One of the classes I teach at the Shelburne Craft School is called Weaving Your Story. The chance to meld my love of weaving with my passions for healing, growth and creativity has been a true boon in my life. The program is fully grant funded by grantors and an anonymous donor making it cost free for participants. The Vermont Arts Council, being a grantor and a great supporter of the program, recently interviewed me to talk about Weaving Your Story and I wanted to share the article with you here. It captures so much of what the class is about and how I feel about it!
In case you are wondering how weaving and creative expression can be healing, I think the conversation gets at it well. Enjoy!
Thought I’d share a compilation of things I’ve been thinking about and doing this last week. Some make me smile. Some make me think. Some make me cry. Some make me feel gratitude. Some a mixture of all of those things.
I got to participate in this art show along with fellow fiber artists, potters, painters, and woodturners. What a wonderful thing! There is something uniquely powerful about putting your work out there for others to see. The camaraderie I feel with my fellow makers who are in this show is really nice. Makes me proud.
I had to cancel, very last minute, a Community Weave event at my studio because I got wrecked by an allergic response, either to an antibiotic or a new-to-me face/body cream. It looked like I got punched in the eye, and I had welts all over my body about 48 hours ago. Not cool. Much better now.
I finished a prototype for a larger series I am getting working on… it’s hard to see in this picture, but it’s a woven tube made of linen, adorned with flax, wool, jute, with a beautiful antler hanging in the middle… better images to come…
Wrapped up a fabulous class at the Shelburne Craft School- this was explosively fun and very co-creative and inspiring! Weaving with minimal rules, natural materials, and instinct frees up a whole lot of space in my psyche. Sharing that with others was a true joy.
Read through journals I’ve been keeping since high school, looking for lyrics I wrote for a song I love playing… man, that’s a trip. Never found the lyrics to that song. Did find lyrics to another song I wrote but didn’t put down the chords… what the shit? So, reworking that one. But, I did find this… a realization that I’ve been hard at work being-a-person for a long time… thinking, creating, examining, striving, loving, fearing… I often think of my younger self as kind of a hot-mess, and don’t get me wrong, I had my drawn-out hot-mess moments for sure (still do!), but I think I’ve been unkind to the younger me that was just learning how to grow up in the midst of living. Those days are over. I suddenly see myself very differently, not as pre- or post- hot-mess, but rather as a long story. Just like anyone. This shift has been medicine.
Listened to (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang on repeat, a cover of Heaven 17’s original version. Got inspired by the artists that use their medium to say “NO!”.
Spent a lot of time with my dog who seems to know I’ve not been feeling well.
Learned that there are so many plants in my yard that are medicinal and I am now going down a rabbit hole of studying them… reading about “weeds” that heal ailments has me reconsidering what a weed actually is.
And, I think that’s it for now. There’s so much going on, so much to respond to, metabolize, and critically think through. An endless well of compassion, empathy, fortitude, and courage is needed. And honesty. And self-reflection. Most everything I’m making these days has something to do with living and dying and the cycle of these opposites that shape our existence and our choices.
Because I’m getting ready to teach my first online class that involves a lot of videos. And, as I’ve been editing them, I’ve realized, wow, I really do say “ummmm” a whole lot. It’s such a good place holder for my mouth when I need to catch up with my thoughts, but not ideal to listen to! I’m very grateful for iMovie editing features!
I’m also extremely grateful for…
~ The chance to bring Weaving Your Story to more people~ this is a class I built, drawing together my passions from years of work and study, both as a therapist and as a weaver. I feel so strongly about what weaving offers to people, aesthetically, emotionally, in community.
~ The Shelburne Craft School, and especially its director, Heather Moore, who right out of the gate expressed interest in the way I use weaving in my work with people, and wondered if we might build a class around it. And that’s just what we did! Through that process, I’ve learned about writing grants and partnering with other organizations, while expanding my own skill set as I’ve offered this work to a larger group. I’ve also gotten to teach a dear friend and colleague, Ali Waltien, how to offer Weaving Your Story in her work. How amazing!
~ An anonymous donor who has made the class available to even more people.
~ Weaving Your Story participants who take the leap into weaving… well… their stories! This takes courage, patience, trust, and flexibility, and with every single group, I learn and grow.
~ My daughter who has been helping me learn how to make and edit videos, export, upload and put into the airwaves the online version of the class.
That all reads like an acceptance speech! Seriously though, I’d be remiss to talk about the Weaving Your Story classes without expressing all the gratitude I feel for those who have given so much to me, so there we are.
Now, back to editing my videos! If I can reduce my “ummmmms” by 75% or more, I think it’ll be okay.
Weave me a rope that will pull me through these impossible times.
I’m delighted to share that an article I was invited to work on with the director of the Shelburne Craft School, Heather Moore, has been published in the IMAG #18 periodical from InSEA publications. It’s called, “Who Cares How it Comes Out? Pinhole Camera as Teacher and Muse”. You can find it here! It was a marvelous process, working on such an important-to-me project. The more I think about creativity, the more I think it is an essential and critical part of being human and that it ought never be treated as an afterthought. We’ve, as a species, been articulating our ideas and inspirations for millennia. To be able to think and write about how the creative process fosters community, empathy, enthusiasm, and engagement was a real pleasure. I hope you like it!
A friend of mine mentioned the other day that I hadn’t written here in a bit. She’s known me long enough to recognize a pattern of mine which is that I do a pretty full retreat from online things when there’s something I’m sorting out. I got to talk about the things that I’ve been chewing on, and she listened. She also said she missed seeing what I’m up to when it comes to making things. This was a beautiful nudge. Very well-rounded.
Grief, as you likely already know, takes its toll on people. As someone who’s written a lot about grief, a whole book in fact, you’d think maybe I’d know some tricks on how to navigate the experience with greater ease. But I’m here to tell you, there are no easy ways through the process. In all my writing, talking, supporting, and expressing, never once do I suggest there is a “get-through-grief-the-easy-way” option. It is simply something we must go through, feel, adapt to, and be chiseled by. Ultimately, we are charged with getting to know ourselves and others in our new form, as someone changed by what we’ve experienced.
I’ve noticed about myself that when I’m swimming in the grief waters, I need to take some steps back from those things that put me out there into the world. Certain aspects of grief make me feel like I’m a flipped over turtle, and the last thing I need in those circumstances is to feel more vulnerable during those times.
As we approach the year anniversary of when my dad died, we are also making our way through cold winter here in Vermont. In a few days, it will be February 1, Imbolc, which marks the halfway point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. This is when, in the Northern Hemisphere, the light starts to shift and come back. Many are thinking about the seeds they’re going to start indoors in preparation for the spring plantings. The goddess Brigid is honored in her many forms. We are invited to clean our houses, set our intentions, and think about what we want to bring into fruition in the coming growing cycles.
sun snow…
I will be honoring both of these events. I feel ready for the light to come back after relishing resting in the dark.
Creative life has been full all these months. I’ve been teaching at the Shelburne Craft School, a place that has truly become a home away from home. I also have spent time with folks in my studio, supporting their weaving journey. I’m taking a tapestry weaving class with Elizabeth Buckley, all about weaving water. I am learning so much!
my first attempt to weave reflections in water… not easy, my friends. I have a ways to go, but I’m loving the class.
I have a lot of little projects going on as well, including a new daily weaving practice that has absolutely no plan, so we’ll see how it goes.
Oh, and I made some block prints…
I’m creating things for a new class I’ll be offering called Wild Weaving, where we get to blast out our creativity and impulses into the embrace of a waiting warp.
And, I’m developing an online class as part of our Weaving Your Story programming through the craft school. This is a curriculum I’ve been developing for a couple of years and has become a very important part of my life.
All amazing work to get to be doing!
I still need to finish weaving some towels so I can get started on a new installation idea that won’t let go of my imagination. That is a project I’ll be planting seeds for soon, in hopes that it will be born over the summer months. You heard it here first! It’s got ties to this piece that was in a show in South Burlington last year.
Creative energy builds when we learn how to rest in the ways we need.
That’s it for now. Thank you, dear friend, for asking for an update.
Has it really been since March since I’ve written? I’ve been meaning to, but honestly, it’s really hard to extrovert (which in my mind includes putting parts of myself out into the world) when grieving. I’ve needed a lot of quiet, a lot of time alone, and not at all any “shoulds” where possible; just simply to have time to be in my own headspace, at least more than I typically am able. That all being said, I’ve missed writing here. I’ve come to look at this website/blog as the place that holds evidence of my thinking and ideas.
I’m grateful to you for tuning in.
Some updates: I was asked to participate in a group art show entitled Interwoven at the South Burlington Public Art Gallery , and I wholeheartedly said yes. I’d been working on some projects and it was just the impetus I needed to really focus and bring them into being. Most everything I make has to do with something I’m working out in my psyche and the pieces I made for this are no exception. Three are hand knit and three are handwoven. I’ll love to share them with you. The show’s opening is on September 11. I’ll post more about that soon.
Evidence of Significant Repair
Wearing Away
Hema ThrínoRhythms
Winter of Our Discontent
Soil
My wooly, woven pieces are actually curtains but could also be wall hangings. I love playing with the idea of warm and bold wool being woven in an airy, light-filled way. I was in my studio yesterday and the window was open, allowing Winter of Our Discontent to flow and move and I smiled, seeing it dance just the way I’d hoped. I’ll write separately about each piece to introduce them simply and properly in the next week or two.
Also happening lately is the spinning of wool while listening to Clarissa Pinkola Estés’The Power of the Crone. I highly recommend listening to her wonderful stories. Pairing that with spinning is like eating dark chocolate while sipping a hot coffee. Perfection.
I got to dress up for a dear friend’s beautiful event thrown to raise money to develop a space that supports deep creativity and the arts…
And I got glasses- suddenly everything looks crisp and clear again… dang, that was a slow motion slippery slope…
I played with paint and yarn…
And had a lot of my work hung at the Pierson Library in Shelburne…
And did all kinds of fibery things with the Shelburne Craft School, my home away from home…
So, now that we’re all caught up (is that ever really possible?), I’ll love to know what you’ve been working on, thinking about, gearing up to do.
I’m a member of the Vermont Weaver’s Guild and I participated in this year’s weaving challenge. It was to make a pillow using three of the four elements randomly assigned to each weaver who entered. I got overshot, cotton, stripes and black and white. I chose the first three elements because nowhere in my house is there a spot to receive a black and white anything, so that part was simple. One pillow is to be donated to the guild so it can be part of a sale that we have to raise money.
I’ve not been weaving for terribly long, and every time I learn a new thing, it feels like I have to relearn a bunch of old things, although I can say I’m noticing a growing ease with preparing a warp, getting it on the loom, setting the loom up and threading, so that is a good thing. I will share a story in another post about a fight I got into with my counterbalance loom with the absolute simplest warp/threading/tie up you can imagine just this week, but I’ll save that for later. For this pillow project, I opted to utilize the weaving class I was taking at Shelburne Craft School with Lausanne Allen to get help and support as I tackled the most complicated pattern and weaving structure I’ve done to date. The class was for weavers who have experience but are still actively learning and benefit from the guidance of a skilled and patient teacher.
I felt rather overwhelmed immediately with the overshot part of things, and how to add stripes to it, because I don’t know how to create my own patterns yet. I referenced Madelyn van der Hoogt and of course, Bertha Gray Hayes, and saw so many drafts I’d love to weave, but somehow, translating those into a pattern made me feel like I was swimming in too deep water- maybe it was resistance? Or confusion? Or just the simple fact that I need to dig in and study what size yarns go with what epi goes with what draft, etc., etc., and then color choice- oh man! It’s a lot to sort out! So… I kept getting stuck. Enter Lausanne, who showed me a wonderful pattern called Bertha’s Towels from Handwoven. I was like, boom… Cotton, check. Overshot, check-check. Stripes, bingo. I knew I could modify the pattern for the pillows I needed, and get a few towels out of the bargain as well, if I lengthened the warp. And from there I went.
What I loved about the process once I got out from under the stress of making a bunch of decisions about a weave structure I didn’t really understand yet was the toggling between community and self, community and self. During class and open studios, I shared close space with fellow students who I now consider friends. One was weaving a beautiful Krokbragd pattern on a rug warp; the other was approaching our school’s antique barn loom that was having new life breathed into it with all of the attention paid to her; that weaver has her own incredible story to tell about her experience, and she wove an absolutely gorgeous table runner using an overshot pattern. In the back weaving room, there were other wonderful weavers and friends working out their warps and weaving. The sounds of a working weaving studio are amazing- clanking, knocking, the occasional sigh, swear, muttering to self, the walking around and looking at others’ work when you’re so tweaked by threading, sleying and realizing a mistake. I’d have a moment where I’d meet myself and my own growth edge, exclaim some thing, get support and dive back in to my own mind and project.
It took a long time for me to weave three towels and two pillow covers (one side- I used a lovely muslin-esque type fabric for the back). The flow of overshot and the pattern itself requires complete attention, pretty much the whole time. I think I finally internalized the pattern by the middle of the second to last towel I wove and it started to make sense to me, how it all worked. And wow, as the fabric became reality, I couldn’t believe what I was making. It was so much fun to problem solve selvedges and beats, fixing mistakes and troubleshooting loom peculiarities with Lausanne and my weaving partners. And it was heartening to meet, yet again in this weaving passion I’ve found myself in, my own growth edges and how I deal with them- it’s not pretty all the time, that’s for sure, but I know that I can move forward now towards pattern design- not with ease, but maybe with less trepidation? I mean, I’m in no rush… we’ll see.
The pillow for my houseThe gold towel actually follows the pattern; the salmon and blue, I wove the pattern without doing the plain weave stripes or changing colors. The pillow for the guild
Something very exciting is happening here in Shelburne, VT, of the fibery, weavy, yarny brand. On this rainy Memorial Day Monday, I’d love to share the news with you.
A couple of months ago, I received an email from the director of the Shelburne Craft School, a wonderful woman named Claire, letting me know that they were bringing weaving back to their programming. Oh my… she had me right there. It was an incredibly welcome email to receive for reasons big and small. In it, Claire explained some of what she was hoping to accomplish and asked if I would I like to talk. Truth be known, I would have jogged my pandemic-fatigued self to her right then and there, but I tempered that urge and like any mature grown up, set a date to meet in my studio nearby on a later date.
When we met, it was difficult for me to contain my enthusiasm. I listened to what Claire’s vision was and marveled at the fact that soon, Weaving and Fiber Art would be offerings at the Shelburne Craft School again. The school had a strong weaving program decades ago. I’m unclear as to why it was stopped. I’ve only heard whisperings about “the day the looms left”, or something like that. At any rate, as we spoke, I realized quickly that while I want to be a part of this most assuredly, I don’t have the weaving expertise to spearhead the vision coming to life. But, I thought of my weaving teacher, Lausanne Allen, who has more expertise in her pinky nail than I’ll ever hope to achieve in my lifetime. I let Claire know I’d be in touch with Lausanne we’d see what unfolds.
Well… receiving Lausanne’s response to my inquiry as to whether she could imagine taking on developing a weaving program at the craft school was probably the closest I’ve come to that feeling you get when you hurriedly open a letter from a someone you’ve missed terribly, or the results of some test… I sped read it and laughed out loud and read it again more slowly… not only was she interested, but she was thrilled out it, too! I’d forgotten this, but Lausanne reminded me that she learned how to weave at the Shelburne Craft School in the 80s and right out of the gate, she had so many ideas and questions and wonderings…
A lot has happened since Lausanne and Claire met. Spaces have been cleared, looms that the school still had from the fateful time the weaving program shut down have been resurrected and Lausanne and I have brought in a couple of our own. The walls have been adorned with Lausanne’s incredible work and other weavings we’ve collected over the years. There’s been cleaning, oiling, de-rusting and untangling. Lausanne has done many hours of research and learning and acquiring of needed items for the school. And me? I get to be Lausanne’s… I don’t know what to call myself… helper? Assistant? Grateful-To-Be-There-Apprentice? I can tell you this: I feel pinch-myself lucky to be a part of this new development in my town, and am thrilled that Claire has the vision she does to bring back such an important part of not just our town’s history, but in my view, an integral part of the story of human making.
These are some images of the development of the space. Over the next month or so, I’ll introduce each of the looms and share the project that will go on them. We need to get some of them moving after their long hiatus from their purpose.
Thanks to my kids for helping to clean!
Heddle measuring!
If you are reading this with a particular interest in weaving and wonder when might things be lifting off ground at the school, I will be regularly updating you here. And of course, check out the Shelburne Craft School’s website to see all of their offerings. It’s a wonderful place to be, and soon the sounds of beaters beating, shuttles flying, bobbins spinning, and voices whispering to cloth will be filling the air and saturating the old wood of the historic building.
Healing Handcrafting 