Warping and Wefting

Another one of the arts that we were taught at GG was the art of weaving. At GG they just built a new Fiber Arts building and it houses over 12 looms. Liz is Rich's wife and the co-founder of Grunewald and she was the person who taught us how to weave.

We started off by learning how to dress the looms, that means how to figure out the measurements and products of the piece that we were going to weave and then getting the loom set up and ready to use. This process is way more difficult than one might imagine and can take a few days some times. But we were entirely too eager to let that happen so we did everything that first day. Liz had us use chenile for all of our projects as it has the best lay (meaning it looks good on anyone-ha!). We made a scarf for our first project. We used some sweet yarn for our warp (the threads that lie lengthwise) and then experimented with different colors for our weft (the threads that lie width-wise). Weaving comes with it's own language and we're still arguing as to what terms we have right and which ones we just made up out of thin air.

Liz is a wonderful and patient teacher as well. She is very knowledgeable when it comes to what will work and look nice and what won't and can always figure out where we've gone wrong or why we're stuck. We've been able to spend hours in the studio with her and her dogs, a crackling fire and yarn in all the colors of the rainbow to experiment with. Erica, another staff person and a woman from a nearby town are also weaving this winter and it's neat to see their projects turn out as they complete them. Weaving can be a noisy practice with the banging of the looms, but we've managed to tell stories and generally have a good time after we get a rhythm going.

Scarves completed we move on to making our stoles. Picking out colors to match the liturgical seasons has been wicked difficult for me so i'm making a white stole. This will be something that I can use outside of the worship of a particular parish; baptisms, weddings, dedications....an all-around stole if you please. Justin's gone a little mad if you ask me...he's eager to put this time and equipment to use and he's making a green, blue and a red stole. Ok, to be fair he's only started the red one and will finish it in Chicago...but still.... At least his zealousness gave me time to get a few pictures of the process...