I grew up taking piano lessons starting at the age of six. I was pretty diligent about practicing my mandated half hour a day whether I wanted to or not, and kept this up long enough to be able to play Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata in my early teens. In high school I rebelled for a couple years, but started playing again when I wanted to play contemporary music from the likes of the Beatles and Carole King.

Last month I went on a truly wonderful textile tour through Bolivia that was sponsored by Andean Textile Arts. I had been scheduled to go on this trip in 2020, which was, of course, cancelled due to covid, and again in 2023, but a scheduling conflict kept me from joining. The third time was a charm - it couldn’t have been better, and I felt that it was worth the wait.

Fairly early on as a new weaver, I learned that if you are creating a warp that has two colors alternating with each other, it is far easier and faster to wind with two strands of yarn in your hand than one at a time, cutting off and retying after each one. Once you get used to it, the process becomes so automatic that it’s almost harder to go back to winding with a single strand. In fact, if I am winding a single-color warp I will nearly always use two identical cones of yarn and wind with two strands together.

In my last blog post I shared our experiences on a recent tour of the Nile Valley of the textiles from ancient Egypt as brought to life by the stories told to us by Nancy Arthur Hoskins. On this tour we also visited several contemporary practitioners of textile arts that are being kept alive today, and these were as wonderful to see as the ancient sites.

Returning to Egypt 45 years after my last time there was an eye-opening experience of how much growth has taken place and how much has changed. But at the same time, there are places there that are seemingly eternal, and I also found a spirit in the people and in the land that felt to me like coming home again.

I’ve recently taught workshops at three of the regional weaving conferences this past summer, all of which were wonderful experiences with great students. A whole variety of looms show up at workshops in different makes, different sizes, and in a range from small table top looms to table looms on stands, to all types and sizes of floor looms.

My sister Patty and I had been waiting for several years to have an opportunity to take an overseas trip together and this year we blocked out the month of May, which would also happen to coincide with one of her milestone birthdays. Over the course of six months we booked our plane tickets and places to stay, much of it done while talking on the phone together and looking at websites on our computer screens.

Over the past few months, in the course of reading articles and blogs and watching videos by various weaving instructors, I’ve come across different approaches people take to working with and threading heddles. So I thought I may as well share some of my own approaches and habits that I’ve developed over the years.

Like many people, I would guess, I grew up with a fascination about ancient Egypt. It probably pulled on my imagination more than any other country in the world. So it was very exciting when my father, a management consultant in Chicago, was put on a project to be in charge of a study of the water and sewage systems in Cairo.

Perhaps one of the most significant things that we can do with our skills, knowledge, materials, and tools, is to pass them on to the younger generations. So many textile techniques are in danger of being lost as we move forward in this world, and it can take only one generation of disuse for knowledge to become lost.