mastercrafts to masterchef...

Margo goes for an extra 15 minutes...

Mastercrafts: on weaving

9:05pm i receive a text message from my not-yet-brother-in-law...BBC2 watch it now!

overcoming a mild wave of guilt at not touching my loom for an eon, i switch over to Monty Don driving through anonymous countryside ruminating on how little he knows about weaving. Margo Selby appears smiling and surrounded by an array of glistening pastel coloured weave celebrating the form of the oval. quite why Ricochet decided that a weaver who was trained in london, has a very lovely shop in london and weaves in london had to be showcased in a country house, i am at a loss. something about craft and cities i imagine. sigh. get beyond that and it shaped up to be a well rounded, moving programme of three approaches to the craft that revealed much about attitudes to the whole enterprise.

the terms amateur and professional reared their ugly heads. for a change the terms actually informed a seedling of a conversation about the true difference between those that dedicate themselves to mastering a craft, and those who want to give things a go, learn the basics and move on to the next pot/sock/print. for the record, i'm not entirely sure which group i fit into, but i know to which one i'd hand over hard earned cash for an item of their making. there was a great deal of grace amongst the participants, a heap of tenacity, and a dash of impressive ingenuity. given six weeks, could anyone pick up double cloth, overshot, eye stopping colour combinations, and the matrix like lift patterns? give it a watch on iplayer and make your decision. i was crying by the end. and this morning began advertising my loom in exchange for a smaller version. i have no urge to generate three metres of double cloth in two weeks, but just a desire to pick up the basics where i left off almost 2 years ago. if i can fit the loom in my flat that might be a good start!

the weave is dead, long live the weave!

a reincarnation of sorts is taking place. I haven't woven in a really long time, the reasons for which are dull and won't be gone into. i began a rather ambitious warp last summer, whilst I had the studio in east london. that has now been gingerly removed from the raddle on the top of my then newly acquired Louet Kombo 70 loom and is resting, waiting to be reformed into cloth at some future date. i'm going back to basics as quite frankly i can't remember a thing! this ancient stuff takes a good while to stick. i feel a little fraudulent having started to write about all this before i had learnt to walk, but that was after all the whole point of jotting down thoughts en route. so task one is to get this loom to work the way I imagine it should...really, back to basics we go, with some dark thread, some light thread and 1,2,3,4 in different orders.

a new space

the posts have been absent for a couple of months, partly due to nothing much happening, and thankfully also due to many things happening. i have been fortunate enough to acquire a beautiful loom, pictured on the left. made by louet, a dutch company, it is a four-shaft table loom with fibre heddles and a fantastically constructed beater mechanism. being new to this you could probably show me the most basic of equipment and i'd think it was rocket science. but that aside it opens up a great deal more for me in terms of construction and pattern with which to experiment.

another development has been finding a temporary studio space in east london. this huge step forward, however mildly inappropriate for a maker only just beginning to understand the very basics of her craft, means i can come back to my practice of weaving and writing with a clearer head and with a more open sense of what it is i'd like to achieve.

i left this blog with reflections on the process for my last piece of weaving. it was a total experiment - but the kind of experiment i do...which means it had at it's core a certain element of control, of just enough restraint to be inventive but composed. i've never been an artist that can totally cut loose - filling pages with colours and textures that don't cohere to see how they might, maybe be made to - but rather one that has composition constantly in mind. the whole has to function, the parts to be brought fully together, or as together as an experiment will allow.

written in July 2008

292 threads, alot of wood and nails later....

i have a raddle under my bed. it has caused a number of raised eyebrows from visitors and makes me realise why most weavers have studios. my raddle is a plank of wood with a number of evenly placed nails protruding from it. by employing some elastic bands, or in my case hair elastics, the wood can be neatly attached to the back bar of the loom ready for raddling the warp.

written in May 2008...published so it's not missed out, although it doesn't say a great deal! raddling means basically to spread the threads out and put them in order ready to put on the loom (known as dressing the loom)

from the pages of a notebook

i have always had a slight obsession with notebooks and constantly have a far too abundant supply of empty sketchbooks and exercise books, and those that do get filled very rarely see the light of day again once written. this space may change that relationship as here unedited (you'll have to believe me on that one) are the jottings i made on vacation after finishing the cloth just before departing. it is an attempt to view the process from the beginning. and i may regret not editing it...call it an exercise in post something textuality...or something

"the length is finished. well, almost. i remain to wash and sew in the ends, so in cloth terms it isn't complete. throughout the whole process i have been mildly nervous about the whole thing unwinding, undoing itself and returning to its just-past-original state of tangled multi-coloured thread. i'm finding it no small miracle that it hasn't happened and that i now hold in my hands veritable cloth.

at every stage i was learning what to do and how to do it. with warping i quickly discovered my maths isn't that great...four warping posts does not a warp make! and lacking a suitable horizontal surface of sufficient size, the only remaining option was a door. again my spatial awareness failed me - a rather trepidatious knitting needle ended up being taped unceremoniously to the door to make up the numbers for (the) posts. i learnt how to make a warp in two sections when the needle came unstuck and my heart was almost sunk.

rather than choose a basic warp - one or maybe two alternating colours - i somehow settled on a more improvised approach. using the three colours, ecru, magenta pink/cerise and orange, ignoring any references to fruit salad sweets that crept into my head, i began to wind the warp. that was after raiding the knitting needle bag again to fashion a spool rack from four needles and a wine box.

making the warp was like dancing and painting. hundreds of regular movements that were guided by a shapeless notation jotted on the reverse of a cereal box and stuck to the door...round over under down over under round under over up round over under...picking up one colour after another, consciously putting an order in between the choice of three, trying to imagine how they balanced each other over the width of the warp - a not enviable feat as all that can be seen is a collection of threads. and whilst all this rhythm continues , attempting to maintain the same pressure, the same tautness across all threads. that reminded me of painting, the brushstrokes determining by their quality and regularity the visual outcome of a colour or combination of pigments.

and so not having written down the order of the threads, i relied wholeheartedly on my memory. thankfully better than my maths"

ok. i can only say i was reading a lot at the time and had evidently swallowed various parts of a dictionary of pomposity. but you get the idea...next stage, getting the warp on the loom. after two days of dancing around a bunch of pegs attached to a bedroom door, it was a rather welcome horizontal relief.

does anyone know how to make tassles...or spell it??

today has been surprisingly momentous. after a number of failed attempts at getting the new loom back to my house, a cup of tea, a number 55 bus, and quite alot of audible panting later, it has arrived. the one definitive thing i have learnt from this experience so far has been that certain activities are greatly facilitated by the ability to drive a car. looms just aren't made for public transportation...

but there is a huge chunk of all this weaving stuff missing! since the 11th April much has happened, the obvious event being that i acquired a shiny new loom. i have finished my first length of cloth - a three coloured gauze-ish cotton length around 150cm long and 40 wide, and removed it from the loom. i thought of simply hanging on to this post and filling in the gap, but that felt like cheating, like faking the documents and mis-describing the process.

i didn't have time to write about what i was doing as i worked because the reed, a vital piece of equipment resembling a comb with a lid on it, had to be returned to its owner rather sharpish. as a result i was weaving until 1am for a number of days in order to not waste the precious warp that i had spent so long measuring and threading. the cloth is about 50cm shorter than i intended, but it is beautiful. well i would say that...it has encroached on my conversations like a prized pet or new baby, and friends have started to urge me to take photographs of animate things...

and so i will try to remember the stages so far and write them before completing the cloth entirely. there remains a slight trepidation in all my actions - as i sew in the ends i fear for the straightness of selvedges, and washing this object fills me with dread...nightmarish images of plunging happy coloured cloth into soapy water and lifting out a bundle of grey fibre...let's hope the cloth maintains its so far miraculous integrity and that at some point i find out how convincing, non bad-curtains-with-matching-3-piece-suite fringe tassles are made