Nationally, people have known me for my teaching and instructional books about the art and techniques of weaving for 35 years. Few people knew that I was creating art pieces during this long period of time. Now I fee it is time to share my work with art lovers.
I have been interested lately in weaving sheer cloth. When I went to Japan in 2013, I wanted to make something that would show how sheer I could weave cloth. That is how I got the idea of weaving my bookmarks. I enclosed them in a package because I knew that the wrapping of gifts is very important to the Japanese. I received a lot of very good feedback.
In Japan, I fell in love with a book that had gorgeous holes in the pages where bookworms had eaten the paper. I treasure that book today. I brought home other books with interesting calligraphy that I thought I might use somehow with my weaving. It was a long time before I realized that my bookmarks would be perfect with their pages. Some of the pages are poetry and some are practice pages for brushwork for calligraphy.
I love old textiles for the home, too, and grew up with rag rugs in my mother’s home. When I saw these rag balls in an antique store on Bleeker Street in New York, I was completely smitten and had to have them. I can image the woman who carefully cut the strips and hand stitched the lengths together and them wound these tight balls. All this was in preparation for weaving a rag rug.
I hesitated to unwind the balls to weave a whole rug, but wove these small pieces. I loved handling the “rags” of old, vintage cloth. I added my personal touch by weaving in horse hair, a material I have been using in recent work.
[click first photo to enlarge]
I am exhausted: full to the brim with information from the lectures and many textile people. It is really something to be around a few hundred people all interested in textiles and probably most of them experts in one aspect or another.
