A Souper Breakfast
I enjoy baking and cooking in general, but two of my favorite things to make are pies (Pie are Round, July 30, 2020) and pots of soup. I have my favorite soup recipes that are in my regular rotation, but I also love just throwing whatever I feel like into a big pot and letting it evolve over a few days - adding last nights leftovers and odds and ends that need to be used…
A New Lease on Life
One of the things that I love about traveling to teach workshops is seeing how other weavers around the country have set up their studios and made adaptations to their looms and the way that they warp them. I’ve learned so many useful things that I’ve incorporated into my own studio and practices that I might not have come across otherwise. I thought that I would share with you something that I’ve come up with…
Going Totally Tubular
What is it that compels me to start a new weaving project? Sometimes it is because there is something specific that I want to make for a specific reason. Sometimes I want to weave samples to illustrate a concept that I will be teaching about in a workshop. Sometimes just looking at all the colors of yarn in my studio makes me want to do something fun with them. And sometimes an idea enters my…
Weaving with Lunatics
I have a thing about complete sets of materials, especially when they involve color. I have sets of colored pencils and pastels that I’ve never even used because I want them to be perfect in their entirety. Back in the 80’s I worked at a weaving shop in Portland, Oregon. I would spend hours arranging new yarns that came in according to color on the shelves, and then I wouldn’t want anyone to buy them…
Weaving a Good Fold
As a teacher of doubleweave, what I get asked about more than anything else is how to weave a good fold. There are countless techniques in doubleweave and many reasons for using them, but easily the most common and functional reason is to be able to weave fabrics that are wider than the loom available. It takes two shafts to weave a layer of plain weave, so it takes four shafts to weave a doublewidth…
Postcards from the Edge
It all started in 1977. My best friend Nancy and I were knocking around downtown Portland, Oregon, where we attended college, and we wandered into the Greyhound bus depot, as one might do in those days. There was a rack of postcards, and I pulled out a 3-D postcard of The Last Supper. It became the first of a collection that has spanned four-plus decades and most of the continents. I don’t collect just any…
Five Texans and a Stowaway...
Six months ago I returned from my last teaching trip to find the world a very different place. At the time it sounded like my April and May workshops might be shut down, but I was hoping to be back on the road teaching by summer. Now we know that everything has been cancelled or postponed for the remainder of the year, and likely for well beyond that. Like many of you, I would guess,…
105 Tones of Grey
In my last blog post, 90 Shades of Grey, I talked about a warp that I put on my loom in a rotation of six neutral values from white through grays to black. Since I still had a couple yards of warp left on my loom after completing a sampler using all of the neutrals in the weft, I thought about what else might be interesting to try out on the remainder of the warp.…
90 Shades of Grey
Most of the weaving that I’ve done over the past several years has focused on exploring color rotations in doubleweave in a system that I call Double Rainbow. I've worked with color wheel hues in saturated colors, tints, tones and shades. I’ve expanded the traditional color wheel to work with up to twenty colors in one piece and I’ve created designs with up to eight blocks of doubleweave. I’ve experimented with different weights of yarns…
Pie are Round
In the summer of 1990 my former husband and I moved from southern California to a little town outside Corvallis, Oregon called Philomath (which means ‘lover of learning, especially a student of mathematics’). We bought our first house there, a sweet little 1940’s bungalow that had a concord grape arbor that spanned about 16 feet across the back of the house. It grew so prolifically that if I didn’t prune it back assertively every week…