Backstrap Weaving – Where are you?

I’ve been getting emails and messages these last few days with a common question….WHERE ARE YOU???? Yes, I have missed a few blog posts, as I often do when I am away from home, and so here I am attepting to squeeze in a quick update.

I must warn you that there is not a whole lot of weaving related content in this post. I am, after all, simply attempting to answer the ”’Where are you?” question and I will save all the stories about new friends and fun people I have met along the way and the inevitable fibery tales for another post, if you don’t mind.

Right now, I am in the vicinity of this….

This is the view from my window on my way to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After having spent six days in Florida, which had been downright refreshing after the brutal heat and humidity of the Santa Cruz summer, I had almost forgotten that yes, the USA was exiting a hard winter and snow was to be expected.

I had been looking at the small, odd and widely scattered patches of white from the plane window as we left Newark thinking that they might be salt lakes (!) and then remembered as we drew closer to Boston, where the white patches grew and started to merge one into the other, that Massachusetts had experienced record-breaking snowfalls this winter….duh!

I spent a weekend in New York city. Ah, ”if I can make it there”…..! :-)I was excited to be staying on the 15th floor of an apartment building in Manhattan with glimpses from my bedroom window of the Manhattan Bridge and the river. It was cold outside. I felt quite the silly tourist as I headed out to meet weavers  wrapped in a scarf and clad in my friend’s long, well-padded winter coat but with my bare toes exposed to the elements in sandals.

And just a week before this I was here, in an area that my friend, Berna, nostalgically calls ”old Florida”….a place where old oak trees dripping with Spanish moss line beautiful Lake Yale…

This was the venue for the annual Florida Tropical Weavers Guild Conference.

Strolling the lake shore in the cool, soft, early hours of the morning was my favorite way to start the days that were, in typical conference style, crammed with activity. It gave me time to think and get my head together before approaching a day of weaving.

 And whenever I got the feeling that I wasn’t quite alone out there, I was usually right…

And then the sun would make its glorious appearance, I would feel its heat and it would be time to head to breakfast and get charged with the energy and excitement of all my fellow weavers heading off to refine tapestry weaving skills, learn about the Quigley structure, study boundweave, dye skeins in multiple colors and play with cashmere…just to name a few of the workshop options that were on offer.

Well, okay, I will show you one textile thing before I go. I made some cuffs and have been wearing these while weaving. When attention is focused on what my hands are doing in amongst the warp threads, it is nice to have some prettiness on my wrists. I am really pleased with these. They are all fastened with snaps. You might remember that the brown one was a four-selvedge experiment and so it does not have any raw edges to deal with. The others are woven with fine thread with three selevedges and I was able to turn the one raw edge over and hem it without creating excessive bulk.

I definitely want to make more of these and have been inspired to make some very colorful ones by something that one of my weaving friends showed me. You will have to wait until the next post to see that.

So now you know where I am. As to what exactly I have been doing and what I have seen, there is too much to tell right now! It’s time to get ready for a fun day of weaving tomorrow. See you soon.

 

 

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