inspiration – Page 2

Summer Weaving

July 13, 2017 | 1 Comment

Summer is a time when my weaving projects must take priority since that’s when I’m home to work! Yet summer offers SO many wonderful distractions! The garden, family and friends visiting, lots of conferences to attend. I want to kick back and enjoy the season, but I also feel the pressure to make as much progress as possible before I leave home again.

These are the scenes that greet me each day on my walk along the Connecticut River, although the peonies and iris have shifted to roses, and now the roses are being overtaken by hydrangea.

It’s been a banner year for roses in my own garden. I have to give all the credit to Bob since he has fertilized every time I’ve asked, and he’s also used some kind of eco-friendly spray when the gypsy moths fell out of the trees on to the rose bushes.

We have a granite wall that is about 100′ long and planted in pink and yellow roses, interspersed with lavender, daisies, and boxwoods.

I’m going to back up a bit and reminisce about the trip I took to Tennessee to attend the Southeast Fiber Festival back in April. Back in April? Time flies! I took three weeks to drive down to Gatlinburg and back. It was a perfect mix of relaxation and adventure. After spending Easter weekend with my new granddaughter and her parents, I continued south to meet my good friend and tapestry weaver AnnaByrd to make the rest of the trip together. We had a wonderful 500 mile drive through the Shenandoah Valley and into the Smoky Mountains. Both going and returning we stopped in New Market, Virginia, and enjoyed lunch in a cafe at the civil war museum there. We were both taking a 3-day class with Jon Eric Riis on Coptic tapestry techniques.

In spite of the terrible destruction in Gatlinburg by last autumn’s fires, Arrowmont is still a stunning place. There is plenty of evidence of the chaotic and destroying force of fire, but I was relieved to see that there was still plenty untouched. This view is not the direction of the fire came from.

A view of the main building from the dining hall. The dining arrangement is the best I’ve had at a conference. I wish I’d photographed the dining room. It is cafeteria style, and the food is excellent. You sit at real wooden dining tables that have real chairs. Although there are a lot of tables in this large room, it feels quite like gathering in a home situation because the food is excellent and so obviously prepared with care, and the setting is so comfortably home like. Well done!

My few photos from this trip are not memorable, but the memories they conjure for me are too good not to use. Here is Jon during his keynote address for the conference.

The slides of his work covered most of his weaving career. I had no idea he’d been weaving for 50 years–how can he be old enough to have had such a long career? I have always loved his Icarus tapestries, and I no idea just how many works he’s done over the years. Look at this assemblage of pears! I know, it’s a bad photo– what can you expect of a photo of a projected slide during the presentation?

AnnByrd took this photo of Jon and me together, and it’s a great memory for me, even though blurry. Some day the memory of the workshop will become like this photo….a bit out of focus–but hopefully not too soon.

On display in the instructors’ exhibit were a series of partial faces that Riis wove entirely in metallic yarns. I don’t know HOW he got such a beautiful surface with such challenging materials. On the last day, after this work was crated, he unpacked a few and let us pass them around. Look at the curve of the chin–and the shading!

There are 20 partial faces in this series that hang together in a grid. The piece is called “Diaglogue.” You can see it here.

About 10 days after I returned home from this adventure, I was off to the Cape with a couple of lace making friends. We were headed to the Sacred Hearts Retreat Center in Wareham, Massachusetts, for the annual weekend retreat of the New England Lace Guild. It’s a wonderful setting near the beach, all our meals are served to us family style at big tables in a large dining room. We have private rooms and shared baths, and we can stay up all night making lace if we like, go for walks, take classes, and even buy stuff from the Van Scivers who always come. For the past two years I’ve opted not to take a class, and instead, filled my days sitting in the sunroom with a couple of my own projects that needed uninterrupted attention. There are plenty of other lace makers who do the same.

I spent the weekend working on this project while also keeping track of the eagle cam that was following the eaglet Spirit, on the Anacostia River, just off the Potomac in Washington, DC. You can just see Spirit at the edge of the nest (upper right) on my computer screen.

Here is one of the two classrooms….. since the center is in a large Georgian house, the rooms are generous and furnished from decades past.

Back at home, with the summer unfolding, we’ve celebrated our 40th anniversary, and been treated to a long weekend with both our sons and daughter in law, along with cherished new granddaughter Tori and a few good friends. I’m working on a couple of floor loom projects and two tapestries.

One tapestry is the line of text that our son Christopher asked me to weave. As of this week, I am 20% done. It seems like an insane thing to weave, and even Archie tried to dissuade me from this project, in spite of having woven quite a lot of text himself. Yet I find it both relaxing and challenging. Chris made the font and then hand manipulated the spacing of letters for my cartoon. I am not making any marks on the warp, since I’ve found that I have more success working from a cartoon when I let the cartoon be an idea of the weaving, rather than trying to actually follow the cartoon slavishly.

And here is the work in progress on the design I created in Riis’s Coptic workshop. The workshop was titled “Unraveling Coptic Weaving,” and we were to bring family photos to reinterpret in a Coptic style. I balked at that idea and brought a lot of other images that intrigued me more–Minoan dancers, Greek vase paintings, and one of the bas relief religious figures from the facade of St. John the Divine Cathedral in NYC. Anyway, after playing with those compelling ideas, I settled back on the idea of a family member…..dear little Tori.

The warp is sett at 16 epi, which is considerably finer than the finest sett I’ve ever used before — 12 epi. Between the fine sett and the neutral color of the warp thread, I am struggling to see what I’m doing! Still, when I pick the right threads, the weaving is also compelling.

It was a good challenge for me to draw this cartoon. Tori will be surrounded by clouds with hearts in the corners….schmaltzy for sure, but I hope to balance that a bit by using some tertiary colors. Each cloud and each heart is somewhat different from each other….the only way I can do it. We’ll see.

This morning I measured the lace that I started at the retreat. It’s also for Tori. I just photographed it after I put away the measuring tape. It is now a whopping 32″ long!

So I’d better get back to work on these projects so I can get some of them finished before the season changes!

Women’s Work

June 1, 2017 | 1 Comment

Today’s mail held a treasure I’ve been looking forward to seeing! Last week on Etsy I found a vintage bedsheet with matching bolster pillow that had been embroidered in counted cross stitch and bordered with laddered hemstitch. The sheet itself is a luxurious, heavy weight French ‘metis,’ which is 65% linen and 35% cotton. According the to vendor, Hanky Heiress, this fabric blend was developed to be an ‘easy-care alternative’ to 100% linen sheets. Look how beautiful it is!

Here it is opened up across my bed. The blue and orange cross stitch look wonderful on my vintage, machine woven, overshot bedspread! I’m thrilled!

The seller of this sheet and bolster set believes it’s from the 1960s, and she speculated that that they have never been used. Now that I’ve seen it firsthand, I agree with her. Who knows where it originated; by the time I found it, it was residing with an Etsy vendor in Cheshire, England. What a sad thing that it may have spent 50 years in a drawer or closet. I have been imagining various scenarios in which this might happen, and the only that makes sense to me is that someone made this as a gift for someone else. Perhaps it was a wedding gift, with the two initials signifying the union of two different names. I can only imagine that the woman who did this put so much love into this gift. It is truly a treasure! And I’d like to think that the woman who received it loved it so much that she was hesitant to actually use it. Well, I intend to use it, and I intend to enjoy it. I will always think of this story that I have created to go with it. I feel it has good potential for being true!

It amazes and inspires me that women (and men too) have been making and embellishing textiles since the dawn of humanity. There’s a reasonable chance that textiles are older than pottery, as Elizabeth Weyland Barber has speculated. It seems we are hardwired to surround ourselves with the work of our hands.

In early April I learned that our friend Hank, had arrived in Havana on his boat and would soon try to deliver all the all donations of lace-making materials to the woman I met last year. I wrote about the lace makers last year while Bob and I were visiting Cuba on our boat. Due to lack of communication in Cuba as well as while sailing offshore, I did not get confirmation of the delivery until mid-May. What an emotional moment that was for me! And I understand there were few tears shed by Hank and his wife, along with the women who received this bounty, and even the male interpreter! I cried myself when I saw the photos and this wonderful video that Hank and Seale made for me.

When Bob and I first hatched this idea of sending materials to Cuba, neither we nor Adriana fully realized the effort involved. I had been quite saddened to see the poor quality materials women had access to–sewing thread used in multiple plies for embroidery and crochet, and poor quality knitting and crochet yarns that looked like some Russian version of Lily’s “Sugar N Cream” yarn–and only available in one color — Ecru! Mailing gifts is simply not possible, since all mail is opened and usually the contents are ‘re-purposed.’ Even making a face to face delivery had a high degree of risk for confiscation. Adriana and Hank worked out the best plan they could come up with, and still both of them were worried about being discovered. It is forbidden in Cuba to have guilds or groups, so the women who meet to do various types of lace together have to be quite careful. I am so relieved that this venture was a success!

This is now my favorite photo of Adriana, where she looks like a young woman again, full of excitement for the many projects that lay ahead for her and all the other women she tutors in lace techniques. I can almost see the ideas starting to swirl in her head!

Here is photo of the stash before Bob and I packed it up in four extra-large vacuum seal bags. In early January, Bob sailed to the British Virgin Islands, where he transferred the stash to Hank’s boat. In early April, Hank sailed for Cuba as the leader of a rally of sailboats that would spend two weeks in Havana.

Best of all, here are some photos of Adriana’s lace work that I bought from her last April. First a Torchon doily that I gave as a present at my lace group’s annual holiday party.

And two pieces of Adriana’s tape lace that I kept for myself.

The work of our hands–across the decades– and across the world. And this is just the tip of the tip of what is out there in the world.

As Summer Wanes

September 5, 2016 | 2 Comments

It’s Labor Day, the first truly chilly morning of the season, and I LOVE it! There will be a few more days of summer heat before we hit the equinox, but summer is winding down. I can feel it in the air and see it in the trees. In spite of hurricane Hermine heading northward, I feel autumn coming.

The month of August has hurtled by me. I had lots and lots of doctor appointments, and in between them, I tried to very hard to enjoy one workshop on ec0-dyeing and as many days of weaving and lace making as I could manage. Looking back, I feel fairly productive!

If you haven’t tried Eco-dyeing, give it a whirl! There is nothing like unwrapping a scarf or fabric to find some lovely imprints of leaves and flowers. If your first attempt doesn’t suit your taste just put the fabric/scarf away and try it again on another day. That’s what I’m doing this morning as I write this. I have a 1-yard length of lightweight linen and one silk scarf steaming. I used the rinse and spin cycle of my washing machine to re-wet them, and I just collected a few leaves on my morning walk: one small branch of Japanese maple with about a dozen leaves on it, some golden rod fronds with buds ready to open rather than in bloom, and a few fronds of sumac.

When I got home I spread out my damp linen fabric and silk scarf and placed my plant materials on half of each length of fabric or scarf, because I will fold the other half over to cover the plant material. To the things I gathered on my walk I added a few gems from my garden. Today I am trying tall ferns that I hope are ostrich ferns, since I read that those work well in eco-deying. I have a few dark purple oxalis leaves, some purple cranesbill flowers as well as leaves, some coleus leaves, and one small spray of red flowers from a dragon wing begonia. As I write this I realized I meant to to pick some hyacinth bean leaves and flowers. The leaves of the purple hyacinth vine have such dark veining, it might work very well in this technique. Drat! My fabric is already in the steamer.

Here are a couple of sites that I found very helpful in trying this technique. Sherry Harr did her doctoral thesis at Kansas State University on various textile dyeing techniques, and her article is quite thorough. There are several blogs where the authors have documented their plants and techniques rather well. Take a look at Threadborne and Obovate Designs.

In mid-August a few people from my local area guild got together and shared lots of plant material and had a go on our various fabrics and scarves. None of us had ever done this before, but we shared the internet info we found, and a couple of us had talked to others who had taken a workshop with Amelia Poole, whose work in this technique is stunning.

With a bit of info and a LOT of enthusiasm, we plunged ahead. We were quite lucky to have the use of Kate’s wonderful weaving/dyeing studio for this project. Here you can see how we layered the tubes of fabric with sticks to keep them from touching. To make the steamer there are some rocks and sticks at the bottom of the pan to keep the tubes of fabrics above the water level.

The taller tubes of fabric went in this make-shift steamer.

After 30 minutes of steaming and a little time cooling down, our tubes came out of the pot.

Unwrapping and hanging our scarves and fabric to dry on a rack. We were pretty thrilled with our results.

My first scarf turned out better than the other things I tried that day.

Look at the imprint from this giant dahlia.

I hope to compile a list of the plants and flowers that work best for me. Some things leave behind wonderful colors, but the imprint is just a blob. I’m more interested in the things that leave an actual impression of the leaf or flower. So far, this is my list of A plants and flowers:

Japanese maple leaves–great leaf definition
coleus leaves–faint leaf definition and pastel colors, lovely on silk
golden rod–great definition for leaves and flowers
purple oxalis–great definition
black hollyhock flowers–a wonderful, deep purple ‘blob’
cranesbill, purple–nicely shaped ‘blob’ somewhat recognizable as a flower silhouette

One of the perks of visiting the studios and houses of other weavers, is seeing the lovely details in their living and work spaces. Weavers usually have such a eye for beauty.

It was a glorious day for our project.

Fast forward to the beginning of September, and on this stunning weekend I spent a wonderful day at the monthly meeting of bobbin lace makers in Connecticut. You can find us here.

We met outside in a member’s garden under a canopy of billowing, striped canvas. Her terrace was surrounded by flowers–black-eyed Susans, phlox, and other late season bloomers, with a view of her large vegetable garden nearby, and in the distance her bee hives. She made an English cream tea for us that we had to share with the bees. Her tables were covered with vintage white on white embroidered cloths, topped with vintage linen tea towels that commemorated Queen Elizabeth’s reign–going back as far as her silver jubilee. I think we all felt a bit regal.

I hope Mary won’t mind that I shared this photo. Her expression is a mirror of how much we were all looking forward to having these treats!

Our hostess made Earl Grey tea biscuits dipped in chocolate that were off the charts!

On top of this wonderful tea we all actually spent time making lace, too!

This is also the weekend of the Haddam Neck Fair. Late summer is the time for all kinds of festivals that celebrate farming and animal husbandry. I have never been to this particular fair before, and it was a wonder.

First there were the animals. We watched a draft horse pulling contest, visited the goats and sheep, cows, chickens and rabbits. The textile displays were very small, but I met a woman on the fair committee, doing a spinning demonstration, and she hopes to grow the textile area of the fair in coming years.

Look at this beautiful Dorset sheep. Her new fleece growing back was as thick as felt and she loved attention.

Multi-colored Jacobs.

Seeing all the awards for best sheep or cow, all the way down to best cakes, and cupcakes, best flower arrangements, and best single flowers, or best zucchini, made Bob exclaim, “No one can possibly doubt humans’ need to compete!” Along a row of bud vases that showcased individual marigolds, the judges had written such poetic comments as: “As beautiful as a sexy, 1940s film star!” And, one a rose that no longer had a single petal left, “A stunner! Well done!”

I particularly like this arrangement of succulents in a well used frame. Clearly the judges did too.

Some whimsical flower arrangements. There were lots of categories for flower arrangements, and these were two in the category inspired by food. A tray of floral cupcakes!

And a slice of mum cake! The same kind of judges’ comments showed up on all the individual vegetables, from tomatoes to summer squash, to cucumbers. If you can grow it or make it, you can compete with others at some local fair!

It was a beautiful day, and it was quite lovely to see how much care and attention can go into growing a zucchini or a marigold!

Sadly, the textile area could not hold a candle to the livestock or the flowers and veggies. Maybe that will change in the future. All it will take are a few textile people who want to compete!

The day is getting away from me, and I should turn my attention to Archie’s book and to that never-ending boundweave project.

I’ll end with a recap of what I learned today. The tall ferns in my garden must not be ostrich ferns since they left no color. I did add some hyacinth bean vine, both leaves a clusters of flowers buds, but they also left no color or imprint.

Clusters of purple verbena flowers are interesting–they turn turquoise!

And signet marigolds left an interesting imprint. The red stripes turned black.

And speaking of flowers, I have to share one last image. The well known, oft-photographed field of sunflowers on the north fork of Long Island. Bob and I sailed to Sag Harbor and stayed for almost a week back in the middle of the month. Even when compared to an amazing dinner at the American Hotel, and wine tastings along the North Fork, seeing this field was the highlight of that trip!

Now to work!

Weaving and Dreaming

July 25, 2016 | 1 Comment

I’m dreaming about my next project as I zoom along on the current one. There are always surprises, and this yardage has had its share. Last fall I decided to make the warp a yard longer than I’d figured when I bought the materials. Yeah, so, it should not have been a surprise when I ran out of warp and had to fudge a second warp out of a solid grey to blend into this handpainted warp.

Then, for some reason, I neglected to make the mental leap to realizing that if my warp is now a yard longer than planned I might not have enough weft! That only occurred to me after I started weaving, about 2 weeks ago. Really, I amaze myself sometimes.

So I’ve spent this morning thinking about what I might use as weft for the rest of this yardage. I have not yet run out of handpainted JOY weft, but it was time to decide if I should switch to a solid color now so I had enough yardage that is clearly different to make a significant part of my garment–like sleeves or front bands.

I spent some time this morning digging through bins stacked pretty high, looking for a bin of tencel. Luckily most of these bins are clear so I can what’s in them. But wouldn’t you know the bins at the bottom of my various stacks are not clear so I had to unload everything to check out what is in those bins at the bottom of each stack. No luck in finding any tencel. I have lots of tencel, but at the moment I have no idea where it is!

So I moved on to looking at color cards for tencel, and found that there is no coral shade that comes even close to what I want. That led me down the rabbit hole of looking through my silk bins and silk color cards. I have the perfect shade of coral that I’d love to use, but not nearly enough of it! So I called Treenway and have placed an order for two 1000-yard skeins of a loely coral color #27. Those skeins will not arrive for almost three weeks. Sigh…Does this happen to you? Please say it does!

Fast forward to the end of the day. I wove another half yard today, in plain weave now, with the handpainted weft. Just moments ago, when I advanced the warp, I saw that I am only about a yard away from the end. That means I will have 5 yards of fabric instead of 6. The mistakes just pile up faster than I can keep track of them! I could swear I made a 7 yard warp and that’s why I ran out of materials. I have no idea what happened last fall, and I don’t know where my notes are! I hope this sounds familiar to you. Now I think I need to call Treenway and cut my order in half!

Luckily there have been some marvelous experiences lately to balance the derangement going on in my weaving. While others are busy heading off to Milwaukee for Convergence, I have gotten to enjoy some inspiring events much closer to home.

First is an exhibit in Providence that will be closing soon. I wish I’d seen it sooner so I could have spread the word earlier. I believe it closes this weekend. There is a small gallery called The Reading Room of the AS220 gallery, on Matthewson St. where Kate Barber has a wonderful exhibit of her recent work, called “Forward Folding.”

This postcard image is a detail of one her works on display, and it is stunning. Her exhibit is in an intimate setting with beautiful lighting. I stayed longer than I would have imagined to view her 22 pieces. There was such zen in the room I could not tear myself away. Kate is doing wonderful things with shibori on the loom which she uses to create crimped cloth. Some of the works are also dyed and embroidered.

There is a wonderful mascot at the gallery who watches for visitors and then greets you at the entrance. I’ve now forgotten her name. She is so calm that I almost mistook her for a ceramic dog!

Across the river, in Old Lyme, my local area weaving guild members are hard at work getting ready for the annual town festival where some of us will demonstrate various textile techniques. The big Clemens loom is ready for demonstrating the weaving of a traditional Canadian rag coverlet bed covering. Jody will the be first weaver, although she needs three helpers to do this. This is her coverlet that will be woven first. It will be 9 ft. wide by 9 ft. long. It’s a big undertaking!

This Saturday, July 30, Jody and her crew will be weaving on this behemoth loom, and others in our guild will be demonstrating various textile techniques. I plan to bring my spinning wheel to spin some lovely tussah silk sliver that a Connecticut woman who calls herself HoneyBuns prepares and dyes. I am spinning a wonderful colorway of rosey coral and gold.

Yesterday Jody and I went to see a wonderful film about an exhibition that is currently traveling through Europe. It was a stunning film and almost made up for the fact that I won’t get to see this exhibition in person. The exhibition is called “Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse,” and the film has the same name. The Royal Academy of Art put this exhibit together. It was quite moving, and I enjoyed sharing it with Jody and two other weavers from my local guild who also attended.

There were scenes of the exhibition itself, including a large room where Monet’s waterlily triptych has been displayed together for the first time ever, since each of the three pieces is owned by different museums. There is current footage of the gardens where each of the artists painted a century ago, and there are wonderful old photographs of the artists. The best image was Renoir’s portrait of Monet in the garden at Giverny, doing a painting of his own. I did not know that this portrait is owned by the Wadsworth Atheneum, so sometime in the future I will be able to view it in person!

Here is a short excerpt from the film:

Here is one more video with the curator discussing Monet’s Agapanthus triptych.

To all of you heading off to Convergence, have a wonderful time! I’ll be thinking of you and what I’m missing. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the down time of being at home in the studio. Maybe I’ll soon get to start the next project I’m dreaming of–I didn’t even tell you what it is!

Past Wedding, Full Forward on Inspiration!

August 11, 2015 | 1 Comment

First a moment of shamless personal happiness: our older son was married over the weekend in Baltimore. It was a glorious event! I enjoyed every detail of it starting with our private time with the almost newly weds when we arrived on Wednesday evening last week, right through to the after-wedding-Sunday-brunch. It was a small wedding, but the honored guests came from as far as San Francisco and Denver and Florida, to as close as right down the street. It was a congregation of close knit friends and relatives. It couldn’t have been better!

We invited our very oldest friends–two couples we’ve known since long before either Rob or Chris were born–Chris and Pat and LeaAnn and Garrett– and a dear friend, Craig, who has been more than an uncle to our boys….and my sister Sheryl and her family–Carl, Madison and Chloe. It was perfect!

Elevator selfies are certainly the rage now!

The wedding party was large for so small a wedding– 6 bride’s maids, 6 groom’s men,
1 groom’s dog, 3 flower girls, and 2 ringbearers. The groom’s dog may have stolen the show. After walking down the aisle with the groom, he then gave the groom a ‘high-5’ moments before the bridesmaids entered.

He lay down peacefully between the bride and groom when the vows began.

When he began to make nesting movements with the bride’s beautiful wedding dress, he made no fuss at being moved in front of the groomsmen. Just look at all those Chuck Taylors!

He got to spend a few moments at the reception before he was sent up to the bridal suite to to relax with a very attentive friend.

Here are more moments from the day… I loved every minutes of it!

Photo ops in the beautiful Hotel Monaco in Baltimore.

The best man and the mother of the groom–moi!

I am shamelessly proud of these two young men–the groom and his best man brother!

The finale of the ceremony!

That wonderful moment for any mother of the groom!

The very best moments of this weekend aren’t documented with photographs. It was spending some wonderful time with both our sons, our new daugher in law, our friends, my sister and her family. It was finding two very sweet handwritten notes from my son thanking us for so much, acknowledging what a wonderful relationship we’ve had over the years behind us and the years to come. This note arrived with a gift just moments before I left our room to go down to the ceremony. It just doesn’t get any better!

With a little help from my friends (there’s always a Beatle theme when our family is together) Bob and I hosted a brunch for the newly weds on Sunday morning at their new house in the suburbs of Baltimore. If not for Pat and Jeremy, and of course Bob, the brunch would not have been nearly as buttoned down as it was! I guess we were way too busy hosting to get any photos.

I am so indebted to our old friends and my sister’s family for making such a long trek to be part of this event. Being with them put the frosting on the cake and the cherry on top!

Now back at home I am relishing the all the memories and enjoying looking through all the candid photos taken by friends. We’ll have the photographer’s images shortly.

I have turned my attentions back to the tapestry presentation I’ll be giving in early September to the weavers’ guild in Rhode Island, to working on what I’ve lovingly called the “Archie Project” for the past ….. years. I refuse to admit how long this project is taking!

Bob and I took inventory of his stash of dowels in the workshop to determine what he might need to buy in order to make a backstrap for loom for me. It looks like we have everything needed! I might be weaving by early next week.

This morning LeaAnn sent me links to a wonderful illustrator and writer who lives in Wales — Jackie Morris. My imagination took off while reading her blog. On Saturday, while we were celebrating a wedding, she wrote this:

The summer is always busy. It’s hard to find the silence required for clear thought. George MacKay Brown talked of writing poetry as ‘the interrogation of silence.’ I know not everyone needs it to work, to think, but I do.
…I become more fascinated by silence as I grow older. But finding silence is different to being silent. When you choose to stop speaking you unnerve people. They fill the silence, the space you leave. They interpret your silence in their own way.

At the end of her post she invited people to comment on how they achieve the silence they need to think and work, or to respond that they do not need to find this silence.

I agree whole heartedly with her description about needing inner silence and attempting to find it. There is no one place where I find mine. Sometimes it is easy to retreat to a wonderful silent place, and sometimes, no matter where I go I cannot get to it. I’m certain it has more to do with the state of my mind than the features or faults of any physical place. It all comes down to me. I just have to learn to be still and let it come.

As a weaver I often find that being at one of my looms is the best place for me to be silent and reap the benefits of where silence can lead. It doesn’t always work, but it is almost foolproof. On a floor loom or at a spinning wheel there is a rhythm of mechanical music that takes me deep into my inner self where there is a vast landscape of something like silence.

In tapestry I almost silently lift each warp thread by hand to create an image, and in that case it is my own deep thinking about the image that draws me away from the world, from any other noise but that deep music inside me. These are the reasons I return to weaving again and again.

After all the busy-ness of this summer–the SSCA extravaganza, visiting friends, the biennial weaving conference, and the wedding–it’s time to find that silence and get some good work done.