Category: ANWG 2019

So photos from, oh, 1984?  A long time ago because I’m, ahem, a brunette…and thin… My initial interest in weaving was in making cloth for clothing.  I wove a lot with 2/60 silk.  These garments are both woven with silk from Treenway Silks. My background is that I learned to knit age 5 or 6…

Photos of scraps of fabric from the textile collection at the fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia.  Photos by Janet Dawson (I had my head buried in the boxes!) One of the down sides of teaching at a conference is that you can’t – or don’t have the time – to sign up to take…

Photos of scraps of fabric from the textile collection at the fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia.  Photos by Janet Dawson (I had my head buried in the boxes!) One of the down sides of teaching at a conference is that you can’t – or don’t have the time – to sign up to take…

If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. John Kennedy perhaps put it best here when he talked about going to the moon. There are times when we dream those big dreams and they become a lot bigger in terms of getting them to completion than we had hoped.  Or Life Happens and we wind…

After writing about my brother yesterday, I started thinking about the people I admire and respect. They all, in one way or another, dream the big dreams. Some people I have met and am delighted to call friend; others I know by their reputation or their presence in books/magazines, feedback from others, or their on…

As I have taught over the years I have come to realize that not everyone can visualize what something will look like…later…after it’s been woven. If this is the case, then I strongly recommend people weave samples.  Sampling is the only way to know for sure how something will turn out, especially how colours will…

One of the things we learn as weavers is to look at the whole picture – so to speak. Bringing cloth into material form (pun intended) from individual strands of thread means you have to look at the whole thing. Fibre characteristics, how the yarn has been spun, the colours being combined weave structure.  Et…

One of the things we learn as weavers is to look at the whole picture – so to speak. Bringing cloth into material form (pun intended) from individual strands of thread means you have to look at the whole thing. Fibre characteristics, how the yarn has been spun, the colours being combined weave structure.  Et…

There is a school of artistic thought that says “There are no rules”. I prefer to know what the rules are so that I know how and where and when to bend them.  Sometimes even break them. For me rules are all about establishing guidelines.  Rules say “if you do this, this and that, the…

When I began weaving, information on wet finishing was scarce.  Most of what I know about the process I learned from books, and – most of all – trying things to find out what was what. The best way to learn was to have someone who knew something about it explain it, but they, too, were…