What Is An Accomplished Weaver?

Sue was kind enough to come over in the rain this morning to look over the shawls I've woven so far for the Exhibit(ion). One of the problems I had was the too-fine fringes on Shawl 4; she took one look at it and suggested I make them half as long. That way, the fringes don't look so scrawny. I'll post before and after pictures when I've made the changes, but that piece is going to look so much better.

I've been thinking what makes one an accomplished weaver. Technical competence is a must, as is knowledge of fibers, colors, and weave structures; some knowledge of dyeing, spinning and/or sewing/pattern-making are desirable. It's the weave structure that puzzles me.

When I started weaving, I had so much fun with plain weave, I wove just that for nearly five years, mixing yarn width, colors, and especially playing with spacing and cramming, without ever trying Log Cabin or Color-and-Weave (different placements of colors that can produce an optical illusion with plain weave.) Then I moved on to twill, and I have been happily weaving twills for, oh, going on six and a half years, and I'm just starting to get to know this weave structure. For the time being, I'm perfectly happy to weave just twills for a few more years, before reluctantly moving on to something else.

There's another element to this. Previously, weavers learned structures from mothers, masters, teachers or books, and then they might have drawn what we call weaving drafts by hand, on graph paper. This is like a blueprint for a piece of cloth, where on the Y-axis you enter the threading, and on the X-axis you enter the order and combination of shafts lifted for a particular pick. (There are two ways to show the latter, but we won't get into it now.) Then, you worked your way though either vertically or horizontally and colored in where all the warps (or all the wefts) were lifted in a particular pick so you can see the weave structure.

Sample Draft: Shawl 3

I did some of that with 4-shafts weaves, and then I got a drafting application; now I only need to enter the information on the X- and Y-axis, and computer will automatically fill in the interlacement. In other words, I started using a calculator, or a spread sheet, soon after learning addition and subtractions, but not quite multiplication or division.

I still read up on a particular weave when I have to learn one (this time last year I had to learn about Repp weave and create a draft of my own), but I can still sit down and do half the work and let the program figure out the fiddly bits.

Similarly, even though I am a novice, I have a big 16-shaft loom, which allows me to play with more intricate lifting combinations (i.e. weave patterns) even if I stuck to, say, twill, than a 4- or 8-shaft allows. So I don't have to move on to another weave structure to entertain myself.

So, Sue would ask me what weave structure I used in Shawl 3, for example, and I said there is a link to the draft on my blog, and I wasn't sure if we were still speaking the weaving language, especially now that we can exchange or download drafts.

Conversing with an accomplished weaver as Sue makes me wonder how I want to educate myself, and what kind of an accomplished weaver I would like to be.

Anyway, this is Sue's work from a couple of years ago; feast your eyes, but no touching, please.

Making of an Exhibit - Part 4: List Time

Three weeks to go. I have completed 4 shawls, wove the 5th (it needs fringing and washing); have started the 6th. I also have one I wove a year ago which relates to the sea so it can go into the exhibit as well. In effect I will have seven pieces by the end of this week, and that's really enough for the space of the gallery. If I get ambitious and put on another warp, good; if not, no problem.

I have a draft invitation postcard and poster. In the next week, I will see Martin at Arts Marketing, Mr Harwood at Arts Council, and Kath Bee, the song writer who is kind enough to perform live at my Exhibit every Thursday at lunch time. (I recall something about the length of the cable of her speaker... Hummm...) I will go see the two lounge chairs (instead of a love seat) I might hire to put in the second room. I must contact people and venues which are going to help me with free advertising.

This weekend, with the help of Claudia, I've decided how I will hang the pieces. I'll show it to you a little later when I buy the bits I need to experiment. I must ring one of the two builders recommended to me to solicit help to hang things from an almost-4 meter ceiling, whichever one that can help me in exchange for a bottle of wine and maybe a scarf. I must also make up my mind about what to do with the enormous windows which allow too-strong afternoon sun.

I must start thinking of what to bake for the afternoon tea following the Weavers' Show and Tell hour, and what else I must bring for that event. I must also start thinking about which photographs of sea, sand or sky to print to decorate the stairway going up to the gallery, and possibly on the wall of the gallery; I must also consider printing some of the posts from this blog. I must put a dictionary above the business cards I printed out this afternoon to make sure they are flat.

I decided not to have an opening long time ago, because of costs, and more seriously, because I hate art openings. But I've been toying with the idea of a less pretentious, "Sneak Preview" in lieu of an opening. I must find the willingness, funds, food and booz if I go down that road.

All the pieces are falling into place; I just need to map out where they've fallen.

Candidates Three and Four

There is a degree of freedom in weaving Exhibit(ion) pieces, because I only answer to myself, without worrying about the client's possible expectations. Having said that, I am still trying to get my hear around the merit of the individual pieces vs. the integrity of the Exhibit(ion).

The second warp was in brighter mid-blue 100% merino wool, 110/2; the sett was 18 DPI, and once again, in 14-end straight draw; Shafts 15 and 16 weaving two ends of plain weave at both selvedges.

In the third piece, I used a teal-colored possum/merino/silk blend in the weft. The main part with long curves is woven in a modified version of #44659 from Kris Bruland's Handweaing.net; at each ends there are short portions of modified #31216 to represent the sand and the water's edge. This is the more-my-style effort after the hissy fit concerning the first two pieces.

I contemplated for a very long time whether to embellish this piece with small glass beads, not only in the selvedges and fringes, but in the main body of the shawl to accentuate the curves, but in the end I vetoed the idea, as I would really like the pattern (weave structure) to be seen. I like this piece better than the first two, because if nothing else, it looks and feels a little more familiar to me, and it shows off the weave structure, but I am aware this (or anything in "my style") may not be a particularly noticeable piece in an Exhibit(ion).

I was also reminded that "my" weaving is harder to photograph as there is usually less contrast in hue/value; my camera was whizzing trying to find good spots to focus.

In the fourth piece, I used the same 100% merino as in the warp, but in variegated pale blue, a combination expected to produce the thinnest textile thus far. The weave is a modified version of "Merk's Fabric", (the pink dinosaur) on pages 12-13 of "The Best of Weavers: Twill Thrills" (XRX Books, 2004). I chose this weft color because I wanted to show the sea foam as well as the water, but in retrospect I wished I had chosen a color more similar in value to the warp to show off the weave structure. (Although, because of the contrast, this piece was much easier to photograph than the third piece.)

This shawl has particularly fine (2+2 ends) fringes which were intended to match the weave and the anticipated fineness of the cloth: the shawl fluffed up in the wet finish, and the fringes are too light-weight to hang properly, so I think I will return to my regular size (4+4 or 6+6 ends) fringes, which also takes up far shorter time. The textile has a lovely spongy feel.

Thus far, I have created four pieces with quite diverse looks and textures, and the phrase that keeps haunting me is "all over the place". "My style" is less striking from a distance and I worry how they would look in an Exhibit(ion).

New Year's Resolution

Randall Darwall made it easy for me this year: be my own apprentice. The way I see it, I need to not plan everything to death, but weave dangerously, and have fun doing it. Be more spontaneous. And try colors and combinations I don't normally choose.

I hope 2007 is a wonderfully creative year for all of us.

How to Prepare Your Loom - A Short Version

I just found this post by Cathy in Maryland. It's a much more concise lesson on how a loom is prepared.

Baker's Apprentice

Several things happened since June. But before I get into it, let me say I am not placing myself above other weavers, that I do not see myself any better. What I am trying to do is to have a conceptual direction for my art, or if you like, I'm trying to have a clearer product positioning; these two statements sound so different, and yet in my mind, for now, I understand them to be remarkably similar.

In early July, I had a One-on-One with Martin at Arts Marketing. The crux of the discussion was, I may be a different kind of a weaver in that I aspire to weave textiles outside of what is commonly expected of handweavers in New Zealand or Nelson, at least for now. He told me to build stronger ties with weavers with similar aspirations, and to seek inspiration from artists in other disciplines as well.

In October, Randall Darwall told me to be my own apprentice.

Later in October, I met Sue Broad, who now lives in Nelson, and with her arrival, I have, for the first time, a warm-blooded (as opposed to mostly-over-the-Internet) weaving buddy I can talk to and have coffee with and admire each other's stash with. I also became friends with song-writer Kath Bee at a time when we are both taking baby-steps and giant leaps into our respective worlds.

A couple of weeks ago, sculptor Tim Wraight and designer Claudia Lacher, both of whom I met at the June Retreat, came over. While discussing my transformation into a weaver and search for an identity, Tim recalled when he finished his apprenticeship and was about to go solo. He declared he would not trouble himself with "bread and butter" minutiae, but would make cake only, and that I should do the same.

So, in 2007, I'm going to be an apprentice baker who aspires to bakes only the moistest, most delicate, and the most delicious cakes. And if this isn't a clear enough direction, I have no business in art.

Liz, Angel Food, Devil's Food, orange, or whatever, you and I have lots of cakes to go through in our respective lives; I hope we get to share some in person.

Artist/Craftsperson Continuum

Then in June, I went to a weekend Artists Retreat organized by Martin at Arts Marketing. It was designed for artists to learn how to market art (from paintings to woodwork to performances to novels) and to meet other artists.

While working on the previous post, I got used to thinking of myself as an artists whose discipline is textiles; handweaving to be precise. In spite of the superbly organized Retreat, and making new friends, I came home feeling defeated because I felt a chasm between pure art (the kind you can't use) and applied art/craft (things with utility and beauty). I was not sure where I was heading, and I wasn't sure where my textiles fitted in the scheme of things.

The title comes from a chart I made in 2000 which shows pure artist (who may use fiber) at one end, and cottage-industry-production-weaver at the other, and pin-pointing where I wanted to be; it is my visual mission statement.

ARTIST/CRAFTSPERSON CONTINUUM
Drafted June 2006

I was very happy being an artist last week; I want to weave artistic, unique pieces of shawls, scarves and yardage that are wonderful to the touch, beautiful to look at, but are hard wearing serious textiles. But of course the story didn't end there.

For the first forty years of my life, I believed, "of course the glass is half full, and look, if you bend your knees this way, it looks more like 3/4 full!" But of late, I not only see that it's half-empty, but in certain lights, I looks completely empty. This week, it's not just empty, the glass is dirty!

I attended an Artists Retreat at St Arnaud this past weekend; it was well-organized, presentations carefully chosen, and overall it was a superb event and I hope to go every time they hold it. So make no mistake, it wasn't the Retreat itself.

But I came home feeling totally defeated. I didn't meet many who would traditionally be called craftspersons or artisans; there were potters, a fashion designer, and I believe, more than one furniture makers, but most textile people I met were textile artists, many using multi-media, some putting their 3-dimensional work into picture frames. Museum and gallery representatives were overwhelmingly interested in paintings and installations. Almost all the works on display were not utilitarian. In-vogue "craft" magazine are filled with unusable artistic crap. So many galleries declared: "we don't do textiles." And most devastating of all, the message I got from those who buy and curate was: "Don't call us; we'll call you."

So, what happened to craft? What happened to making beautiful things that work; that never-ending appreciation of holding something you use and having a good look once in a while to have your breath taken by its beauty, and the blending of aesthetics and utility? Is there no room for such "tools" in this mass-producing, mass-consuming, over-advertised world except for industrial, stretchable, one-size-fits-all polar fleece junk with the same logo?

I'm really at a loss as to where I am, and I feel the loss for the world. For now.

Who Do You Think You Are, Calling Yourself a Weaver?!

I started this post in May while thinking about what kind of a weaver I want to be and not being able to actually weave because of tendonitis. I have not reached a conclusion, but I now have a direction, so it's a good time to post while I'm looking at the end of an eventful weaving year.

This and the next two posts are dedicated to my oldest (in the length of time I've known her; she is younger than me, to be sure) friend Liz Backlund.

Liz, I used to think once we grew up, we knew where we were and who we were and parts of life would become automatic. Well, some parts may have, but not in the ones I anticipated. The search for our places seem to be on still, so we might as well enjoy the ride. I'm thinking Valley Fair.

WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, CALLING YOURSELF A WEAVER?!
Drafted May 2006

I came to weaving late in my life. As a child I thought I would become an academic; that was the family business and I grew up on a college campus. I had very clear visions of me sitting in an office with wall-sized bookshelves on at least two sides and a twin-bed-sized dark wooden desk.

But now I live in a town without a university. And a strange place this is. What you need to understand is New Zealand is an extremely forgiving country to someone coming from an "old" country like myself; anyone can have a go at just about anything regardless of training, family background or other inherited baggage, and in Nelson, arts and crafts are all around, constantly seducing me to the colorful side.

Having enjoyed a few warps as a hobby weaver, I had hoped to sell my work eventually, but life interfered and I took this step earlier than I had planned. I attended small business seminars, I did market research, I made short-, mid-, and long-term plans, color-coordinated checklists and Gantt charts. And made To Do lists; notebooks of To Do lists.

And I wove. Weaving itself was fun, and considering where I started, I improved with every warp. But becoming a weaver was a different game. I was basing my new life on the familiar system of Gantt charts and To Do lists: weave an average of x pieces in y weeks; make $z sale every quarter, or roughly $z*3 by Year End. Slow was not good, and experimenting to improve designs could interfere with the plans. I had faith my improvements would come in direct proportion to the number of pieces I wove. Well, almost.

That I wove was itself a secret for a long time and I didn't show anyone my work. On 5 February 2001, 10 minutes before attending my first ever weaving workshop, I was left standing in a Blenheim church car park, watching Ben's Pajero heading back west, feeling worse than a kid on his first day of school. This was my day of reckoning, my coming out.

For a few years, when I ran into former work colleagues, I cautiously said I was "trying to be a weaver." I was trying to learn what kind of a life a weaver lives, not just weaving, studying colors, studying design, or learning to draw, but the other stuff. I even lived the tree months of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. Then I stopped going to marketing classes.

After six years, I haven't yet found out what a weaver's life is, but I know weaving is slow, and I can't live by the plans, at least not the ones I created back then. I need time to observe, to see, and be inspired. I need to allow myself to be reactive as well as proactive. I need to play more with colors and textures, and not put on a warp knowing exactly what is coming off it. And weave more.

And I need to allow myself to call me a weaver, because in this journey, there is no Commencement, there is no Diploma, I won't have letters at the end of my name to say I have arrived. I am a weaver because I weave.

Randy Revisited on Christmas Day

I was threading my navy/teal silk/cashmere warp on my 4-shaft jack in 8-end Dornick, (that's a twill that changes direction every eight warp yarns) while thinking of Randy this evening.

I like regular, square-looking, or symmetrical weaves. I like stripes. I like single-colored plain weave with plenty of tracking. But there is a part of me which started to believe that in order to progress, I needed to include more and more Randy elements in my textiles, and this made me a little sad about having to depart from static (as opposed to his dynamic) textiles.

But I think progress in weaving is not linear. So while I intend to continue investigating the Art of Randying, I am allowed to delve deeper into symmetrical and regularly repeating patterns as well.

I think this is what he meant by my doing my apprenticeship.

How I Make a Shawl: The Two Candidates

I believe good shawls age like good wine. I was unhappy with both of these last week, and refused to photograph them, but today, they didn't look.... so bad.

The yarns I used in this first warp were in three blues and one undyed 100% merino wool, 110/2. The sett was 18 DPI.

For this first piece, I used a variegated-dyed merino boucle in the weft. The weave is #40229 from Kris Bruland's Handweaing.net. The weft shrunk far more than I had anticipated, so the shawl has a squishy, stretchy texture, but is surprisingly light-weight.

I had anticipated the loops on the boucle to pop up all over, making it a piece showing off the beautiful oranges and greens of the weft yarn, but the result is more warp-dominant. I don't like that the construction is not exactly stable, (i.e. the long warp floats might catch buttons and long earrings, but pulling it warp-wise and weft-wise, the thread will go right back into the textile); on the other hand, I think it looks like water over sea weeds and shells.

In the second piece, possum/mohair/merino wefts in four colors were placed in Fibonacci sequence, the colors representing grass, sand, shallow and deeper water. The weave is #12833 from the same, turned.

I didn't like the teal yarn being much more vivid than the other three, and even though all four colors were used in the same proportion, the shawl appear predominantly teal. As well, in spite of sampling, the finished textile is much stiffer owing to the weave structure; this is totally different from the shawls I usually weave with the exact same combination of warp and weft yarns and the sett, but woven in looser twills. The appearance and the hand of this piece ended up being masculine/rustic/tough, which is not the kind of textile I normally weave, like, or had planned, but the appearance matches the hand, and this is a sturdy, long-lasting piece of cloth.

I am not sure if these pieces will make it into the final selection. I tried to challenge my self-imposed boundaries and preconceptions, and I created two pieces that I would not have woven had I not tried new things. Yes, I am ambivalent about these at this point, but I also feel both of these suit "Sea, Sand and Sky".