﻿- What I'm doing is really the final bit of a warp, even though these yarns, which are silk
ribbons and chenilles, even though they have color, that's my starting point. And what I'll
do is take out some of this color, add some other color in the dye pot. It's one of the many things
I can do as a hand weaver to make my cloth as different as possible. This is the beginning
of the process, but all of this is a 17-yard warp that will go right into the dye pot. I can buy a
really great yarn in the most god-awful color you ever saw. And I can take color out in places and
I can add it in other places in the dye pot. I'm moving one skein from here over to here,
and this can go a little in here, and this can go over to this pot. These are our warp skeins
that I dyed earlier this morning, and I got really excited as I took them out of the dye pots and saw
what the color remover had done, over-color, and how the warms were shifting into the cools and how
there was a little bit of surprise all the way along each thread. I came here just on a leave
of absence from teaching. And I realized halfway through that winter that I wasn't going to go back
because my work did change. Instead of being paid to talk all the time, I was paying myself to shut
up and be productive. I am taking the warp that I wound, and that I dyed, and I am now tying it one
thread at the time to the preexisting threading in this loom. This loom has a memory, a lot like
a computer, and it's all set up with a structure. This is the architecture of the cloth. I don't
count, I can't measure, but I can tie threads faster than anybody I know. And simply lifting one
of these frames, I'm able to bring up different threads in different combinations to create this
kind of shawl, which is called a quill damask. I'm taking a thick bright thread, and I'm tying
it on to a dark thread. Having done a dark warp, I gotta do something brighter. Much of the designing
happens as I tie these threads individually onto the knots that are here. And now those knots have
been pulled through. This is actually the thread that I was winding on the warping board. It's that
chenille and silk ribbon, and it's bright, it's light. It's a lot of texture, and it's in there
to really provide the foreground. So when this warp goes on, I will have done my job,
and whoever says I don't do any weaving doesn't think of setup, which is at least 50% of the work
as weaving, and I think that weaving is a whole lot more than throwing a shuttle. So, This is
what I, it's where I get to say my piece. - Randy dyes the beautiful silks and dresses
the looms, and that's when I come in and take them home to my studio space and work on them
there and then, you know, shuttle back and forth between his house and mine. Randy's really the
master of the warp, this element here, and I'm using the weft and with the little boat shuttle,
that's the horizontal element. He pretty much leaves it up to me as far as the colors and you
know, how they interplay with what he has done, using my feet to raise and lower the harnesses,
which create the pattern. So I'm twisting the fringes, I'm taking a small group of
the threads and twisting them to the right and taking another equal group and twist it to the
right. And then I put the two together and twist them to the left. So that's really how rope is
plied. And that creates a nice little finish on the scarves and the shawls. I think Brian's input
is probably the final word before each piece goes to a show or to a customer as far as critiquing
and the color and the presentation of it. - We met at a 12-step meeting. And it was a
time in both of our lives where big changes were happening.
- Mid-eighties - Mid-eighties. When I first set up
the booth with Randy in Baltimore, I looked over and I said, wow, this is beautiful. You've made
a beautiful fortress. And he said, what? I said, how can people get in here to see the work? I said
we have to move this around. And he looked at me like, wow, what an unusual concept.
- Where am I going to hide? - Where am I going to hide?
- We got married the minute we could, which in Massachusetts was May of 2004. So it's
been awhile and we're really not celebrating until everybody else gets that chance. It's,
it's coming slowly. And, but I never thought it would come in my lifetime.
- Do you remember this series? - Deconstructed.
- Deconstructed. So it was actually weaving a double weave in,
this is a wool and silk from JaggerSpun. - I went into Randy's studio, and when he tried
on a new weave structure, what he would do is weave off about a foot or a yard just to test the
coloration for that weave structure. Basically, it was an anthology of what he's been doing for
35 years. And so that was my original idea was to do a quilt which really covered a complete career.
This is a piece probably from the eighties. And this is a piece that was finished probably two
months ago. I love the fact that we still have a turquoise kind of blending in with that. When
I lay it out like this, I can see kind of where I started. We have a piece 35 years old, one of
the earlier pieces, and I'm really going to build around that. So Randy just dyed this silk for me,
this will be the backing of the quilt. So I know what my backing is already gonna look like. I try
and balance it out. If it pleases me, I go with it. I'll actually put a whole section together,
look at it and say, you know what? It's not working. I'll take it apart, reconfigure it
until I get it. And then that's it. I leave it. - I use color because it's just around me so much
and I drink it in. I don't think about it. It just kind of, it's the easiest part of the process for
me. It's not the struggle. It's the, all of the other things that I get tangled up in,
but never color. Color is the first thing you see. And it's the last thing you think about before you
adopt this piece into your life. My overused phrase is, "Why use five colors when fifty
will do nicely?" This one was woven and washed, and it looked a little plaid, a little boring,
a little high contrast. So I took color out, added other colors in. And what I got was exciting
because all of a sudden, all of the blacks which ran throughout the piece just appear sporadically,
and there are hills and valleys, and this whole series of cloth is inspired by Ireland and the
hills and valleys and the barks and the mosses and everything is soft because it's always about
terrain in Ireland. I think it's important to understand that process is a means to a way to
discover what's most important in the end product and how can you adapt the process to really
reflect your own point of view and your own unique personality. So I'm always looking at each step of
the process as a way to answer the question, why would I bother going through these extra steps?
Whether it's tying it on, whether it's winding the warp on, whether it's choosing the wefts,
whether it's throwing the shuttle, and they're answers that only human beings can discover in
the act of doing it. Hand weavers tend to be looked upon as dinosaurs who are doing something
that really doesn't need to be done. Why would you bother? And I think that we have something
to offer the world that is best expressed through interlacing threads. This is not busy work. This
is not happy hands and happy faces. This is very essential stuff. I'm a hermit, you know,
I like to hide in the studio and play with yarns and colors all day long. But going to a show,
I can kind of put on enough armor to get through it, but Brian is there as the front man. And he's,
my job is to really stand back and look artistic and let him do his magic, but there's a lot more
work to be done. Let's keep at it. - Challenge.