Finally, yarn

After a good soaking and wash with mild soap to set the twist, we finally have a finished yarn! This is the step that allows me to gain some insight what characteristics the texture or ‘hand of the cloth’ will have. I had read that Clun Forest was a breed that resulted in a wool that was ideal for handspinners and described as “poufy.” That second part concerned me. Some yarn profiles are wonderful for knitters, but not necessarily weavers. Chunky, lofty yarn makes for wonderful woolen knits, but poufy is not something one wants in a weaving yarn. I spun this a bit thicker than my last Shetland handspun, knowing it would likely give more textured, nubbly handwoven. This was something I was looking forward to, but I didn’t want something too gnarly and bumpy looking. It’s turned out quite well, not over- or under spun, a good diameter and with a profile that looks like a good rug yarn, but much softer and with a little more luster.

All this soaking and washing and drying today did leave me reflecting on the under-recognized role of water in the spinning, weaving and dying process. No fresh water sources equals no way to prep and clean your textiles. I made a small tapestry a few years ago about the role of water in the dying process and it sold before I had the chance to exhibit it. Here’s the piece below. It’s a small one, about the size of a paperback book. There is only one dye plant used in the tapestry, but water from different sources—melted snow from two areas of the city, water from a tap in Barre City and one from a drilled well in Barre Town. The resulting differences in color you see are all the result of differences in the water, that was the only variable in the dying process.

Setting the Twist

Working on two making-related things today—yarn prep and design. Today, the yarn was removed from the niddy-noddy and skeins were unwound to begin soaking the yarn to complete the spinning process. As they are removed, you see all the action stored up in the yarn as it curls up on itself and looks like a fantastic pile of ramen noodles. We don’t want the fibers to begin to unspin themselves, so we’ll set the twist with a soak and mild wash in warm water. This will remove oils (from lanolin and from my own hands) and leaf matter from the yarn and cause the fibers in the yarn to interlock, forming a more integrated strand of finished yarn called as single.

I’m also continuing to think about design and concept. The kiddo and I spent the afternoon looking through the exhibition catalouge for the Sophie Taeuber-Arp show at MOMA, which is just about to close. There have been an amazing run of shows honoring female fiber artists in the last few years—Sheila Hicks at Centre Pompidou, Anni Albers at the Tate, the Arp show in NYC—each with their own publication or redesign/reissue of the artist’s major works. If we’re not traveling anywhere to see work in person, at least we can at least get a good peek at the work via interlibrary loan. Hick’s Weaving as Metaphor reissue is about as beautiful as an artists book can get. I mentioned yesterday that Byrne’s 1847 mathmatical illustrations of Euclid looked incredibly modern. They could easily be long-lost siblings to these Arp compositions, painted about 80 years later.

About Receiving Blankets

I went for a walk with a friend who has spent their entire parenting experience under the cloud of covid. We walked past our favorite front yard gardens and talked about how their spouse is grieving the state of the world, experiencing a painful reckoning for having decided to bring a child into being. This seems a natural segue into why, for the last two years, I’ve been weaving receiving blankets. I often call these speculative objects, the way some writers have adopted the term speculative fiction.

No one would ever accuse me of being a little ray of sunshine. I am friendly, smile easily, have what my spouse calls “resting nice face,” but I am constitutionally pessimistic. I think the world is generally a pretty difficult place to be and rather full of needless suffering. I don’t suggest that this is a pleasant or effective manner in which to navigate one’s life, but like the speaker in that Maggie Smith poem, it seems rather baked into my stars. On my first day alive, there was a bomb scare at the hospital.

This said, gloomy little stormcloud I am, I don’t think we’re allowed to abandon each other or abandon the beautiful, heart-breaking chaos of the world. It matters how we show up to greet it.

I started perfecting newborn swaddles early. I graduated from college with a keen interest in women’s health and began applying to midwifery programs. I ordered a few textbooks and (ironically) the chapters on suturing left me queasy. I trained as a doula to see if I could get over my squeamishness and worked as a professional birthworker for almost ten years. I was based in the western PA rust belt—specifically, eleven zip codes chosen for intervention because of their high rates of infant mortality. In these areas, even with world-class research hospitals, maternal-fetal medicine experts and NICU’s, the maternal mortality rate for women of color resembled that of women in non-industrialized nations. I attended not-quite a hundred births, something close to that. Embarrassingly, I lost count. As a doula, you are intimately connected to the new family in the very moments it’s being born. You make a plan for how that baby’s going to eat, wrap ‘em up in swaddling clothes and you head for the door.

Eventually, the first babies I’d welcomed into the world would grow up. I was living in Vermont now and my facebook feed lit up with a news story. A policeman shot and killed an honors student. The student panicked during a traffic stop near my old neighborhood. His last name was familiar. It turned out not to be one of “my babies,” but it easily could have been. I had been raising my own family and hadn’t been adding up the years enough to notice that the other babies—the ones I’d first swaddled—were about to step into their own adult futures. The world they were entering was deeply unsettling.

Part of how you endure as a birthworker (or in any caretaking profession, for that matter) is to focus on the small part you can do, not what you can’t. You can make sure there’s food in the house the day you visit. You can’t ensure their heat will stay on. You do a fair amount of internal boundary work to compartmentalize and soothe your own feelings of powerlessness, horror or doubt about the prospects of any new beginning. You develop a relationship to hope that is not optimistic, but a pragmatic stance—accepting that you don’t know what will happen. It might not work out. It also might, in fact, sometimes it does. Also, whatever happens, it will likely not be any one single moment’s fault or reward. There is not confidence in any one outcome, but an openness to possibility and all the weirdnesses of the world.

This is the kind of hope that Rebecca Solnit described in her essays that formed the basis for Hope in the Dark:

“Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.”

As a doula, I arrived at every single birth with the knowledge that I did not know if a baby would be born alive or not. Certainly, everyone in the room wanted them to be.

That’s the deal you make with the universe. You can go to the birth. Go and be deeply invested in the outcome and fully present. You can bring all your skills to the table and practice an exquisite ethic of care. You don’t get to know what’s going to happen next.

And I desperately want to know what’s going to happen next. When I turn on the news, when I pick up my kid from school—every moment, I’m bracing for the next thing. I want to know if its going to be okay, if the choices were the right enough, the gambles sensible. My friend and their spouse look at their baby and desperately want to know what to prepare them for. You don’t get to know. I sat wriggling in this tension for almost a full year before I turned to weaving objects as a method of holding the contradiction.

The way you greet an unknowable future is to just keep greeting it. And how should you welcome any new thing that is so precious and full of possibility? Say hello, notice the contours, the fingers and toes, wrap it up in the best of whatever you’ve got on hand. You’ll probably need some receiving blankets.

Receiving Blanket #8

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.



Spinning, weaving and vikings

I continued to spin and spin and spin today. Once I finish about a half-pound more, I’ll begin the work of scouring—a thorough cleaning of the skeins to remove any remaining oils and dirt and prepare the yarn for mordanting and dying. I am a skilled spinner and I love the process, but I’m not a purist. I’ll likely use a commercially spun cotton warp because of the amount of loom waste (extra yarn) required for my big loom. My spinning mentor used to say “find a way to use it all—don’t waste an inch of that precious handspun.” She advocated for knitting projects that would use up a few yards here, an extra bit there in colorwork. I’m not much of a knitter, so I try to plan my weaving projects to get as maximum bang for my buck out of these handmade materials, while not being too strident about it and making unnecessary work for myself. A local weaver once shook her head when describing a project using handspun from her own sheep in both her weft and warp—“never again,” she laughed, “never again.”

The amount of labor that goes into a completely handwoven, handspun blanket is immense—particularly if you’re the kind of weaver who starts with lambs and ends up with blankets. This model of mutually beneficial human-animal networks are described by some textile enthusiasts as “climate beneficial” closed loop systems and have existed for thousands of years. Norwegian textile archaeologist Lise Bender Jørgensen has noted that the Vikings—most commonly described as expert navigators or warriors, should probably first be regarded as expert shepherds, spinners and weavers, given the sheer volume of wool and magnitude of spinning and weaving skill needed to generate one sail. Wool was crucial not only for clothing, but for propelling and navigating the ships themselves. In one of the ancient Icelandic sagas the kiddo and I listened to last year during our homeschooling Myths and Legends bender, an adventurous prince endures all types of misfortunes with icy resolve, but weeps when he returns to his ship and finds his sail stolen. The excellent Norwegian Textile Letter has a chronicle of one woman’s project to weave and sew herself a sail. Bless her heart, I don’t think I’ll be trying this any time soon.

Preparing for color

Today’s spinning brings the Clun Forest total up to about 500 yards. I’m spinning more than I’ll need for this project—nothing worse than estimating how much you’ll need for a project and then realizing you’ve come up short—then secure the yarn into relatively small, loosely tied hanks. They aren’t quite as tidy as the beautiful skeins one brings home from the yarn store—these are intended to be easy to prepare for scouring, mordanting and dying. In the background of everything I’ve described so far (choosing wool, spinning, developing a concept and design) is my dye preparation. Within the seasonal rhythm of the studio, late winter is when I’m inventorying what dyestuff I still have in the chest freezer, considering what dye plants I need to grow more of in the upcoming season, and planning out the next year of growing or foraging.

Even though I don’t have a sense of what colors I’ll be using in this blanket, I do need a dye kitchen and pantry of items that will be prepared and ready when I start to plan color. I typically have a team of plants I use for reds, yellows, browns and greys that can be made within a one-day window (assuming I’ve got the plants available.) Blues, however, are a different story. In the background, I’ve been maintaining my indigo vat.

If you’re relying on plant-based dyes, blues are primarily achieved by using a range of plants within the Indigofera genus. I’ve grown Japanese Indigo and love their bright jewel-green leaves and tiny pink flowers, but the scale of leaves needed for regular use require more growing space than I’ve got available. I’ve bought indigo from several suppliers and would strongly encourage purchasing from Stony Creek Colors if you want a high quality, domestically grown indigo or Maiwa, a Canadian company with a solid history of ethically sourcing its dye plants.

Most dye plants release their dye in water-soluble form when soaked and heated. The dyebath lasts for a few days at most, then gets moldy or loses potency. Light-fast blues are a whole different story. Making an indigo vat is a commitment to tending the vat and coaxing the soluble dye out of the plant. Many dyers report feeling a sense of collaboration or being ‘in relationship’ to the vat. Correctly tended, vats can last years. Incorrectly tended, then can never reach potency or suddenly collapse sending that valuable plant matter down the drain. Extracting the soluble blue dye (called indigotin) from indigofera plants requires some chemistry. To release the indigotin (the dye substance) in soluble form, you’ll need to break down some of the molecular bonds with the aid of a reducing (or antioxidant) agent. The safest, least toxic and least stinky option is a fruit vat, a method reverse-engineered by French chemist and botanist Michel Garcia, based on his study of historical dye techniques. To keep the vat in reduction, meaning the indigo remains water soluble and available to the fiber, I need a reducing agent and that means I need fruit, the more overripe, the better. Today’s tending tasks were to prepare more fructose reduction agent and “feeding the vat” I’ve been tending for nearly nine months.

In summer, I collect overly ripe pears from a neighbor’s tree to freeze. When I run low on fructose syrup, I defrost some, add any uneaten brown bananas from our kitchen, then mash, boil and strain. This is added to the vat every few days, and stirred carefully to incorporate. A well-reduced indigo vat will be blue only on the surface. Below the surface, the liquid is amber, gold, brown or occasionally greenish. Undyed fiber goes into the pot, comes out a shade of gold-green and magically turns blue once it hits the air and oxidizes. Now it’s possible I won’t use any blue at all in this blanket, but a commitment to using natural dyes means that if I want blues, I have to integrate the keeping of the vat into my practice. It’s one of the many parallel processes at work on any given day in the studio.

Spinning as an Imaginative Space

What are we making? A small blanket, probably roughly 30” x 30”—the standard size for a newborn receiving blanket, the most common form of swaddling clothes currently used in the US. I’ve been weaving receiving blankets for about three years now, for reasons I’ll write about in a future post. What will this one look like? Don’t know yet. That’s why we start with spinning, to get the hands busy and open up a clear channel in the psyche to begin imagining the possibilities and questions I want to play around with in this next blanket.

Most modern studio weavers do “recipe weaving,” meaning they take a preexisting design called a weaving draft, modify it a bit and then begin to thread their looms (called warping or dressing the loom) according to the recipe. Some folks do their own designs from scratch and map out on graph paper what happens within each grouping of threads to envision a design before they start to lay the threads in. These weavers begin the process with a sense of what the completed cloth will look like. Because I was trained as both a conceptual artist and a traditional craftsperson, I begin differently from most weavers I know. I don’t start with a design in mind. I starting with a material and often a materials-based question or concept. Right now, the most basic question knocking around in my head—both in terms of the material in front of me and a “big picture” question—is how did all this stuff get here? And I wonder and imagine and then I start to spin.

Right now, I’ve got this Clun wool from sheep raised about 25 minutes from here—a breed that only crossed the Atlantic in 1959—and a batch of other small hanks of yarn spun from heritage breeds from the UK. These breeds are typically raised in small numbers, living pretty close to the place where generations of their genetic ancestors lived. Some of these rare heritage breeds, as James Rebanks explains in his book The Shepherd’s Life, have sheep-y bloodlines meticulously documented and are considered such unique local treasures that vials of their (to put it politely) genetic material are prohibited from transport outside their regions. So while I’m spinning, I’m thinking on a sense of place, about rootedness, about this idea of authenticity. Who or what gets to leave? Who gets to stay and what is the significance and cache of a plant or animal species that is described by ecologists as ‘native.’ I certainly see a special twinkle in a gardener’s eye when they explain to me that a certain plant or section of the garden are all ‘native species.’

I often think about these topics around Town Meeting Day, where local chatter about authenticity and native and who’s “from here” and who’s “from away” tends to reach its annual fevered peak. What does it mean to be from a place? I consider how I can tell a story of my own history where I can sound “from here” or “from away,” depending on my audience and my objectives. I can talk about what civil war battalions my Green Mountain ancestors fought in and mention stone quarries. I could also just say grew up in New Jersey. I meander over to the concept of genetics and the idea of documentation of genetics. Some of these sheep can be traced back much further than my documented family origins. I think about about histories and who gets to access to information about what a family tree looks like, think about who doesn’t have the privilege of that documentation. I think about the weirdness of things like genetic testing and 23andMe or those other genetic testing services that offer up a kind of documentation about being authentically “from” someplace, just like this wool. They’re concepts, histories, stories—but not fictions, right? Maybe there’s a little bit of fiction?

Spinning is the busy work that makes the woven cloth possible and the design take shape. All these different “threads” hang out in my head in a very sprawling imaginative space, while I spin the very real wool through my fingers and I get to ask myself that marvelous therapy question—what’s up with that?







Ready, Set.....GO!

Hello Friends and welcome! We’ll spend the next month gathering here to dive into the making of a new woven piece. You could probably guess from our password what’s in the bag…

You’re looking at just over a pound of Clun Forest wool from Bill Blachly’s flock in Calais, VT, spun into roving at a local mill. I’ll share more about this specific breed of sheep and its history in later posts, but Cluns are generally beloved (by folks who love sheep) for not getting into too much trouble (for a sheep,) being relatively easy to care for (for a sheep,) and offering small scale farmers streams of (very modest) income for both fiber and meat. Vermont has a long history with sheep, their promise and peril. It’s why we have so few old growth forests in the state. We’re starting our month together at the beginning of lambing season. Friends of mine will swap stories about improvisational midwifery, headlamps nearby.

For all the pastoral charm these animals offer, it’s a certain type who takes on the work of tending to the bodies of animals. Filmmaker John O’Brian, his Seven Days Article about raising sheep, explains: “Why do I still have sheep? My father was a Democrat, so I’m a Democrat. My parents never smoked, so I’ve never smoked. My parents raised sheep, so I raise sheep. These weren’t logical decisions; they just happened. Children imitate their parents, and then all of a sudden it’s midnight and you’re up to your elbow in a ewe’s uterus trying to deliver a breech birth and you remember your mom doing this during the Nixon administration.”

Where did I start? Why do I work in fiber? It’s what was around. There was no single moment when I learned how to weave or fell in love with the process. My mother and grandmother and all the women before and around them sewed, quilted, made things themselves, even as the economic illogicality of the act increased with each new generation. I grew up in a beautiful, scrappy, forgotten area that had more barns and historical reenactment villages than actual extracurricular activities. Working as a teenage “pattern girl,” for a weaver paid better than other options. By the time I went to college, I had been around enough looms to know the basics, even if the nuance of a particular technique or fabric structure was new to me.

I don’t mean to suggest that I came out fully formed as an maker. There was some actual art school involved. When I saw the work of installations artists like Ann Hamilton and Kiki Smith, I found an aesthetic and spiritual home in their gospel of handwork. Growing up someplace agricultural and forgotten left me stubbornly devoted to the reality of how things are made. When I was dissatisfied with the cloth I found for sewing & quilting projects, I began to weave my own. Dissatisfied with the yarns within my budget to weave with, I started spinning and then dying my own. Dye materials were too expensive, so I planted a dye garden. I don’t raise sheep—my family has drawn a bright line there—but I hear you can keep silkworms at home, if you’re not too squeamish about crawly things and this is our starting place together, a pound of wool.

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A final note today—it’s not lost on me that as we begin this month together in support of resettled families and newly arriving families, the Russian military aggression in Ukraine is displacing more than a half-million Ukrainian citizens. The 44 artists in this project have collectively raised more than $44,000 for CVRAN. I am grateful for the opportunity to bring dollars to their work. I’ll close with a link to the paintings of Ukranian artist Maria Prymachenko: https://www.wikiart.org/en/maria-primachenko Yesterday, the Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry announced that a historical museum in Ivankiv containing 25 of her original paintings was destroyed. (This is still being independently verified, as per the NY Times.) Thank you for the financial support you have offered our local refugee resettlement services and for the space to write and think aloud together about the threads of interconnection that bind us.

March is Almost Here...

Thank you so much for your contribution to 2022’s Central Vermont Refugee Action March Arts Marathon. The starter’s pistol hasn’t gone off quite yet, but this is the page you’ll visit to view daily posts about my arts practice and follow along with the weaving of a new piece for the Receiving Blanket Series. This is a password protected page and we’re working on the honor system here, so if there’s someone you’d like to share my writing and photos with, please ask them to make a donation (in any amount) to the CVRAN Arts Marathon at this link: https://cvran.org/pamela-wilson-march-arts-marathon/

Here’s where we begin! Now what do you think’s in the bag? You can leave guesses, questions for me or notes about what parts of my process you’d like to hear about in the comments below. I’ll begin posting regularly to this page on March 1st and then we’re off!