Many Moons

Can you believe that it has been twenty years since we were finishing up the first year of this millennium? At that time I was marking the end of my first year of living in my house in Santa Fe and a whole new life here. And I was also finishing up a special weaving that was about to lead into yet another one that led me down a path that I couldn’t have predicted.

I had worked for a number of years with the gorgeous space-dyed silks that my friend, and master dyer, D’Elin created. She asked me to weave a small doubleweave hanging for her using one of the palettes of her yarns. In order to fit the full range of colors in the skein’s repeat I laid out the warp threads so that they fell on a diagonal line.

I always plan out my wallpieces in complete detail on graph paper ahead of time, but for some reason I just jumped in, wound the warp, and set it up my loom without knowing what it would become. When I saw the colors on the loom set against a background layer of black perle cotton the image of a moon calendar came to my mind.

The next day I was in town for an acupuncture appointment, and when I walked into the office I noticed a moon calendar on the wall. I asked the receptionist if I could make a copy of it, and she said, “Oh, I’ve got an extra one. Here - you can have it.” When I got home and put the calendar next to the warp they were in perfect alignment - probably better than if I had planned it intentionally.

This was the year 2000, a leap year with 366 days and moons. The thought of graphing out all of those moons was rather overwhelming, so I took a different approach. I found a website that had photographic images of each of the monthly moon phases, and I used that to map the phases onto graph paper. Then I made multiple photocopies of the graphed moon phases, cut them apart into little squares, and assigned a number to each phase, giving me stacks of a dozen little graphed designs for each moon phase.

I built a ledge that sat at eye level above the warp on my loom. I wove the piece in a vertical orientation so that there were twelve moons in each horizontal row of the weaving. I could then go to my stacks of graphed phases, pick out the ones that I needed for a particular row of moons, and set them up on the ledge to follow as I counted the threads for the pickup design. When I finished that row of moons I would take down those graphed phases and go get the ones I needed for the next row. I tied marker threads around dents in my reed to show where each moon in the row started and ended so that I only had to count within each of those areas, rather than having to count across all the black background warp threads.

My black warp was 5/2 perle cotton and the space-dyed silk warp was a comparable size, each layer set at 16 ends per inch. When I tested out weaving a row of moons using black 5/2 cotton as my weft I got very tall oblongs because of all the layer exchange from the extensive pickup. I tried again using 10/2 as the weft and got less tall oblongs. Using 20/2 as the weft gave me almost round moons, but still a little too tall. I finally tried using black silk sewing thread and got pretty perfectly round moons. This wasn’t nearly as difficult as it might sound because I still only had to weave the same number of weft picks as if I had used a thicker weft, and I could just pop spools of the sewing thread into my shuttle instead of winding bobbins. And it also meant that the weft was nearly invisible, leaving the spaced-dyed silk to show in its purity.

The weaving progressed slowly, of course, with thread-by-thread counting in each row, but there was a lovely meditative quality to the process. Once I started weaving I realized that the full moons fell right through the center of the year in the diagonal pattern, creating an organic rotational symmetry. One night when I woke up at 2 am and couldn’t fall back asleep I decided that I might as well go into my studio and do some weaving. At one point as I was working on a row of pickup I looked up and noticed that the full moon was shining through the window. It turned out to be the same full moon that I was weaving at that moment, October 13th.

'2000 Moons'

At the time I only intended to weave this one piece, which ended up measuring 32.5” x 15”. But once I had shipped it off to its new owner I kept having the feeling that I wasn’t done with it yet. I felt like I wanted it to be bigger, like the size of a human being, about three feet by six feet. I knew that if I were to do that it would be a big undertaking, so I mulled over the idea for awhile.

One day while I was winding fringe on another piece I heard a voice in my head say, “We all look up at the same moon.” I really liked the sound of that so I wrote it down. Something prompted me to count the number of letters and spaces in that sentence, which came to 31, the same as the maximum number of days in a month. I knew then that I would weave those words into the new weaving, going up one side and down the other.

I graphed out the letters that I needed for that sentence and had them oriented sideways, as they would be woven, one for each day of the month. The pickup process worked the same way as it did for the moons, counting out thread-by-thread following the squares on the graph paper.

Laying out the space-dyed silk on the diagonal was a bigger undertaking than it had been for the smaller weaving. The warp was 36” wide and 3 yards long. My dining room table would exactly fit the width of the warp, and if I extended the table to its full length I could fit most of the length of the warp, with just a foot or so hanging off each end. I rigged up a holder for my reed at one end of the table and laid down a yardstick at the other end with double-sided tape laid over it. I placed a sheet of paper on the table that had the diagonal line I wanted drawn on it, and used that to place the colors of warp as I wanted. Laying out and positioning each of the 576 ends of the colored warp tied up my dining room table for several weeks, but got the job done.

Another unexpected surprise was that as I wove this piece I found that the two O’s in the word ‘look’ aligned perfectly with the full moons, which also lined up with the brightest colors in the warp. The entire project from start to finish took almost exactly the entire year of 2001.

'We All Look Up'           (dark side of the moon)

During that year the events of September 11 occurred, and life changed in ways that we never imagined, and that still impact our lives. It saddened me to see how much suspicion and fear that created towards people who might look different or come from different backgrounds. “We all look up at the same moon” became my mantra during those months as I finished the weaving. At night I would go outside and look up at the moon and think about how people all over the world were seeing the same thing when they looked up at the sky at night.

I think about that again now, during this year of upheaval. Life has changed again in ways that we never imagined, and we’ve seen divisiveness that has shaken the roots of our society. My hope is that, as we go forward into the coming year, we can recognize that we are all a part of this world and that we all deserve dignity and respect.

When looking at the sky at night
We’re guided by an orb so bright
Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jew
You see the same one that I do
Let’s live in peace and do it soon -
We all look up at the same moon