Quote of the day

One of my plaited baskets woven from strips of folded wall paper. My materials, free BTW, are from a wallpaper sample book. Just ask your local decorating store for their outdated sample books. They will welcome your request.

Quote of the day.

"Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little."
--The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

Writers Wanted

Look for this project in the upcoming issue of Spin-Off magazine as part of their handspun feature of my Spaced Out and Felted Scarf in our Winter 2008 Schacht On-Line Newsletter and subsequent interpretation in a handspun yarn on Ravelry. The yarn was spun in an evening with my office mates: Gail Matthews, Stephanie Flynn-Sokolov, and Melissa Ludden. Warping took about an hour and weaving two evenings after work.

I hereby kindly and respectfully request that you work at getting published. We are in a terrible weaving book drought and we need books (but also magazine articles, too). We need project books that inspire. A book might be focused on a technique, for example, but be illustrated with projects. Think of a book on lace knitting when you think of a book on lace weaving.

Writing a book can be intense and stressful: The deadline is looming. From my personal experience, though, it is highly rewarding. Not from fame and fortune (don’t expect it), but from the joy and challenge that comes from discovery, pushing your designing and writing skills, as well as the other opportunities writing a book affords you: teaching, travel, TV, other articles. Like it or not, being a book author gives what you do an added legitimacy.

If you’ve never designed or written for publication, I suggest that you first try writing some magazine articles. This way you’ll understand how to design and write for an audience, what its like to work with an editor, and how it feels to see your work in print.

Before beginning, it is wise to study the magazine you want your work to appear in, as well as get a copy of their writer’s guidelines and what they pay. A good way to test the waters is to look for a call for submissions, a special contest, gallery to which you might contribute for practice.

Where to submit? For weaving projects with instructions, the choices in the US are almost exclusively Handwoven and the new on-line magazine, Weavezine. I love the Swedish magazine Vav, but you’ll need to be sure your designs have a Scandinavian aesthetic. I encourage you to reach out to non-weaving venues and submit simple projects. The recent Craft magazine is a case in point, but also what about Better Homes and Gardens, Martha Stewart, and Living Craft? Like seeing knitting everywhere, that’s where I want to see weaving go…

Pattern #2 Waffle Weave

Pattern #2 Waffle Weave. 3/2 pearl cotton at 12 ends per inch.

This pattern uses a pick-up stick to weave warp and weft floats to create the pattern. To use a pick-up stick, place the heddle in the down position. Behind the heddles, pick up raised warps. For this pattern pick up 2 up and 2 down. Slide the pick up stick to the back of the loom until you need it.

Weave pattern:

1. Up
2. Pick-up stick (bring forward behind heddle and turn on edge)
3. Up
4. Pick-up stick
5. Up
6. Down
7. Up and pattern stick (place heddle in up position and slide stick up to heddle but do not turn it on edge)
8. Down
9. Up and pattern stick
10. Down

Draft:

					4		4						4		4						O			O
				3		3		3						3		3							O
2		2							2		2						2		2		O
	1		1							1		1						1		1		O	O
Note: Shaded area is end.																					/
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The Tipping Point

My second weaving, woven at the home ec school in Iceland where I first saw a loom and knew weaving was something I must do. You could say it changed my life.

“In sociology, a tipping point or angle of repose is the event of a previously rare phenomenon becoming rapidly and dramatically more common. The phrase was coined in its sociological use by Morton Grodzins, by analogy with the fact in physics that when a small amount of weight is added to a balanced object, it can cause it to suddenly and completely topple.”
--Wikipedia

A few years ago this idea was applied to daily life in Malcolm Gladwells’ book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little Brown 2000). In it Gladwell argues that there is a point in time when there is a critical mass for change and when that happens it is unstoppable. He describes it as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.”

One wonders if the yarn industry credits the rise in popularity of knitting to the tipping point. It seemed that almost overnight every young woman had a pair of knitting needles in her hands. Knitting, obscure only a few years ago, is now part of the lexicon: “stitch and bitch”, “stitch and pitch”, knit nights, knit outs, knitting at the symphony, books and books and books about knitting. Certainly knitting had truly arrived, I mused, when shopping for a birthday card I found that right next to the funny cards about golfers were humorous cards about knitters.

Knitting has done more than start needles clicking, it has brought a whole new group of crafters into the fold. Some will continue to knit to their hearts content, others have begun to explore different crafts. This is what I think I’m seeing happening right now with weaving. I’m not saying it’s anything close to the weaving mania of the 70’s, but every day I sense that there is a movement in this direction. Of course, being the weaving enthusiast that I am, I’m waiting and hoping for the tipping point.