you can weave

 

You Can Weave: A Simple and Basic Guide to Weaving by Mary E. Black & Bessie E. Murray, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1974
source: stopping off place

been a while.

it’s been alittle while.
alittleweather.
a little springtime.
a little grey new growth.

(and a little beauty of a quilt…)

Pearlie Kennedy Pettway, work-clothes quilt, c. 1950

it’s mostly because i’ve made this choice i’m very excited about.
and pretty sad about too…
so i’m having a hard time accepting it as a reality.
i’m going to move.

to work with a weaver that i’m very excited to get to spend more time with…
Suzie Liles.
she’s da bomb.

i don’t really want to talk about it.
but it’s going to be perfect.

2.0′s Chair!

Remember dad #2.0, who took me to the esteemed Yarnorama (playground for the fiber obsessed)?
well, he bought some roving during our adventure in Paige…
and when he got home he wove it thru his retro Bertoia wire chair!
it turned out so awesome and cozy, what a great idea!

before...

after...

what a martha! (as in stewart)

hit the road

on the road again.
austin texas back up to the little village in brooklyn…

while i was kickin it in texas, i visited two riteous and surprising fiber destinations…
the first was Old Oaks Ranch

quite literally in the middle of a beautiful nowhere…see the map….! 

actually it’s outside of Wimberly, a little town I love- and that many of my friends grew up in.
doesn’t mean that i’d imagine it as a home for a thriving fiber arts center!!
they have a room full of looms, and ALPACA (whoa baby!), and beautiful texas hill country ranch land, not to mention shelves filled with locally spun and dyed yarn!

alpaca shearing!

loom room!!

the next day, I was convinced to visit Yarnorama in Paige, Texas.

I was planning on just hittin’ the road and heading to Louisianna, to be honest I wasn’t expecting much from a place called Yarnorama….
okay, all that said, Yarnorama is the BOMB DIGGITY.
I am forever grateful and endebted to dad #2 and dad #2.0 for the push!

cozy and colorful!

dad #2 behind his new woven basket...(standing in front of a beautiful hand woven coverlet)

Susan Fricks, the owner, is so friendly and knowledgeable- she has a bunch of beautiful looms and spinning wheels- and is clearly engaged in many of her own projects!
one in particular was a plain weave- the softest creamy hand spun warp (spun by Susan herself), i can’t remember the fiber…and a hand spun/hand dyed hemp weft. so simple and elegant- she’s going to piece together a tunic from it.

kinda blurry...but you get the idea...

i was deeply inspired by both these places, and the women who run them!
i am so impressed to see fiber thriving in small town texas…and i’m feeling a bit of a pull to head down south and join the celebration!!

The Loom

i just met a very appropriate group of lovely people,
who band together and call themselves

The Loom

they’ll be playing again in New York at Saint Vitus on the 11th.

everytime i think of freedom

clearly, i’ve been a little distracted lately.
something i’m really trying to conquer, but it’s been a tricky battle of late.

but i do want to share a few of the myriad of things i’ve been working on…
i’m so excited about them, you’d think that i’d steal myself away into my apartment and find hermitage.
but instead, i find myself galavanting…on the DAILY.
staying out late dancing to wild brazilian dummers.
staying out late dancing to cosmic north african oud players.
going to the Tenement Museum and obsessively researching the history of my apartment building afterwards! (i’d highly recommend doing both!)
listening to records with new friends.
(they just dropped some new Karen Dalton recordings…definitely worth distracting one’s self for)

everytime i think of freedom
one of my favorites.
(not off this new record…)

okay. distraction abounds. even in this correspondence…
onto what’s actually sitting on my loom

i’m working on a series of very intricate ‘fannypacks’ (for lack of a better word)
this one should have taken me about two weeks…
but i’ve been s l o w l y sailing since mid-december.
(big confession.)
i’m working on it.
everytime i think of freedom.

love affair

some may not call this act an act of weaving.
but i consider Richard Long an artist that uses the most essential fibers to weave together this world.
i just wanted to share.

a line made by walking (1967)

he started making work in the mid ’60s.
walking, slowly stepping his history into the landscape.
it really reminds me of the clacking of my loomship: i’m slowly doing the same thing…
back and forth slips my shuttle, back and forth Richard Long treads across the landscape.
all of us slowly making an impression on the scenery.

walking a line in peru (1972)

a line in japan (1979)

of course, he wasn’t always just making his mark with his repetative feet.
he would also lift and build.
make a road out of the world.
 i pray to be able to reign in my pathways.
walk the same simple lines. leave a small wake behind me.
have the awareness to notice what that wake looks like.

nomad circle: mongolia (1996)

simple resolve

i am starting a movement in my life.
i have a simple resolve to bring simplicity back into the tornado of my everyday experience.

i have been living in the city for a year and a half now.
and towards the end of 2011 i was hit with how deeply i have lost the rhythm of my country lives.
being moved by the sun and seasons is an inevitable part of living close to worlds that are a little less human as this new york city.
and i’m finding myself riding a very different train…and i’m guided by different forces.
i do believe that there is great use to being a city dweller.
i am unbelievably thankful for the skills and lessons that i learn in such a different habitat.
with a different kind of distraction and brutality.

i’ve spent this first week of the new year formulating…
how to root out distraction.
and the answer i’m working towards at the moment is a strong structure for me to expand within, and trust, and lean on.
give strong structure to my week.
allow the things i love to live in their own institution so i don’t use them as distractions from other pieces of my life.
i will have a baking day, once a week.
i will have a mending day.
i will have a day of self care.
i will have a day of prayer.
i will have a work day.
i will have a day of education.
and…i suppose i’ll have a day to tend to all the things i never want to tend to (maybe that day can be every other week…)

and i will weave almost every day.
 i want to make these little tasks priorities in my day.
like tending the garden, or preparing for winter.
and beyond and outside of these tasks i can be distracted by the city.
by my wonderful community.
by bourbon…..(just trying to be honest…)
by simply not doing (that’s actually an ideal distraction. i pray for more beautiful ‘not doing’ in all of this.)

 hang it out on the line and let the light shine through.

happy happy new year.
i have a very good feeling about it for all of us.
regardless of what comes.

 

strung

Vera Frenkel’s String Games: Improvisations for Inner-City Video (1974)

in this lovely little number, Frenkel had artists play one of my favorite string games, cat’s cradle, across Canada via video feed!
Frenkel is known for investigating art’s potential to communicate…
here she is, in 1974, already intuiting and playing with social medias that foreshadow how we are all sharing art today…
you know, like the tin can telephones that let us stay up past bedtime and tell secrets to the neighbors.

furthermore, this piece is not only creating a link from Toronto to Montreal it is also using a language that is cross-culturally relevant and understood.
cat’s cradle and string games are played all across the world, a simple ritual that unknowing knits us all.
(the Smithsonian cites that anthropologist Louis Leakey used the game as a proverbial “in” with the natives of Sub-Saharan Africa who were suspicious of European anthropologists…
but once Leakey busted out his cat’s cradle skills…well…
the rest is history…)

Ainu children playin'

i can remember really feeling like a master with my rainbow cat’s cradle string…and when my official c.c. implement was lost, i’d confidently use my own shoelace.
my favorite was witch’s broom…

a Sierra Miwok woman playin' circa 1903

 

 

mm…p.s.

johnny cash playin'

 

where warmth is stored in winter

i’m thinking about turning inwards
as brooklyn takes it’s tiny dive into winter.
the winter, to me, is a beautifully solitary and barren time.
after the final crisp flurry of fall, i get a chance to embrace something dark and quiet.
stick season.

and i’m thinking about the title of this little correspondence

W O O D S H E D.

and i want to spend a second explaining what the idea of Woodshed(ing) means to me…
i was introduced to the woodshed by one, Milford Graves, a truly innovative modern sage.

Woodshed, it’s a wholesome noun’y verb.
to woodshed is to take an idea, or a craft,
take it and work with it, chew it up, taste it.
learn it, learn from it, teach yourself new names for it.
find the true name of it.
the true task of it.
take it to the woodshed, and work.
to woodshed can take a long time.
it’s a slow world in the woodshed.
a world of roots and twine, tiny buds, all the seasons, birds molting one day and flying south the next.
it’s ephemeral in the woodshed.
the beauty is you don’t know what to expect from the task at hand.
when one takes the time to woodshed, there is a union that is formed.
full of surprise. and set backs. unknowns.
it’s a re-education.

it’s a way of learning that really really works for me.
and i feel so blessed that i get to do that with my loom.
a ‘loom’ of one’s own.
(man, virginia woolf sure knew how to woodshed).
this winter will be more of a turning in than i am used to.
relying on my craft while little things beautifully crumble, drop their leaves, and hibernate around me.
i am thankful.