beach listening

I used to think that as an artist, I needed to DO something when I saw and felt a beautiful or powerful scene. That I needed to make art from that specific view or immersion or feeling.

But now I know that it’s more important to just be here with whatever is going on, to pay attention with all senses, which today felt like listening.

At some points, it was actually sound-focused, as when I reached the outermost curve of the point, and the gentle waves approached from my right, passed in front, and continued to my left - a wraparound sound of sea caressing small stones.

Or when I heard a distant peeping on the water, higher than gulls’ voices, and could see lots of tiny bird shapes in the distance. The app on my phone suggested they are Marbled Murrelets, a few of whom I did see close enough to recognize. Yes, they are as sweet looking as their names sound.

self portrait in wet rock - this one almost came home with me - those lines!

Generally it was just a form of attention, the sounds joining the light on water, the shapes in the sand, the language of the tide and the shore, and I listened to see what it might teach me.

the color and texture of the sand are striking me now, whereas when I made the picture it was a neutral ground for the shell and stone

In addition to reminding me that I don’t have to do anything ‘with’ this (but who can resist taking pictures when the colors and textures and shapes are so cool), the teaching today was that wherever I am is the view that matters. I’m often seeing the bay from up the hill, and thinking oh I have to get down there! But the truth is, I can only see the angle of light and reflection, for example in the first image, from just that point on the hill. So I stopped there long enough to appreciate that this view is unique to this spot, before continuing on. There’s some broad lesson in there, that the view from where you are now is unique and most important. It makes me slow down, which has to be a good thing.

I can’t claim to understand the heiroglyphic messages in the beach debris or the designs of rocks, but I have a priority these days of listening to wise language, whether I know what it means or not.

bonus spindle content, with green rocks to swoon over

madder, indigo, persimmon, cloth

So why all this knitting and spinning and weaving and sewing and stuff? Well yes, handmade clothes and fabrics are wonderful, but the truth is, many of us do this because we love handling the materials. Fiber, yarn, and cloth are sources of discovery and wonder, and so we’re forever coming up with new ways to explore with them and through them.

Ending up with reliable results is a sign that we are gaining in knowledge and skill, but getting there is often most of the fun - including the dreaming stage, the beholding of some material that compels us, either ineffably or viscerally. The Japanese shirting was doing that to me. Both the ochre version from which I made my petticoat, and this striped blue and neutral. They kept talking to me, insistently, requiring that I pay attention to them. I realized the striped one reminded me of indigo and persimmon, natural dye colors that are commonly seen in Japanese textiles.

I bought a remnant, again (when I can’t think of a concrete project for a fabric, I wait for it to be a remnant, then bring it home as a pet.) This sat in my basket, on view, for a while. Here it is with a Japanese indigo dyed piece my husband bought me while we lived in Japan (late 1990’s). It is loosely woven asa fabric - asa is a generalized term for native plant fibers, from what I can tell. The base yarn is colored with persimmon (kaki) and overdyed with indigo, in a way that involves folding and dipping.

Striped Japanese shirting and indigo/persimmon dip-dyed plant fiber cloth, detail.

Large scarf made of plant fiber dip-dyed with tapered horizontal stripes of indigo in alternating light and dark tones. Creased from being folded….

I found that I had enough for a sleeveless bodice, and began looking for a skirt. Enter one more beloved Thai sarong. This is apparently the year for me to use my Thai sarong fabrics. I wore this one quite a bit. It was a functional garment already, and had been sewn into a tube. When I put it next to the Japanese shirting and knew they belonged together, it struck me that this fabric also had a natural dye referent - it reminds me of madder and indigo. It’s not even a true batik, just a print, but I suspect that people dye and print commercial fabrics with colors that are traditionally pleasing, consciously or unconsciously hearkening back to natural dyes.

Print sarong, showing underside. Intricate batik-style patterns in shades of pink/brown and indigo blue, with black and white highlights.

Button band of sewn bodice, with 19th century China buttons in blue and white. These are my first machine sewn buttonholes, ever.

I don’t have to go far to find examples of madder and indigo among my fibers and fabrics. They are my favorites, and make their way into the stash with ease.

Madder-dyed wool spinning in progress, on a Peruvian spindle. I dyed the fiber in a workshop with Local Color Fiber Studio of Bainbridge Island. The weaving underneath I made with my rigid heddle loom, two shades of indigo cotton from Laos.

Working with these colors and fabrics is the joyful part - placing them next to each other, seeing how they communicate and what they have to tell me. Being able to wear what I make with the fabric, practicality meets delight. I made a sleeveless Hinterland dress which may serve as an undergarment until it gets warm out again.

Detail of dress, Japanese striped shirting on top, China buttons, Thai sarong on the bottom. Soothing blue and muddy cinnamon….

Another example of persimmon (painted onto stencil paper for use in stitch resist dyeing) and indigo (handmade paper made and dyed by Laura Mayotte.)

Natural colored flax yarn, spun by me, indigo dyed hemp yarn from Rainshadow Fibers, a Japanese bag made from plant fiber and dyed with indigo and possibly persimmon, but maybe walnut, underneath.

I’ve done that thing again, where I write about another topic and put it on a different page. Still thematic to the textile riches of my life, a contemplation of a camel trapping in the threads page.

learning: the many little missteps

I’ve been thinking about skill again, and how we develop skill not only through repetition, but by making mistakes. Not necessarily big, bad mistakes, but all those small misjudgments that need correction. This happens sometimes on a larger scale, and often in the moment, almost constantly, infinitesimally. While it helps to have someone point out the larger errors before we make them, the tiny ones are how we learn, and they are necessary steps to learning - they’re even joyful, because that’s when the mind suddenly sees the right way, the best option for here and now, or at least a better one. It’s the kind of learning that sticks because we’ve discovered it ourselves, we know it with the body.

I’m just going to meander through the things I’ve been doing, and see how these thoughts may apply. I’m also surely going to get distracted by the robins whooping it up in the madrona tree outside. The berries are ripe and red, and I’ve never seen such a robin party. I’m still not used to seeing them in the fall, anyway, having grown up in Missouri where they are a springtime bird. We have flocks and flocks of birds right now, as if trying to make up for the quiet of August and the eerie silence of the fire smoke weeks. Goldfinches, in their duller plumage, are still here in force, favoring the madrona across the way, but occasionally visiting my bird bath. You’ll have to take my word on the bird scene, because I don’t have equipment or skills for good bird photos, and backlit tress with indecipherable blobs in them would not be convincing.

Anyway here are the berries - madrona tree branches laden, no robins at the moment (they flee if I come this close, of course.)

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Same handwoven natural cotton tape, with wooden sword beater. Not handspun yarn. Woven with string heddles.

Handwoven tape!! This has grabbed me for real. I’ve been enthralled by the idea of it for some time, seeing both the Susan Faulkner Weaver book a friend owns, and another friends’ exploration of the Japanese manifestation, Sanada himo (Ravelry link). A few months ago, I got out the “knee heddle” that I own (because people give me weaving tools) and tried some tape weaving. I got quickly frustrated with this heddle, because not only is it unclear how many hands you’re supposed to have to open the shed, pass the weft, and beat, the distance between knees and waist is short enough (on me, at least), that the warps remain spread apart and it’s difficult to get a true warp-faced look. Which is fine if you don’t want that, but all the tape I’ve seen has it, and it’s what I want.

Wooden “knee heddle” with crochet cotton tape being woven in stripes of rust and grey, with blue down the middle. This image shows how the warps are closer together in one section, which I’d prefer for the whole length.

Handwoven crochet cotton tape, spooled on top of a navy blue T-shirt being converted to a skirt.

Any long woven band with integrity is a functional thing, and this worked nicely as a skirt drawstring. But I immediately warped for another, to be woven with string heddles in my more accustomed manner. Much more satisfying - and I did not like the crochet cotton either, so I chose a natural colored laceweight which lives in my weaving yarn bin for some reason. Very much better!

Warp-faced natural colored cotton band in progress, brown-green-brown lengthwise stripe, about 1/2 inch wide, held in the sun against my fingers (this was in May, when life was sunnier.)

This same cotton was also used in my current band, shown in the first two photos. I warped up 4 yards or so this time, because I aspire to the hefty bundles on the cover of that book. And with that much to weave, I can already see one reason why people may have preferred heddles: less abrasion. I still want to see a demonstration of this knee heddle thing- I can find only pictures of it and written explanations, and haven’t seen anyone showing how it’s done. I find it awkward, and ended up pushing it away beyond my knees, and letting it hang. In which case, a sweet little, small heddle would be much better.

Cover image of Susan Faulkner Weaver book Handwoven Tape, with my crochet cotton blue and white band on top. I was imitating the pattern third from left in the bundles shown.

At any rate, this warp-faced tape is a surprisingly deep rabbit hole, teaching me more than I expected very quickly. The one above, for example. While I’m still not convinced that the one in the picture has more than one dot in the center, and absolutely could not find a way to make that happen and still have symmetrical embracing wavy lines, we’ll leave that aside. Just to get those symmetrical lines, I had to discover that mirroring the pattern doesn’t just mean warping another blue round in the same position. No, look here. The lines are crooked, right? They jog right and left with each pick. and they all jog the same way. So the first one comes from winding a round of blue - it forms the left and right jog. But for the second one, we want the jog to move in the opposite way, so it has to be wound half white, half blue, then half blue, half white. I don’t expect this to make sense unless you’re either well-versed in warp-faced structure, or way beyond me in the logic department. I had to make use of Warp Visualizer’s oval chart to spell it out for myself. I’m the opposite of whatever logical mind it takes to grasp this kind of thing at a glance.

Anyway, moving on - that image on the cover is what really keeps me coming back to this book - those beautiful bundles! So much handwoven tape, in natural dye colors that look so reassuring and earthy. The second from left also wouldn’t let me go, with its two zig-zag lines of indigo. So I wound another warp, since I was conveniently located in an undisclosed location (not my home!) with a very large amount of available yarn.

Brown and blue warp-faced band, 5/2 cotton, weaving in progress with small rigid heddle. Short sample with different warp scheme, woven with string heddles.

And look! There was also a wee, handy heddle in this place, so I could try again to compare the rigid heddle experience, without the bulky knee heddle causing me frustration. The truth is, my habits are so ingrained that I heddled up with string and started weaving before I remembered that I meant to use the wooden heddle! But this was good, since I’d also noticed that I wasn’t getting the double zig-zag I intended. My zig-zag was happening in the middle, where two blues were right next to each other. Second thing I learned about warped in design for warp-faced bands! When I cut off the string-heddle bit, I was able to place the threads in the correct position in the rigid heddle to get the double zig-zag. So cool! So fun! So pleasing!

I may still favor the type of fabric I get with string heddles - the difference is clear in this instance, with the same yarn.

Double zig-zag band in progress, with small wooden rigid heddle, draped over my lap - and I’m wearing my new rust denim jumper, recently designed and sewn by me.

One thing leads to another, and an Instagram post of the blue and white band got the attention of Cassie Dickson (Instagram link - she’s also profiled nicely here.), who is a masterful weaver and flax whisperer. Seeing her handwoven flax and her tantalizing processing pictures reminded me of how much I want to get better at spinning flax for weaving. At this same location with all the yarn, there was also some well-aged flax which needed hackling, so I took it home to test it out and see how it compares to the varieties I have. It’s beautifully blond, and seems in fine shape, after hackling. Not long ago, I got the tip from Sharon Kallis, who was told by Karen Barnaby (more IG links), that spinning flax from the fold is a good way to go when using a spindle. This was revelatory, because it’s true, and it gave me a way to take my flax with me as I wander about, which is my preferred spinning method and gets a lot more spun than the stationary techniques.

Hackled flax, folded and tied, and spinning in progress on Ashford high whorl spindle.

My addition to this approach is to wrap a cloth around the flax, so it can be held in the hand without mussing it up as too much handling will do. This is a great use for some of my vintage ladies’ hankies, which are delicate and lovely and I never use them (I prefer a larger, less precious man’s style hankie for actual hankie needs.) But I have a sweet collection of beautifully hand-worked hankies, most of which came from my grandmother. Perfect chance to show one off below, which has been washed and pressed - different from the one in use with the flax.

Spindle with flax cop and flax fiber folded and tied into a hankie. Green plants and trees in background.

Vintage hankie detail. Whitework and cutwork embroidery and edging. not showing scale, but this is very fine work. The whole thing is only about 9” square.

Spinning flax is what made me think about learning and making small mistakes. I’m constantly making mental notes about what works and what doesn’t because I’m still getting to know this fiber. I learned, while spinning the largest of the three clumps shown above, that I should use smaller amounts at a time with this from-the-fold method. It has less chance to tangle and mat within the wrap of the cloth. I’m learning what’s too thin and what’s too thick, and how to join, and how wet I want my fingers…. and that this is a great choice for the rain/sun/rain weather we’re having, giving me lots of little drops of water to dip my fingers before drafting.

I hope to keep this up and compare some different types of flax, before getting distracted by something else, although there is a new warp going into the bamboo reed at the moment, and another on standby. And I also intend to keep increasing my bundles of handwoven tape. And of course, my wool spinning and weaving is always calling to me as well… the dance of learning is quite syncopated around here, but it continues.

Handwoven warp-faced wool with pickup designs, Navajo churro is the main color, bundles of cotton handwoven tape, a few skeins of handspun wool yarn, in a basket on top of a Turkish handwoven salt bag.

If my captions seem obvious, it’s because I was looking up the low vision accessibility of Squarespace, and saw that the captions of photos will appear as alt text image descriptions automatically. Trying to make sure this works for people. If anyone reading knows of other things I can do, I’m open to suggestions. I enlarged the main body text a while ago because it was hard for me to read, but the caption text remains very small. Some things are within my control, and some are not.

Slug’s eye view of me spinning on the trail the other day. Lots of sky, clouds, trees, me in a skirt made from a Lao handwoven sarong (sinh mukh kho) a handknit sweater, and spinning a little Turkish-style spindle made by Allen Berry.

Thank you for being with me, and keep doing those things that keep us real.

poetry: la fileuse

Yes, there is an interloper who has hijacked the leadership of this country, the USA. Hijacked also the values, the motivations, the very structure of the government that many of us cherish as a democracy. Not that things weren’t rotting in many assorted crevices before, but the flagrant, unabashed corruption and disintegration of what makes a democracy is alarming.

I have been waiting, for these several years, for people to stop turning up the volume. To mute, to mark as “ignore” - not the concrete damage being done, but the endless harmful and ignorant rhetorical spew. I agree heartily with Ursula LeGuin, who wrote in her blog in 2017 of the golem, a creature created from mud and enlivened by language. The whole post (the whole blog archive!) is well worth reading, but here’s the key thing she said:

I honestly believe the best thing to do is turn whatever it is OFF whenever he’s on it, in any way.

He is entirely a creature of the media. He is a media golem. If you take the camera and mike off him, if you take your attention off him, nothing is left — mud.

There are things to do, such as phone banking to empower voters. Here are a couple of options: Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and Unite Here’s Take Back 2020 campaign, calling on behalf of the hospitality workers’ unions. I’m sure you can find more, and by all means take to the streets when necessary. But I refuse to listen to, or repeat, anything uttered by this person, and fervently hope that the flood of voters, activists, and new candidates for office will reduce it to mud.

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I have to believe it benefits us to look away, to cultivate our own sanity, to keep building up the notions, ideals, and convictions that are being threatened.

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Looking UP - hello, trees.

What I do intend to listen to, read, and write about is poetry. My friendship with poetry goes back a long way, to earnest high school sonnet writing attempts - I’m sure they were awful, and none saved, but I was learning about structure and how a strictness of form can open up pathways of expression. I’ve constantly collected poems, written and tucked into notebooks here and there, most of them not my own, but once in a while I write them too.

There have been a few that I internalized early, and that keep me company in a consistent, affirming way. Portions of Adrienne Rich’s Transcendental Etude, a glorious long poem, do this - my favorite bit is conveniently cited here, only she cuts off the end of it. The stanza ends “only care for the many-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself.” My emphasis. I could not emphasize that part enough, at the time I started reading it. And still it rolls on, reminding me.

Another example is the Rilke poem from which this website derives its name. Have a look at the ‘about’ tab, and scroll down for the full poem in German with my English translation. I’ve had that one memorized, the German version, for almost 30 years. I remember reading, in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans book, about the imprisoned woman reciting memorized poetry to herself, and made a mental note to add some more to my own internal library. In a culture of readily accessible writing and reading, it’s easy to skip over memorization, the oral power of language. Another reason that poetry is grounding, engaging all the elements of sound, texture, and shape.

As an undergraduate, I wrote my Comparative Literature thesis on the work of Paul Valéry and Rainer Maria Rilke. I was studying their writings on visual art, but also seeing how their aesthetic manifested in their own poetry, that deep interlacement among the artist’s moral imperative, the tools and techniques, and the finished works. Oh, I can wander around in that stuff all day! And these two are rich, in that respect. So once in a while I still just hang out doing this:

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Recently I’ve been rummaging in Rilke, aided by the Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows compilation A Year with Rilke. I have most of the poetry in German, and in other translations, so I read the translation in Barrows and Macy, refer to the German, and compare with Stephen Mitchell or one of the stuffy previous translators, to see how the meanings well and spread, or pool into an unutterable depth. Rilke is an acknowledged spiritual heavyweight, often quoted and well-loved, so it’s not hard to find wellsprings of inspiration there (although whoa it’s deeper than you think.)

But Valéry is a bit more… removed, austere…? Not a name you hear bantered around much, anyway. (They actually met, Rilke and Valéry. I’m reading Rilke’s letters, and haven’t gotten to that part yet ((yes, I make myself read in order, as if it were a fictional story)) - anyway, looking forward to seeing what Rilke has to say about the old guy.)

So for some reason I pulled out my fat, La Pleiade edition of Valéry’s work (shown above - the pages are fine, like that of a Bible) and imagine my surprise when, starting from the very beginning, the first poem in that whole book is called La Fileuse. The spinner. One of the earliest poems he ever wrote, and it’s about a woman spinning wool with a wheel! Somehow I made it this far, having studied this poet extensively, and having studied handspinning for the last 15 years, without knowing that there was an overlap. I had to give that page a doubletake. Then I had to sit down and read the whole thing, dictionaries at hand.

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La fileuse, c’est moi!

Do you mind if I just talk about this poem for a while? I’m not interested in explication, or analysis - just a personal response, a musing. What else is poetry for, after all? I like the way Karl Ove Knausgaard talks about poetry, saying that when you start to read a poem, it either opens itself up to you and lets you in, or it doesn’t. There are plenty of times I feel unwelcomed by poetry, and I leave and don’t come back to that work. But often enough, especially with poets I know, I enter as if to a familiar place, even if I have to look up half the words. Somehow the surroundings are drawing me in, telling me things, and I try to hear and translate what they’re saying - even if it’s purely internal, or more of a visual image.

This poem is like that, highly visual for me. I can grasp it better as a complete, interactive picture than as a word-by-word translation. The poem is written out in French, and with an English translation here (scroll to the bottom), but I’m going to write a prose description, a narration of it. Let me say, right off the bat, that I don’t know what this poem means. Really, I don’t. It forms part of the Album de Vers Ancien, which includes poems about Helen and the birth of Venus, so perhaps this spinner is one of the Fates, but there is nothing that indicates her actual role in the world…. which makes it an interesting evocation. We know a woman is spinning, but there is no why.

Ok here’s the scene: the garden, a melodious garden, is rocking, swaying, balanced on the crossing of two paths. The woman who spins sits there, in the blue, intoxicated, exhilarated, transported by the sound of the wheel, a snoring. She sits in the blue of the crossing, au bleu de la croisée. This is repeated at the end, it’s an important space, this blue. I think of it as a place where the sky opens up, because as the paths cross the trees and tall bushes recede from one’s field of vision. I also can’t help thinking of it as a crossbar whorl on a spindle, with that point where the yarn is fixed and rotating coming out from the center. And indeed, the garden se dodeline at this point, which means to balance or lightly rock one’s head (or an infant.)

She is tired, having “drunk the azure” - I think of when you’ve been basking outdoors all day and you get lulled by so much sky - and she starts to dream and doze, even while spinning la câline chevelure. Now the definition of câline in my Petit Larousse is amazing - it says this means one who enjoys caresses, who expresses sweet tenderness. Kid you not, that’s a real definition in the French dictionary. And chevelure is human hair, not usually a word used for animal fibers. So the fiber likes to be stroked, like a child or a cat, and the lullaby implications of dodeline are reinforced - this spinning is a rocking, a soothing, a caressing into being of a dream state.

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This fiber liked to be stroked. Spindles made by Janet Scanlon (not available, they were unique gifts from a unique and gifted woman.)

There is a shrub that sprinkles small flowers all around, like a water hose. There is a tree branch that bows graciously and pays respect to the spinning wheel, offering a rose.
The sleeping woman continues spinning une laine isolée - it could be the single wool thread that is alone, it could be the spinner who is isolated in herself. Meanwhile, the shadows begin to braid themselves into the the thread she has spun.

The dream winds off the spindle (now see, we can’t help but wonder, we fiber folks, if this is just an artist playing loose with terminology… the wheel would have a bobbin, unless it’s a driven spindle, and the yarn would wind on, not off - but the words used imply winding off, and fuseau is spindle, so I get stuck in technicalities.) But she’s also still caressing the chevelure, so we are still in the realm of multiple, shifting meanings, as in a dream. The azure blue starts fading, the woman is enveloped in light and foliage, the last tree lights up as if burning.

Then suddenly, the spinner is “you” - and your sister, the huge rose where a saint smiles, scents your brow with the luff of her blameless breath, and you feel the burning - you are extinguished.

In the blue of the crossing where you spun wool.

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Valéry said that he wrote this while sleeping. And the whole thing is about creating while sleeping, and all the elements are intermingled in the slippery logic of dreams: the flowers sprinkle like water, the fiber is a living being enjoying the caress, the sun radiates as a rose, all is overbright with color and light, especially blue.

I see la fileuse as sitting au bleu de la croisée, like a jewel set in the point of a cross, that point a fulcrum on which all is balanced. And as I mentioned, it’s also the point at which the spinning happens, where the yarn is formed - in other words, it is the point of twist, with the whole “garden”, that is to say creation, the world, rotating around it. And she becomes as if inebriated, but could this be the spiritual intoxication of a Sufi saint spinning, entering into a dream state that is not oblivion but a continuation of creative action? She is extinguished there, but “extinguish” is a synonym for release, or liberation… possibly a mystic merging with the wind and the light and the blue, as one more invisible element of life force.

As I said, I don’t know what this poem means - I’m just giving my own take on the vision it gives me. Spinners and weavers will understand the appeal of my interpretation, the magic of becoming the point of twist, dissolving into the act of creation - and I’m impressed that Valéry somehow knew that it’s really all about caressing the fiber.

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One last PSA for those in the US: you may know of Resistbot, but if you don’t, text the word RESIST to 50409 and your messages can be quickly converted into letters sent to your representatives in Congress.

fundamental

An excerpt from The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, by Kao Kalia Yang

Grandma liked to work by the window in the natural light. Sometimes she mended her skirts…. Sometimes she used her scissors with the long handles to cut plastic bags from Rainbow Foods, from Sears, from Kmart, from Wal-Mart,... the white “Thank You” bags from the Asian grocery stores, into long strips of light brown, mostly white, sometimes red and green. In the last years of her life, she would spend hours before the window twisting the plastic strips into ropes, carefully massaging the lengths of cut plastic into the exposed, wrinkled skin of her leg. Wearing her thick reading glasses, she spent her days making bags and bags of twisted plastic ropes. She said that there were always uses for ropes in life, things to tie together.

Adding twist to strips of plastic bread bags with a Bulgarian spindle. I did this about a year ago, trying to quit wasting so much plastic. I wanted to crochet bags from it, but then would need to learn crochet.

Such a fundamental process of skill, fiber, material, joining. Someone who cannot not work with her hands, make useful things. It got me thinking. Some of us have been focusing on the fundamentals for a while now.

Like Sarah spinning coffee filters

Sally breeding sheep and cotton

Neanderthal 3 ply plant fiber cord

Jude moving from old bed sheet to temple robe

Abby explaining traditional irrigation

Spindle made from half an avocado pit and a stick. Spinning cotton from a pill bottle.

Handmade bamboo reed - sleying with commercial cotton warp acquired in estate destash.

The essence of who we are, as people, can be seen in our use of fiber. We who have distanced ourselves immeasurably in 150 years from these processes of hands, from the knowledge that grows from handling plant stems, pods, cocoons, locks of wool, wriggling lambs --- from the intelligence inherent in managing various sticks, knowing their size, weight, heft, details of purpose and potential --- how many of us have tools that are worn into softness by our hands’ continuous use? Not many, in the industrialized world. I don’t - I’ve only been spinning for 15 years and weaving for 10, and I use lots of different spindles and sticks, not the same ones daily.

Flax singles on vintage Bugarian spindles….. need more practice with this.

We can look at a culture, at the clothing and use of fibers for multiple layers of shelter or containment, and know how these people relate to their environment, how the lifestyle developed in a way that honors the processing of fiber into cloth or basket, net, bag, rope, blanket, house wall or roof. The expressions of textile making speak the essence of a traditional community.

Sweater from a Spinner’s Eden Farm fleece - a CVM/Romeldale ewe named Glenda. Bow fleece sale, Washington. Whitehorse sweater pattern by Caitlin Hunter, modified.

The modern world’s depletion can be likewise observed, in the lack of understanding and skill in fundamentals of fiber - in the assumption that clothing is a ready-made thing to be purchased, along with bags, nets, rope. Fiber needs are manufactured at a remove, by machine, with minimal human intervention, and the only relationship the mainstream modern person has with cloth is as a consumer, who chooses using money.

Money and the abstract ‘economy’ have come between humans and cloth, driving a wedge that separates us from the knowing of hands. As industrialization progressively took humans out of the equation of cloth making, even a weaver became someone who operated a complex machine, and understood not how to work with fiber and yarn, but how to troubleshoot the machine.

Hand carded Shetland wool rolags, from a Marietta Shetlands fleece. Bow fleece sale, Washington.

Getting our hands back onto the fiber is crucial. It’s the only way to really learn. Touch, handling, and practice inform the neural pathways that give us skill. It is the way back to knowing.

It starts with picking up a stick.

Coyote brown cotton from Fox Fibre, spun on Mexican spindle made by husband/wife team (found through Cloth Roads.)

Spindles made by friends, cotton and wool/silk handspun, Gee’s Bend quilts, Indian and US handmade wooden vessels.

There’s an essay in here somewhere, waiting to happen. But at this point, it’s just a collection of thoughts, piled in with some images, in hopes of taking your mind toward the small, important, hands-on things.

update: weaving, dyeing, spinning

So this weaving. I decided to try weaving from the other end, just because I wanted to experience that. Normally this is done to achieve four selvedges, but since I didn't have a nice selvedge at the beginning, it wouldn't matter for this piece. I simply did it to see how it's done, sacrificing a few inches that I might have added to the length of the piece - because I knew I wouldn't be able to close this gap completely, even with plain weave. The sheds are too difficult to open, and I reached the limit of my sword size at this point. I had predicted that I would not get closer than 3 inches, and this shows I was right. Now I have to face cutting it, unless I plan to display it forever like this. Then a bath, and then finishing. Still unsure what this will look like, finally, but it will most likely be what it is - a piece of weaving: flat, rectangular, as long and as wide as it is.

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Then there was a natural dye workshop. It's hard for me to resist this kind of thing, especially when it features the expertise of someone like Emily of Local Color Fiber Studio in Bainbridge. I've done natural dye classes before, and they're always a little chaotic, but they produce beautiful images, beautifully dyed yarns, and give me a nudge toward doing more of this myself.

The pot above is made from grapes, gleaned from a vineyard where Emily works part time. They're especially dye-friendly grapes, and they made a beautiful lilac shade on the mohair yarn we were using.

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Another attraction of the class: spending a beautiful day by the water in Port Townsend. Just watching the yarns come out of each dyebath and hang in the sunshine was pure sensory delight.

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Madder dye, before and after...

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I took some fiber to dye, and came home with nice colors - they will look good as stripes in another backstrap weaving, along with the green Targhee I've been spinning during the Tour.

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things going on

I'm offering a spindle spinning class in May, through the Port Townsend School of the Arts. It's a slow-paced, deliberately discursive path. I hope people will join me.

I also have things for sale on Etsy now - Tracy Hudson FIBERWORK.  Much excitement!

It's all yarn at the moment, but some other types of items may be added....

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