A summer to remember?

Though there is still some nectar in the feeder, I believe the hummers are gone for the season.

monarch work

The monarchs have departed, after eating well this year. As far as I’ve seen, the milkweed grew well, too, and I look forward to gathering it with my papemaking class. I have seven intrepid papermakers, a good number for the autumn.

the bucks

I’ve spotted these two out the big window several times, here enjoying the new growth after a week-ago-or-so mowing. Can you just see their oddball antlers? Up and a tiny spread at the top. One is dark already, preparing for winter.

Haystack stitchers pick up crayons, paper, instead of cloth, thread.

My week as Christine Mauersberger’s TA was busy and beautiful, and the 14 students really got into all the learning experiences Christine presented. This one was one of those spontaneous, serendipitous things. The women are making a 4 x 8 foot rubbing from the FabLab’s discard, reusing something before it gets it’s next reuse. This rubbing is, in fact, a map of Haystack FabLab projects. We made two rubbings from the router-etched plywood tabletop, one became a large meander book. I love that Christine visited the Lab with an idea of what could be made there, and returned with this idea. The staff hauled the board to the fibers studio, so we made a second rubbing. All. Those. Marks. so like stitches. Christine leaves room in her teaching for magic like this to happen, and guides her students, teaching the experience of leap-taking, risk-taking, straying from the path for the experience of making something new and beautiful, opening minds. I loved how this supported her class. I also loved my “slide show” (the oldest TA by maybe 30 years!), in which I handled paper, sent it around the audience, and spun kami-ito with a tiny Jenkins spindle…spinning paper for the ‘masses’!

mud shoes

I spent quiet time in Haystack’s library, finding a wonderful book that had, among other amazing and incredibly racist writing, this wonderful drawing. Mud shoes. Very like bear paw showshoes, only, er, not. Needs must, ordinary excellence, and appropriate technology.

Visiting Maine in August was very good, spending time with Hannah and Tyler, eating LOTS of fresh fish (the lobster/corn on the cob supper on the rocks at Haystack with Christine and Kate remains a highlight), and that LONG drive shook me out of my summer post-move chaos and doldrums. Now I’m back, it’s September, I have a lovely papermaking class of seven (my favorite number) and my first student absence is because that student is showing a Jersey cow at a huge regional fair; how cool is that?! We have had Peace Papermakers here starting the year and will move into making paper from wild and garden plants foraged at the Sustainability Program Farm and haul the pulp back to the studio to make paper using, ta da!, the new drying system!

Oh, and that book above? The library card in the back was signed out to Hisako Sekijima. A rock star.

connecting threads: fiber

the gifts of gift multiply, sometimes.

fibers doing their work

Opportunity sometimes presents and is missed, at least that was the case with me. A couple years ago I was out in Victoria BC teaching at ANWG and in the Seattle/Tacoma area. I heard about an amazing exhibit of tapestries and tapestry book(s) by someone, whose name (I am daft at remembering names) went forgotten. Sometime later that year someone insisted I check out that weaver’s website, A Field Guide to Needlework, and there I met an extraordinary body of fiber work, sometimes written/drawn as comic. There she was: Sarah Swett, that same weaver, and I began to read her most recent, and then the older blog entries. How I wish I had pursued seeing that exhibition, but at least I had now found her words and pictures.

paper and weave

Sarah weaves stunning tapestries; strong design and color, rule bending and adventurous, full of life. One thing she wants to do is get tapestries off the wall and into the dimensional world. When I began reading she was writing about weaving on a homemade backstrap loom and weaving small tapestries (along with spinning, dyeing, knitting, drawing and other making). Her tapestry work that I found there refreshed and marveled me (to marvel, verb). It was climbing off the wall, into her pockets and back out as a woven novel written on store receipts…woven books in many ways.

housebook

I thought I should let her know how much I liked what I saw and read. And so began an occasional email correspondence. About then Sarah was weaving miniature tapestries with four selvages, something I’m interested in. I’ve been making small cloths, in my case for the shifu books, with no fringe or knots. She named it fringeless, I couldn’t agree more with that. (Fringe certainly has its place, just not in my book pages.)

rule breaking: plastic…

also: snow on the roof….

I used to make miniature tapestries, began that work when my first child was born. I could then at least finish something and I could sit on the floor with him. Perhaps the repetition of thread through shed, of fork beating down the weft helped soothe him. I wove on small frames, on books, making dozens of them over the next several years, and never solved the problem of the ends: knotted, needle woven into the web, braided, what to do with them? When I decided to make shifu book pages I needed a better solution, dismissing a Navajo supported warp as too difficult for a paper warp and weft. I just built a stump loom with a chunk of 4 x 4 from the paper mill and some brads and began weaving discrete single pages. I built a more than four selvedge stump loom, too, for complex book structures. Imagine my excitement when small, fringeless tapestries appeared on the Field Guide. She had solved that problem brilliantly!

connecting thread

I’m always making paper to make books or other stuff with. These little papers are business card size, and I have two sweet moulds to make then with. I sent a small stack to Sarah, who promptly wove covers and bound them together into her kind of book. There is kami-ito in the cover tapestries…and a bit other handspuns. Pages are flax with indigo, white abaca, orange cotton and linen off-cuts, red cotton rag from a friend’s shirt, pigmented flax, heavy flax, and gray cotton off-cuts. They’re housed in a house (hoose?) in the Palouse, sewn and strung together with a string and a prayer, of sorts. It’s a happy little book.

Palouse hoose book (My son Ian calls his house drawings Hoosies, so I’m borrowing that word.)

Such a nifty visit and a beautiful trip through Palouse country, I’d driven over to Moscow to meet Sarah. We talked and talked and I rediscovered I can enjoy floor sitting despite my ouchy knees. Sarah took me to a nifty restaurant and we had delicious lunch, pizza and soup, talked more, returned, and her husband sent me away with a new and delicious pickle he’d just made. After driving back to Colfax, I met up with my workshop fellows and Tim and Ann for Mexican supper before the workshop.

*Do search for A Field Guide to Needlework (you can follow the link above) and enjoy Sarah’s weaving and writing and all the rest. You will also then understand that connecting thread.