The fabric was woven in 2001/2 and entered into the Convergence 2002 Carnegie Yardage Exhibit in Vancouver, BC. It was one of those occassions when I had a warp on the loom and decided to use some of it to make fabric for a garment, fabric that could be entered into the exhibit. Mostly I wanted to get some feedback from the juror, and there was talk that the organisers would attempt to provide translations of the comments, but that never happened.
OTOH, receiving second place in the exhibit was a pretty eloquent degree of feedback. 😀
When I got the fabric back I realized that 3 yards wasn’t really enough cloth to create a jacket for someone of my size and I wound up having to dress the loom again anyway for additional samples for Magic, so it was a simple matter to make the warp a little longer and incorporate enough for sufficient fabric that I could actually get a jacket out of the cloth.
Since life never runs smoothly, however, I wound up weaving about a yard before I realized I was using the wrong file and had to quickly find the correct treadling and weaving some more.
This was one of the warps that I needed to do more than once in order to get enough samples for the print run of Magic in the Water, partly because I wove the jacket fabric for myself, too. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the only warp that needed to be woven more than once. There were several that needed 3 warps before enough samples were produced to fill the sample pages of the book.
Even so, the print run was capped at 900 instead of the originally planned 1000. I just could not face dressing the loom again with 6 more warps to weave up 100 more samples to fill the last few copies!
I still have about 60 copies of Magic that have 14 or so samples instead of the original 20. Once the last 23 full sized copies of Magic are gone, I’ll once again offer the abridged copies for sale at a reduced price. But when these books are sold, Magic will officially be Out Of Print.
Currently reading The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny