I started a brief essay about why I weave receiving blankets with no intention of them ever being used by actual human babies, but am running out of hours in the day to edit. Today’s post will be a photo of the last Receiving Blanket I completed and I’ll return tomorrow to explaining why I weave this series.
Each blanket stems from some basic question or consideration about the future. This blanket was woven thinking about movement, specifically about the movement of plants and animals across the globe and across history. I was thinking about how some migrations are chosen and others instinctual, biological, symbiotic or externally enforced. I had handspun a few pounds of alpaca and Churro lambswool—the light and dark brown you see in the photos. Most folks are familiar with Churro as the breed commonly kept by Navajo weavers. The animals are descended from Spanish Churra and arrived in the Americas during the 16th century, brought by Spanish colonizers. This particular churro lamb was part of an experiment for a Vermont sheep farm. Could this breed be one we could bring to Vermont too? They’re certainly tolerant of many kinds of difficult weather.
I also had a several batches of wool and silk dyed with black walnut rinds—a native, allelopathic tree, the compounds of which change the composition of the soil near which the tree grows, to try and create an immediate ecosystem unfriendly to invading competitors. Also, one of my singularly favorite trees in Barre (not to mention, of all time.) There is an absolutely majestic Black Walnut right across from the history center on Washington. When it rains its green-hulled nuts down every other year, I gather then up from the edge of the sidewalk before they roll down the hill and into the chest freezer they go. I paired these with a yarn spun from a local Shetland wool and milkweed silk I foraged from up in the Cow Pasture—milkweed being the primary food source for monarch butterflies. The weft was dyed with avocado pits and pernambuco—an exotic hardwood from Brazil that is currently prohibited from harvesting, due to its scarcity. Pernambuco is only the wood used in the making of fine bows for stringed instruments. This particular pernambuco comes from the shavings of a bowmaker, whose small stash of the wood was imported prior to the embargo. He knows he’ll likely not be able to get more in his lifetime (unless a colleague were to die and leave their remaining supply to him.)
All these plants and animals, all these transatlantic and transamerican journeys. How can there be so much movement for a seed, a flock? In a species? In the hull of a ship or in a cargo hold, in a envelope or stuck to the bottom of a shoe. We often think of migrations as something humans undertake given a certain geopolitical context, something involving nation states and borders, but what if motion and migration were considered basic life forces, facts of aliveness? Some things are alive. Individually, living things move. Collectively, living things migrate.
