Hand weaving

 

We meet in each other's homes and studios, all around the area, once a month. We don't call our group anything particular,  unless it's 2nd Mondays.  We go to Dell, Asbury Ridge, Norwegian Hollow, Viola, Viroqua, Avalanche, Jug Creek. We each show up,  bringing what we have to offer, sometimes an apple salad, sometimes  what we've been weaving, knitting or spinning. Or, we bring our sad or funny stories about where we've traveled, what we've seen since the last time we were together.  Sometimes it seems hard to take the time out from work to get there. But, not one moment of our precious time is wasted with idle conversation, and the conversation (and laughter) starts right away, and covers a lot of ground.

We are friends, we are mostly weavers, and we are women. When I brought my freshly woven wrist warmers, I'd hoped to find a hand model. These women took the stack from my hands and spontaneously put them on. One pair was strung together, so two women had to stay very close to each other while they moved to the window to take a picture of their interwoven hands.  Angie took the beautiful picture with her new camera. These laughing friends of mine, putting their hands together in a circle, with my weaving on their wrists, was warmhand modeling I never imagined.

It was kind of wonderful.

What was I thinking?

No, seriously. What was I thinking about before we left to visit our family out west just 5 days ago? This book and these yarns were on the table. I was thinking about something new. But what?  The show catalog Tradition Transformed, Brown/Grotta, No. 22,  is a favorite of mine. Japanese ideas and  9 contemporary weavers, are represented in a collection originally curated by Sheila Hicks, in 1995, at Brown/Grotta gallery, and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in  NewYork,  and to coincide,  Brown/Grotta gallery, 1998.

Chiaki Maki and her sister, Kaori Maki, weavers, are part of this group.  Their work and words are so clear to my mind's eye, and help me to think better about what I try to do, every time I come back to weave in my own studio.  Their elegance alone would be hard to match, but their textiles incite memory, or something less tangible, something not quite remembered.  Can a textile do that?  What a painting or a poem can?  Obviously, it can.  Here are the proofs.

When I was weaving as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, I experienced a moment in which I disappeared, and only the weaving remained. The piece that was born of that moment was fascinating, beyond any description. Such a moment is the very heart of my creation.   Chiaki Maki



                                                                

Finding Blue

Starting off again, from almost the same place, but not quite.

Honey Makers

 

Tilleke Fever

Another Tree Sack, woven in cotton, linen and rag weave. Applique ribbon from LFN ribbons. The pattern is Swedish Rosepath.


The reverse of the Tree Sack.


Tire burn-out in front of the store, sometime on the night of Sept. 9

Inspired.

I'm hooked on mixed weft weaving: rags, and linen and perle cotton yarns. I'm working with a fresh sense of anticipation. In this I've happily found an inspiration to end all: Tilleke Schwarz' book: Mark Making: Tilleke Schwarz Embroidery.
She is Dutch, and though I am usually in thrall of the Dutch imagination, this time it is true love.

Her desire to make her mark, in densely layered, thread paintings, reminds me of the restless energy of a teenaged driver, screaming up the road in the dark, leaving the rubber from a set of tires, to show where he's been. Not really a reasonable thing to do, but somehow necessary. Tilleke's mark making is probably not so ear splitting. She writes that she is inspired by graffiti, and her work is graffiti style.

I know I'm not the first to know her work. I first read about her in Selvedge, Issue 16. and she has had many exhibitions. There is something thrill seeking about her work. You can see images of her work, and order her book directly from her: Tilleke Schwarz

loom work

The work of Dutch textile artist, Tilleke Schwarz, which I just saw for the first time this week, has given me the fever. A good fever. I wove this before the feeling disappeared.

16/1 Swedish cotton warp, sett at 15 e.p.i, Rosepath and plainweave, linen, cotton, and silk,
7 X 72 inches. Handwashed and tumble dried.