Category: Magic in the Water
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Batter Is Not Cake
Ignore the darker blue on the right hand side – it is the shadow of the woven web above onto the web below. I’m kind of ‘famous’ for the phrase ‘it isn’t finished until it’s wet finished’. The internet will make certain people ‘notable’ because of something they say, and I’m (face it) a…
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Thinking Things Through
cover for Stories from the Matrix Most people seem to assume that creativity bursts upon one in a sudden, perfect thought, no editing or changing allowed. We watch a program called Fake or Fortune. In it an art dealer/expert and a journalist pair up to try and trace the provenance and/or originality of a…
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Finding My Voice
Magic in the Water, 2002 For the longest time, I worried if I actually knew something about the craft of weaving. I hesitated to speak up, unsure if what I knew was only applicable to what I was doing, or if what I was observing and learning held some bigger ‘truth’. It was the same…
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And Now, Twill
before compression after compression Yesterday I did the twill example. Now, plasticine isn’t a true example of what happens in the cloth. Plasticine is, for one thing, not thread but plastic and ‘stickier’ than yarn would be. But when trying to upscale to show what happens, I had to make choices about what to…
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Subtle
This is not a black and white photo. It is the latest towel warp in the loom and the colours are a pale grey and pale greyed green for the warp, and natural linen for the weft. The first two towels are with the natural linen, and then I’ll switch to the white. Which…
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Magic in the Water
top sample wet finished, bottom sample loom state Linen example from Magic in the Water I can usually tell when someone has been talking about my books because I will see an uptick in sales. Lately it’s been Magic in the Water. 🙂 It warms the cockles of my heart when I see it…
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Of Libraries and Books
When I set out to produce Magic in the Water, my only thought was to try to educate weavers as to the necessity of taking this final, and (imho) essential step. To *not* gloss it over with ‘oh, just wash it’. Because in my experience, that final step was – in so many cases…
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Spring Has Sprung
Spring seems to have arrived. We had a small ‘flock’ of American robins in our back yard this morning. The woodpecker arrived last week, claiming his territory by rattling away at the metal vents in the roof. With climate change advancing relentlessly, it is hard to know what the future holds. We’re old, we’ve…
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Magic in the Water
loom state wet finished When a certain someone took over Twitter I eventually left the site and joined a couple others. One of the sites I joined was BlueSky and over the months I’ve been there I’ve gradually ‘found’ other textile folk. Yesterday a new weaver posted a photo of the very first thing…
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That Ol’ Magic in the Water
Over the course of my career I have spent hundreds of hours trying to explain to people what wet finishing is, why it needs to be done, and why I don’t tell people to ‘just wash it’. I have documented the process, in print, in videos, in person and now, remotely. I rather suspect…