Chester's Comfort

I used carpet tacks to stick a piece of my favorite rag weave to the front of this "cabinet" made from an old hand built bee box. The bee box is made with dovetail joints, and has carved in hand holds. There is a  new shelf inside, courtesy of my carpenter-husband, and a little bit of waxy residue from the former tenants. There is a cup hook.

Chester lived alone on the family place a few miles from us, when we moved here 30 years ago.
He was an old man. His house had disappeared long ago behind trees and uncut brush.  Sometimes I saw him walking along the road to the country store, but we never knew much about him. In the winter there was just a footpath in the snow on his driveway.  He didn't farm, he didn't drive.  One year he died.
When the property was sold, the new owners found outside his front door, a huge pile of discarded
maraschino cherry bottles and Vienna sausage cans.

 

I imagine a jar of cherries on the shelf, a can of Vienna sausages, and maybe a tin of Copenhagen snus. 

Winding on

18 yards of Swedish mattvarp on the back beam tonight.  Threading tomorrow.

Down the Rosepath Again

 

Rows of X and O motifs in gaily colored Rosepath (sigh!) against a  background of black and gray prison stripes, suggest some of the complexities of romance, and seems Valentines-appropriate. (Or, that I'll never escape Rosepath).  Wearable cuff, sentimental, handwoven, closed with vintage Mississippi pearl buttons, and hand crocheted button loops, lined with dupioni silk,  I call them Hard Times for Valentines.

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



                                                                

At work

Our sturdy little town plow truck does it again.  I'm at work on a new scarf warp, calculating and winding on to my little Norwood studio loom.  The threads this time are silk, 16/2 Bockens Swedish cotton, and tencel.  The design, Finnish Birds Eye, a diamond twill.   My spool rack is the side of our old baby crib.

A Death and a Chase

First there was a death. This chickadee flew off the feeder, straight into the workshop window.  It fell to the snowbank below, twitched its feet, then gave up the ghost.  Its breast feathers were lemony, and gray.  A color I hadn't been able to see before.  Its small feet, blue.  Poor thing!

 Next thing, a  rabbit came straight down the path to the house, in the middle of the day.  I noticed him, because usually the rabbits stay hid in the brush of the tree row during the day.  And, this one seemed to be in a hurry.

When I was back at the loom again, well, actually at the window near the loom,  trying to get a count of all the cardinals perched in the tree above the bird feeder (16 was the most I counted, but they kept moving. so I'm not sure) here came the same rabbit.  Bounding over the deeply snowed bank on the other side of the creek,  it crossed a rough row of snow covered creek rocks, and then came up the path behind the store.

The rabbit didn't  even glance at the black sunflower seeds scattered on the ground around the feeder, but hurried by in determined haste.  I took another count of the red birds, mainly because they were such a treat to look at in all the snow, plump and red, perched,  like fruits  on the gray branches.

What's this?  Something moving,  gray and slinky at the top of the hill across the creek, just where the rabbit came down through the snow, making its own trail.  It's the weasel!  The same from last summer that wouldn't let me cross the bridge to the house?  Or an associate?  The gray furred  weasel undulated, body surfing through the snow, more than it used its legs, which were not long.  And it was fast, following the rabbit's trail as far as the creek stones, then doubling back. It was back at the top of the bank, in  a moment,  in one gliding,  cursive stroke.

The weasel looked small, only about  2/3 the rabbit's size, but was definitely in pursuit.  Back to the rocks, the weasel streaked across, not getting wet, though weasels are aquatic.  Soon he was up by the bird feeder, hesitating going first to the west, then toward me at the window, then going  around the east side of my building. The rabbit had gone west, but was only a few minutes ahead.  The weasel's gray, fine fur looked so soft and silky, and its face sleek and beautiful. But, oh my, what a mouth full of teeth are in that head!  I thought weasels turned white in winter, but not this one.

I took my camera and sneaked out the front door hoping to see more, but there was just a shadow of
a gray tail (?) sliding under the gas pig in the side yard.  I had disrupted  the chase, but my feeling is that the weasel still had the advantage.  Another unresolved story, with life and death consequences, unfolding outside my window.

What actually came next is I went back to my weaving, wondering how, exactly, a rabbit's expression can appear anxious, and how is a person supposed to get anything done around here, with all this drama?

Foot bridge

   

The new little foot bridge is painted with fresh red and white stripes.  The last  flood washed away the 2-plank bridge.  This one should be easier to see on a foggy night, if I go back to work after supper.

I cross the creek many times each day, and hoped the stripes would give me a little energy each time I crossed. The bridge has a little bounce.  Possibly the stripes will cause a transformation to occur each time I leave my (humble) kitchen and cross to the workshop:  housewife to artist. 

 I'm attracted to bridges. I was married on an old bridge.  (It was dismantled a year later--the bridge, not the marriage).  Some bridges scare me. (The  steep, narrow bridge over the Mississippi at Lansing, Iowa). I miss them when they're gone.  (The old 8-span green bridge across the Wisconsin River at Spring Green was replaced this year.  I'll never be resigned to the modern highway bridge). When standing on a bridge I like to look upstream, to see what the water is bringing down.  A warp coming off the back beam of the loom is like a stream flowing toward me, the future, possibility. The fell is the present, the bridge, where I stand.  Downstream, the water under the bridge, is the woven fabric  winding on to the front beam,  the story of what happened.

out of chaos

What my brain looks like, on the wall.  I look at other artists' inspiration boards and realize that most take down what they had up last, and assemble new things to look at.  I layer.  The first things were pinned here 10 years ago when we built my shop.  I want to see at a glance if I still care about the same things as I used to, and if I'm still on track.

Out of this scramble emerges some pretty orderly weaving, with organized color, and balanced designs.