Loom with a View

It was the summer of 1990. My former husband and I had been living in Santa Barbara, California for the past eight years. He started out going to the university to work on a master’s degree, and ended up working there in the Physics department. I worked at an assortment of jobs during those years, but also worked on honing my weaving skills while participating in various shows and galleries.

In many ways it was an idyllic life, spending many Sunday afternoons on the beach in a nearly perfect climate. My first weaving guild was there, and I had a supportive network of weavers and other artists. I acquired my first loom of my own - a secondhand 70’s-era 8-shaft Gilmore floor loom that I have to this day.

But as hard as we worked, the real estate market grew faster than our bank account did, and we felt that we would never be able to afford living in anything better than our rental, which was a 600-square foot knotty pine cottage that had been built for migrant fruit pickers in the 1940’s. So we started looking around and found ourselves being drawn back to Oregon, where we had met in college.

Friends of ours had bought 55 acres of land outside what could barely be called the town of Wren, which was outside the very small town of Philomath, which was outside the larger town of Corvallis. They had started a farming business growing gourmet salad greens and were beginning to build a straw bale house. We visited them for a few days and learned that an adjoining 40 acres was for sale at the price of a garden shed in Santa Barbara. So we jumped on it, with dreams of clearing some space and building our own house.

But first we needed something to live in. It was summer and we were young and idealistic. We bought a 12-foot round yurt and set up camp. In case this sounds like we were roughing it, we had as many rooms as the cottage in California had. We had a kitchen complete with Coleman stove and ice chest that got filled with ice that I lugged in every day -

We had a bedroom and living room -

We had a bathroom, including a solar shower and the Mary’s River down the hill to bathe in -

And of course, I had to have a weaving studio. There was a nice open field on a hill with views of the the pine forest and the mountains in the distance. Just in case there might be rain, I laid out a tarp underneath my loom and covered it up with another tarp every night. I had some orders to fill of scarves for a catalog I was working with and set to work weaving them.

Sounds lovely, doesn’t it? What I found was that the breeze blowing through the trees blew my weft around as I tried to throw my shuttle, slowing down the process considerably. Also that bees were curious about what I was doing and liked to buzz around my hands as I worked, which made me a bit nervous, being allergic to bee stings.

Normally August could be counted on to be a dry month, but one night we huddled in our yurt as a torrential rain came down. The next morning I pulled back the tarp that was covering my loom and found that the tarp underneath had acted as a reservoir for the rain water and was filled with close to two inches of water. To this day my Gilmore loom proudly bears the scars from that night.

That summer I learned that I didn’t quite have the makings of the pioneer woman of my imagination. I also realized that I was going to be starting graduate school in the fall and that the days would be growing shorter and colder. We ended up buying our first little starter house in the slightly larger town of Philomath, and ultimately giving up on the idea of building a house out on ‘the land’. But it was an experience that I’ll always remember, that I’m glad that I did while I was young, and that I’m glad that I shouldn’t ever have to do again.