Red

The red shed strand has worked wonderfully in the visual sense. The contrast between wood, wool and cotton is visually poetic and satisfying.

But - from a technical point of view it's not doing its job. The shed doesn't shift smoothly and it's not possible to operate the loom as one person alone.

Yet.

I will persevere and work out how to make it behave as I chose!

Time

Sometimes you have to

I do enjoy yogi tea. Most times the tags have a gentle loving message on them, always an added bonus. Not this time! Face it: deadlines are rapidly approaching. Face it: you get out what you put in. Face it: do the hard things before they become impossible.

Red Thread

'All we love deeply becomes part of us.'

This is one of my Red Threads: the interlacing and entwining of the fabric of my jeans with the fabric of my self. Every stitch taken in the darning of my jeans involves the fabric more deeply and irreversibly with the beingness of my self. I am stitching myself a thick skin from the fragile and worn layers of the past darned into a strong fabric with the thread of present strength and determination.

Another of my Red Threads is gradually dancing into place on my loom. It's a painstakingly slow dance of hands, thread and warp. There is a sense of the Weaver becoming the Woven....

Weighting a Warp

For several years I have habitually chucked my coppers into an old vase as I like to be able to close my purse easily and never can be doing with footering about with coppers in a queue at a till. I remembered that if one takes coins to the bank to exchange for notes then both 1p and 2p coins go in one bag and they can tell how much money is in the bag by the weight of it. This means that 12p must weigh the same whatever the mix of 1s and 2s. How useful!

So as it turns out, that stash of coins is perfect for weighting the warp of my loom - 12p per 5 warp threads tied up in a scrap of recycled fabric.

Wonderful how the softly falling yarn becomes a taught and springy surface as the weights go on.



The next step is putting the 'shed' in to allow the weaving to progress a little faster than it might otherwise. I have chosen this red thread to weave the shed from for two reasons.

Firstly Red Thread has come to have a deep significance in my work;  it stands as a metaphor for finding one's way through the creative maze, for the concept of 'a common thread' and for all the connections of text and textile through language and myth and story. I reached for the spool of red almost instinctively. The other thread I had to hand in my studio was an indigo blue and there was just no contest.

Of secondary importance to the symbolism of the Red Thread is the aesthetics of the colours; red felt like it belonged with the white-blond wood and the dark brown yarn. Second reason, yes, but also very important to me as I am very visually sensitive.

Gathering pace

Warp weighted loom

I am moving! The hours and hours of spinning have gathered my thoughts into a strong thread that I can trace out in my studio practice. I want to weave a length of fabric with text in it I think... Text in Textile. Both words share the root Texere: to weave.

I have chosen to build a primitive loom to work on as it feels right with my primitive hand-spun thread.

I gathered the uprights from the huge driftwood piles down by the Findhorn river as I don't want to cut down living trees unnecessarily. The horizontal pieces were coppiced ash and hazel from my garden.

There was a deep resonance to the act of hunting for just the right pieces of wood with forks just so, cutting them to size and carrying them home balanced on my shoulders. Another layer of linkage with our distant ancestors who made every inch of their clothing from scratch. It deepens my understanding of the intrinsic value of fabric.