I’m a few inches closer to completing the blanket this evening and I finished the woven baltic belt I meant to send to my niece several weeks ago, along with another piece of handwoven wool ribbon for my parents’ birthdays. These woven pieces are ‘recipe weaving’ meaning originating from established patterns—in this case, traditional baltic tape weaving drafts—as opposed to designs I had made myself. The Kevin Aspaas talk yesterday had me reflecting on concepts of authenticity and how weaving fits into one’s cultural world, spiritual world and generational inheritance. I’ve never loved Navajo wedge weaving, but when I listen to anyone describe the work they enthusiastically love, I often come around to liking it. Aspaas won me over and I even liked the scalloped edges of his wedge weaves (which had previously turned me off to the pieces) because I could finally understood the scalloped edge as a set of aesthetic and technical choices that could be contextualized within the history of Navajo making and appreciate the challenge of making these diagonal shapes on his particular style of loom.
Baltic woven tapes are one of the few recipe weaves I do that have specific ethnic references. It does fit within my own ethnic heritage—the tapes are a part of most Eastern European handweaving traditions—but what really draws me to them is their mix of the practical and cross-culturally mysterious. It’s wild to remember that before one could just buy a spool of ribbon, rope or a shoelace, these were all handwoven objects. Woven tapes are any thin ribbon-like weaving, typically are no more than 3 or four inches wide. They’re used for adornment, but also for fastening, tying, covering external seams to make an object more watertight and strengthening seams and hems on the inside of garments or woven objects. Even the humblest kinds of handwoven tape, single color twill tapes (think flat shoelaces) still required skill and a significant amount of labor to make. The weaving of tape was so commonplace that Inkle tape looms are even referenced in the Shakespeare play Love’s Labor Lost.
Because these woven objects are thin, there’s not a lot of space on them for illustration. I describe what I weave as “baltic weaving,” meaning that I’m using designs based on drafts copied from historical Eastern Europe examples, but they bear many similarities to the indigenous Sami band weaving of northern Sweden, Norwegian band/tablet weaving and the thin backstrap-woven belts and trims weavings of many South and Central American regions. While some Sami and Columbian examples have extraordinary color work in them, the small number of threads available to design with means that there’s a limited vocabulary of shapes available to the weaver. The same designs or repetition of shapes appear across multiple cultures or regions in tape weaving, but have different meanings. I love that weavers have been engaged in processes of abstraction from neolithic times and that as soon as they started to manipulate threads, they began to express aesthetic preferences and encode their own meaning into the shapes. A semi-spiral shape could mean a wave, a vine, a labrynth, a bird craning its neck. Tapes are such humble objects, but that magic’s in the meaning.
I’ve woven tapes as utilitarian objects, but also ritual objects, for ribbons for couples who are marrying and want to wrap their hands in a version of a ‘handbinding’ blessing, for folks with Celtic heritages for Imbolc or St. Brigid’s blessings who want to bring a year of good luck to the household, for parents of new babies who appreciate the superstition that a handwoven ribbon made for the baby will fasten her spirit to her body, so it doesn’t wander off. I don’t know that I need to share the specific spiritual beliefs of the folks I’m weaving for, but I do feel quite connected to the intention of the blessing or superstition. I certainly want them to have the union, the good or long life. In the example of the belt woven for my niece, it will probably wind up being used as the strap for her first electric guitar. It’s woven with the knowledge that she’s right on that teenage threshold and I want her to have every bit of extra boldness and fortune available to her as she steps over it. There’s a solidness to this kind of weaving that’s different than when I’m weaving blankets of my own design. I fuss over my own designs pretty frequently. Maybe it’s just that I get to lose myself in the repetition a pattern, but tape weaving is a really different headspace. It would get dreadfully boring if it was all I did every day, but I love returning to it a few times a year and imagining up generations of weavers with their fingers in the threads, playing with squares and triangles and lines as far back as we can go. An fiber artist friend of mine—someone who I consider the most decorated weaver I know—the most international recognition, most impressive CV, highest profile commissions—recently moved homes and studios. After a long dry spell and with no clear sense of where she was going in the work, she started weaving traditional overshot coverlets. I think about overshot coverlets as one of the most foundational and fundamental pieces of American handweaving. They are certainly beautiful and beautifully made, but it was what she said about making them that captured my imagination. “After all these years, and all this time at the loom” she said, “I finally feel like a weaver.”