Two months and counting

Two months and counting, plus notes from Midwest Weavers Conference

Today marks two months until the due date for the I Made It on My Schacht Contest. I’ve been hearing from all over that people are excited about our contest and are working away on their entries. This is the time to focus on completing your projects and entering our contest. It’s easy to do. Just visit our web site at www.schachtspindle.com and click on the contest for entry details! Also, don’t forget the You Tube challenge!

We have fabulous prizes, including a cherry Wolf Pup and a Cherry double Treadle Matchless. The show opens during spinning and weaving week, the first full week in October. We’ll have a 40th anniversary celebration and show opening on Thursday, October 8th. So get your wheels and looms going. There’s no time to waste.

Midwest Report
This year’s conference was held on the beautiful Grinnell College campus in Grinnell, Iowa with about 300 attendees. I had fabulous students in both my rigid heddle patterns and textures class and my beginning inkle weaving workshop. Madelyn VanderHoogt, editor of Handwoven magazine, presented the keynote address which was both entertaining and informative.

A reoccurring message throughout the conference was urging guilds to reach out to younger crafters to encourage them in weaving and spinning, as well as to join their guild. Guilds, generally, are aging, and without new members and younger weavers and spinners, it won’t be too long before membership will dwindle and with it our weaving and spinning traditions.

Off to Midwest Weavers Conference

Tomorrow I’m off to Grinnell, Iowa and Midwest Weavers Conference where I’ll be teaching inkle weaving and patterns and textures on the rigid heddle loom. I always feel like I’m “going home” when I return to the Midwest. I’ll give you a report upon my return. If you will be attending, I hope you’ll track me down and say hello.

Midwest Weavers Conference Report - Roots 2007

As a Nebraska girl, it DID feel like I was returning to my roots when I traveled with colleague Betsy Blumenthal to Blair, Nebraska (just north of Omaha) for Midwest Weavers Conference, Roots 2007. The setting of Dana College was beautiful and just down the hill from the Black Elk-Neihardt Park (a city park that is part of the Nebraska state arboretum) where I walked several early mornings to a cacophony of bird song, swaying grasses, and sparkling spiderweb “flags” dotting the landscape.

The gathering of 250 was enthusiastic and energetic, as well as cheerfully helpful. I was impressed with my students’ eagerness to learn new techniques. These weavers were definitely lifelong learners, and it gave me pause to assess my own determination and desires to continue to learn.

Me (standing in back) with some of my great inkle weaving students.

The classes I taught were Inkle Weaving, Do It (how to get done what you want to get done), and Weaving to Go (easy projects to take with you gleaned from my book Time to Weave). I was fortunate to have some really great folk in my classes, and even made the acquaintance of Mary Lou Sherrerd, whose husband, Paul, I water-skied with at my uncle’s cabin at Lake Minitar in western Nebraska many, many moons ago. (Sometimes the world is very small.)

Mary Lou Sherrerd and me (thanks, Mary Lou, for sending the picture).

For me, the highlight of the conference was seeing the many people I’ve known over the years as both editor of Handwoven and sales manager at Schacht Spindle:

Commercial exhibitors: Jim and Susan from the Yarn Barn (Kansas) with tons of books, equipment and yarn; Susan McFarland of Susan’s Fiber Shop with yarns, books, and fiber; the good folk from Personal Threads in Omaha and the Plum Nelly in Hastings, Nebraska. Also, Russell Groff was still making the rounds with yarns from his warehouse. Also vending were Susan Markle of Trading Post for the Fiber Arts with some very cool spinning fiber, Red Fish with a huge array of beautiful, hand-dyed silk, and Lunatic Fringe with their rainbow of perle cotton.

Conference presenters: Margaret Roach Wheeler gave the keynote address and impressed us with an array of her fantastical creations. Mary Zicafoose gave the closing remarks that included at slide show of Nebraska scenes as well as the poetry of of Nebraskan Ted Kooser. Here’s some encouragement for you — in college Kooser was discouraged by his writing professors from pursuing a degree in poety. He then worked for many years in the insurance industry, waking up early to write poety before work. After retirement he pursued poety full time, eventually winning the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and being appointed US poet Laureate. The lesson: just keep after what it is you’re passionate about and you just might achieve what it is you want!

Chatted with Elda Kohls, Jennifer Moore, and Susan Wilson about the art and craft of teaching. All in all I was impressed with the dedication of the teaching staff and the energy given to generously sharing textile information.

The conference organizers should feel great about their well-organized event! Thank you, Roots 2007!

Links:
Black Elk-Neihardt Park http://www.benpark.org/About.asp
Ted Kooser http://www.tedkooser.com/
Margaret Roach Wheeler http://www.ozarkartistscolony.com/Wheeler/
Mary Zicafoose http://www.maryzicafoose.com/
Elda Kohls http://www.eldakohls.com/
Jennifer Moore http://www.doubleweaver.com/index.php
Susan Wilson http://www.weavespindye.org/pages/?p=mem-artist.html&loc=1-58-00

What We Want

Today I am preparing for the inkle weaving class I’ll be teaching at Midwest Weavers Conference in Omaha next week. I know spaces are still available, so if you’re a spur-of-the-moment type check it out for next weekend (June 22-24). In getting my materials ready, I uncovered a treasure-trove of inkle samples willed to me by Carol Strickler before her death in 1992. This, and the recent mention of Carol in the May/June 2007 issue of Handwoven regarding to her development of the Pourrey Cross Cataloging System for the Pourrey Cross Textile Library housed at Interweave Press, made me reflect on Carol and the generous weaving community we are a part of. Carol was my technical editor at Handwoven when I was editor (1985-1992). I always appreciated that Carol knew exactly what a weave structure was doing by just looking at the draft; she could see instantly when something was amiss. Carol could wrap her mind around instructions, keeping all the details intact to know if everything really added up in the end. Handwoven’s readers are fortunate to have had her behind-the-scenes contributions.

Because of Carol we have A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns. What most of the weaving world doesn’t know is that as she created her book, she was also fighting ovarian cancer, which she succumbed to shortly after her book was published. As managing editor of this project, I visited Carol ofttimes daily. Her strength and desire to leave this legacy were remarkable, and I felt privileged to be a part of this work. Also, I know that the book would never have been possible without hundreds of swatches submitted by Handwoven readers. In addition, many of Carol’s weaving friends and members of the Handweavers Guild of Boulder wove samples per Carol’s specific request to fill in any gaps in the material. Guild members also volunteered countless hours, because they wanted to come to Carol’s aid — from threading looms, to toting boxes, to helping Carol sift through scores of samples, to making meals, and even doing yard work. From this experience I learned how caring our Guild and the community of weavers could be. Seeing Carol’s inkle samples reminded me of her and how lucky I feel to be part of the community of weavers. The above, as it turns out, is a rather lengthy preamble to what I want to say, and that is what I think we all want and hope for: community (a place to be) and creativity (a desire to create with our hands). Weaving is this and more for me.

Below is a little treasure I found in Carol’s stash. It’s a tiny bag made out of a short piece of inkle band. The handle is another tiny woven strip. I think it’s a great idea for Christmas tree ornaments—never too early to start weaving for Christmas! Plus, it’s quick and fun to weave, too.