The Weaver's Journey

APRIL 24 | Threads in the snow

Garavavati

Apr 28, 2024

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Hello dear friends

It’s lovely to think of you and write to you in this way. This is the first newsletter where I’ll try to give you a sense of what I have been learning here at craft school. I thought I could start with a little context…

I have been living at the edge of this Nordic forest, atop a high valley peak in the county of Dalarna, said to be the cultural heart of Sweden. I arrived last August, to a bountiful late Summer forest, bursting with Blueberries, Lingon berries and Chanterelle mushrooms. In late October the first snow came, enveloping the landscape with the slow, quiet of Winter. I came here to learn the craft of textile weaving. It was a rather quick decision which came after a rather painful break-up. A ‘need to leave the country’ kind of break-up.

I was drawn to the poetry of weaving. This ancient art handed down (in Europe) from woman to woman. I had images of Grecian mortals and goddesses from the classic poems, spinning thread and weaving tapestries. There seemed to be some kind of earthly magic in learning how a sheep’s fleece or a bunch of flax could become beautiful cloth.

After eight months of learning this ancient art, mainly in the long and beautiful Winter of the North, I have discovered many things. Weaving is full of beauty and precision, it involves complex and detailed mathematics, an eye for colour, and a lot of patience. And, it is magical. Although seemingly made redundant through the industrial revolution and mass production of textile, to spin flax into thread, to watch as those threads weave together to create beautiful intricate patterns, to follow a thread from it’s beginning into the final piece of cloth feels archetypal and deeply meaningful. The process of weaving has woven itself into the fabric of my being and there is so much more to learn.

I want to share the whole weaving process with you starting with warping. Once all the calculations have been made and all the thread is spun and dyed (which, takes aaaaaaaaaaaaages) one can then begin to warp. This is where you determine the width, length and density of your fabric. The warp threads are the long threads in a piece of fabric. One has to count each thread as it winds around the warping wheel. At the school, our warping wheels are in the basement of the textile house, which we sometimes share with a little mouse. Here’s a little video of me warping, kindly put together by lovely friend Laura. As you watch the film you can listen to my sweet friends Clem and Lily (and me) singing a Bulgarian folk song that we learnt from Clem this year.

This Summer I will be launching a website and selling some original art work, prints and weaves that I’ve made over the year. Here is a selection of some of the weaves that will be on sale: