46: Sharon Alderman (transcript)

 

But before we get into the interview I’d just like to say Happy Thanksgiving!

 

I’m recording this a couple of days ahead so that by the time you hear this, I should be tucking into a big dinner with a group of friends.

 

We’re all east coast ex-patriots and have relatives living too far away to visit so we gather together. We all have kids who were born around the same time. Those kids have grown up together, seeing each other at Thanksgiving parties and birthdays and Fourth of July parties and so when we get together it has that family reunion feel.

 

Where ever you are, whatever your Thanksgiving Day looks like, I hope it’s a happy one because one of the things I’m thankful for is you. I’ve been doing the podcast for nearly four years now, and as much fun as it is talking to the guests and hearing their stories, it’s knowing that I get to share them with you that makes it all worthwhile.

 

I know! I know! I got mushy! But I’m kind of a mushy person, so Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Musical interlude

 

Today’s sponsor is Lunatic Fringe Yarns. They sell a variety of yarns in weaving kits, including their famous Tubular Spectrum and Grey Matter colour gamp kits. You can find them on line at http://www.lunaticfringeyarns.com

 

Musical interlude

 

SA This is Sharon Alderman. When I was 10 I had to take Home Economics and they taught us how to sew. My mother wasn’t a seamstress, she didn’t do much of anything with her hands. She was a registered nurse and a surgical nurse – specialty. 

 

I had to take the class and took it and learned how to sew and made most of my own clothes but I was looking for fabrics in the small agricultural town in central California where I grew up and wasn’t able to find things that I could imagine. But like any young person it didn’t occur to me that other people weren’t thinking the same thing.

 

So, I just let it go and when I got to college, I was one of two women in my entering class at Harvey Mudd College which is in Claremont, California.

 

I studied chemistry there and they put us up at Scripps College for Women because in those days the sexes weren’t mixed in dorms and the men’s the dorms, the door to the room opened to the outside world which was unthinkable in that time.

 

So I lived at Scripps and my second year there, someone in my dormitory – a Scripps student – was an art major, brought home a length of black and white wool fabric. It was a tweedy fabric and I was knocked out by it. And I thought “Wow! You could actually make the fabric you want. That’s cool!”

 

And I knew that people had woven by hand, but I didn’t think that anybody did that any more.

 

Well, the next term, the hook was set as fishermen would say, because someone else in my dorm brought back a rya rug that she had made in another studio class, and the colours in it, the mixture of colours and the texture, knocked me out. And I thought – all right, someday I’m going to do this.

 

I never even found where the looms were on Scripps campus because I had eight o’clock to noon classes six days a week, labs five afternoons, two part time jobs, and I babysat. So, I was very busy. (And it’s not a "cinch" school.)

 

So, I just kept it in the back of my mind and after I had graduated, gone briefly to graduate school and married my college sweetheart, I worked to help get him through graduate school at Cornell. When he was about to leave, we were discussing what we would do next. We knew where we were going and I said “I would like to learn to weave.”

 

Well, as luck would have it, we moved to Boulder, CO, which is now a hotbed, but in those days wasn’t.

 

Barry and Dan Schacht were hippies and had just come west from New York and they had a commune up the canyon finishing their drop spindles, which is why it’s the Schacht Spindle Company.

 

We lived there for a bit over a year before I saw in the local newspaper a little squib about a weaving class that was being held in a mill end yarn storefront. I called to see if I could join the class, even though it had already had one meeting, and it was a very small class. I made the third.

 

I borrowed an 8 inch wide little Structo from the Rocky Mountain Weavers Guild and learned how to dress a loom, to read and use a draft, and wove plain weave, basket weave, twill, a little double weave.

 

I ordered a loom which didn’t arrive until March 18, 1970 at 10 in the morning. It was a really important event in my life!

 

SM I would say! I’m amazed you remember the date and the time.

 

SA I do!

 

And from then on I’ve woven with very, very few exceptions, every day or done something that has to do with weaving, like travel to a place where I’m giving a workshop and giving a workshop.

So it has become an important part of my life.

 

Once I started weaving it was almost as if I had remembered doing it before. It felt like coming home.

 

It’s very exciting for me. It’s fun. I love figuring out things that I haven’t seen woven but I can imagine in my mind’s eye and figuring out a way to make them come into being is really a joyful experience.

 

We moved to Salt Lake City, UT on September 1st, 1970 where I didn’t know anybody except my husband and my little girl who was three at the time. So I read my way through the public library, through the university library in weaving, colour and design, and wove every day and was surprised when I went to my first guild meeting.

 

By then I’d been weaving about 3 years. I was in the meeting and someone said “Weavers never use singles linen as warp.”

 

And I thought “Oh!” Because I’d used singles linen for the first project on my new loom when I got it to make placemats for my mother in law. But I was new and too shy and didn’t say anything.

 

SM Well, did you have any trouble with your singles linen?

 

SA None! I just wove it. I just warped it up, wove it and sent the mats off.

 

The next meeting I went to someone said – in equally authoritarian way – “Well, weavers never weave plaids because you can’t sew them, they don’t match.”

 

The Christmas before I had given my father a shirt I had made out of a plaid fabric I’d designed and woven of 2/20’s worsted and I had no problem matching the plaids and again I thought – hmmm.

 

And that was really good for me because what it meant was, that any time someone says “Well, you don’t do this” or “Weavers don’t do that”, I more or less blow it off because if I want to do it badly enough I’ll figure out a way to do it.

 

Now if you were to tell me not to walk off the top of a skyscraper, I wouldn’t do it just to prove that you were wrong, but if I can’t think of a reason why it couldn’t be done that makes sense to me, I will try it and do it.

 

SM Well, I know what you mean. I think sometimes the weaving community comes up with its own version of urban legends.

 

SA You’re right! That’s a good way of describing them.

 

SM You have a scientific background in chemistry?

 

SA Yes. That’s correct.

 

SM Do you think that has influenced how you approach weaving?

 

SA I think probably who I am made me go toward the sciences and made me approach weaving another way. It wasn’t that the chemistry changed the weaving, it’s what I was drawn to. I know that working in chemistry and working to get a degree meant that I learned how to apply myself and to focus. And that’s invaluable if you want to accomplish anything. 

 

So the discipline that’s involved was useful.

 

The really amusing thing is that when I stopped doing chemistry I thought “Ah – well, I’m done with lab reports.” And the joke is one me because I do a lab report every day of my life because I keep notes of what I’m doing so that if I want to do that same thing again, I can. And in all of this time, which is getting on to – what? – 39 years now? Forty years. My goodness. 

 

I have duplicated something exactly twice. But! I take the notes because I consider that I’m sending information to my future self. And I don’t want Sharon in the future to have to work harder than she needs to so that if I used a particular yarn in this structure for the same kind of use before, I don’t have to start all over again figuring out the set. I can look through my notebooks to find what it is that I did before. And that gives me a good jumping off place for my initial sample.

 

I make samples ALL the time. I can’t afford not to make a sample. And I don’t think anybody else can either, frankly.   Because materials are expensive and if you have a big project that you didn’t perfect in the sample, and it’s not a success – you’re going to think two or three times before you go back to your loom. And that’s going to stop you or slow you down.

 

My mission is to have people weave things they love and stay at it. Having them have huge disastrous results is not the way to accomplish that. So samples really pay off.

 

SM I completely agree. It’s especially useful if you then launch an on-line magazine and you get ideas, you know, for that article that you write for it. 

 

I’m curious though, when you sample, are you doing little samples or do you sample full width?

 

SA Not full width. Because if I’ve made the warp the full width and it’s not what I need, then there’s a lot of yarn invested. But having said that, the samples are not two inch strips. Because what teaches me is what the selvedges look like, and I frequently cut off.

 

So, my samples are usually a minimum of 10 inches wide, and if I want to explore several things within one sample, like several colourways, or a straight draw versus a point, versus a twill that advances, I will put those side by side in the same sample, which would make it wider, and weave them all.

 

Doing that, let’s say I had 3 possibilities, if I only wove it in three ways, I’ve got 9 pieces of cloth to look at and one of them might be a total disaster, but another one might be better than anything I’d thought of. So these are reference pieces for me. And I hem stitch them and wash them and finish them and keep them on file so that I have them to refer back to.

 

Or to show to a client. Because I find very often, if I’m designing, and weaving say upholstery for somebody, the people for whom I’m working don’t have the vocabulary of weaving. They can’t tell you what it is they are looking for. So I bring out these big bins of woven samples for the kind of cloth that they are looking for and have them sort through them and put them into piles. I like this, I don’t like this, and yes, if you want, maybe. That’s okay too. 

 

And if you can tell me why it went into the I don’t like this pile, maybe because it’s green, that will help me because I need to find out what their taste is and what they are thinking about. 

 

So that gives me a look inside their minds when they don’t have the language to express. Does that make sense?

 

SM Completely.

 

When I did web development I did something similar. The people I was working for couldn’t express what they wanted, so I’d give them mock ups.    You can have this site or this site and this site, and then we’d pick it apart and I would learn what they liked from that.

 

SA Yes.

 

SM Very interesting. Do you do a lot of custom work?

 

SA Yes. A lot. These days I haven’t been free to weave something just because I want to weave it for some time. I’m obliged to make my living and this is how I do it. It’s not the way to get rich. But, if I can keep myself healthy and sheltered and clothed and fed, it’s a good life.

The worrying isn’t nice, but the rest of it’s wonderful.

 

SM I want to talk about another project that I’m sure your samples came in handy for. Your book.

 

SA Mastering Weave Structures was the book that I wanted when I started to weave. There weren’t that many weaving books in the late ‘60’s. The major one that I had then was Marguerite Davison’s The Handweaver’s Pattern Book and Mary Black’s Key to Weaving.

 

Marguerite Davison is really just a compendium. There are threading and little pictures of what happens if you treadle it this way, that way or the other way. 

 

And that was interesting for a while, but I wanted to know more about other ways of making cloth. Mary Black was helpful in that regard, but the lack that I found in that was that she said “here’s a waffle weave, if you use this yarn and you use this draft, it will look like this.”

 

And what I wanted to know is, what makes a waffle weave a waffle weave and can you make it bigger, can you make it smaller, I wanted to know how it worked.

 

And granted, that wasn’t the intention, I think, of her book, but it’s the book that I wanted. So I tried to do that in Mastering Weave Structures.

 

SM It’s a huge book. It must have taken a long time to do.

 

SA It did.

 

I wrote the first two or three chapters in the ‘80’s and then my personal life sort of fell apart and I hadn’t taken an advance and I couldn’t afford to take time off from working to work on it until Linda Ligon approached me two years before the book was published and said “I think we’re in a position to offer you an advance to live on if you would be interested in finishing this book” and I was interested because I’d re-read the chapters and they were good.

 

So I signed up. The advance wasn’t enough to live on as it turned out, but I worked on it every day and got the manuscript in early. Had to do a lot of weaving for it too, to generate the examples that are in it.

 

And originally she thought that it would just be in black and white, which was disappointing to me because colour is really a passion of mine and when they decided it would be in colour, then I knew it was going to be worthwhile.

 

I knew that Joe Coca, the staff photographer, would be doing the photography and he’s brilliant. I knew I was in good hands, so that was a pleasure.

 

SM It’s a really amazing book. Now I’m interested to hear you say that colour is a passion of yours because you’re so well known now for being the guru of weave structures. Do you consider yourself more of a colour weaver, or more of a structure weaver?

 

SA Actually, I’m both. And the funny this is, that in Utah, I’m known as a fine artist and known as a colourist. I was chosen as one of the quote 100 most honoured Utah artist unquote.

 

And everybody else is a painter. I think there may be two photographers and there might even be a sculptor, but there’s only one person in fibre and I’m that person.

 

My life has been sort of divided, that at home I’m known for colour and away I’m known for structure. I don’t see any reason in the world why you can’t be passionate about weave structure and colour at the same time. Urban legends to the contrary.

 

Because what I want to do is to use the colours so that the structure is made better, it’s shown off. And use the structure so that the colour is a stand out. It seems to me to be obvious that that should be the goal. To use them in conjunction with each other and then you’ve got something that is structural alone or colour alone could not produce.

 

SM Do you have an example from your recent work that typifies that coming together of colour and structure?

 

SA The scarf I wore today at the conference. It’s made with Halcyon’s GemStone silk and has a plain weave ground. The plain weave ground is the colour they call Amethyst. So it’s a violet. There are supplementary warps that come together to make squares of floats on the surface, squares of floats on the back and sort of half tones in between.

 

My concern was that if I made squares and they weren’t attached more, they could easily snag. But by weaving them very tightly in plain weave in between, that holds them in place and creates a half tone.

 

So I have three colours in this scarf across this amethyst, and the colours are garnet, sort of a red-violet, and topaz, which is sort of surprising. It’s a goldish yellow, and a bluer violet across the scarf.

 

The violet background really highlights the other colours and the fact that they are allowed to float for maybe 3/8ths of an inch to form these little squares means that the luster of the yarn, which is considerable is highlighted and it looks equally interesting from both sides. Because the same features occur on both sides. Where there’s a warp float on the face, there won’t be a warp float on the back because the yarn is on the top. But where there’s a blank place and just the violet ground shows, on the back there is a warp float.

 

So it’s reversible without any problem. And scarves need to be

because both sides show.

 

SM It’s interesting how you’ve used the structure to highlight not only the colours of the yarn, but the sheen.

 

SA Yes. Oh yes. Yes. Yes.

 

I pay attention to what the yarn does. In a sense the yarn speaks to me. If it shows up on a cone and it’s really lustrous, I think, okay, I get it, I need to let you float so that your luster can be seen. If I get it and the colour is really rich and deep, then I need to be careful about the structure that it doesn’t seem to fade into the ground, or look like a hole in the cloth. Because as people who have had vision since birth, we’ve learned to interpret a lighter place as a raised place, and a darker place as a place that’s recessed.

 

And so you can create illusions of depth that way.

 

I use those ideas in making upholstery because the very best upholstery would be perfectly flat because any time you’ve got a raised place, that’s going to take abrasion and wear out first. So if I can visually make it look deep, and physically have it flat, then it’s going to last a long time. They can have their cake and eat it too.

 

SM You’re not just creating cloth, it sounds like you’re really engineering cloth.

 

SA Good way of putting it. And I do work for engineers. I weave prototypes for them that they test before they put them into production in a big way.

 

I’ve woven some of the strangest things. Some things that at first thought I thought, this isn’t going to be possible. But I spent a lot of time thinking about it and imagining ways around the difficulties that were evident because of the material and did it.

 

SM So what are the strange things you’ve woven?

 

SA I’ve woven with nickel plated carbon fibres that are about a .06 mls in diameter. And they have terrific tensile strength, but no shear strength. And that means that when you make a shed, you’re pulling across it, which is sheer stress and it tends to break.

 

It was really very challenging stuff and possibly dangerous because little bits of it were flying around.

 

I did a lot of vacuuming, I covered my hair, I wore something that I had to eventually discard, because it was studded with this. I went out into the back yard and I just littered all over.   Which was a little bit scary but…

 

SM Is that where you wore dust mask?

 

SA Oh absolutely! Yes. Any time that I see anything flying I wear a dust mask. Brown lung doesn’t happen very much these days, but I don’t want it to happen to me.

 

SM Do I get to know what you were weaving the carbon fibres for?

 

SA Yes. They wanted samples to see if they could be used on airplanes that would be invisible to radar. That was one application. Because a plane that’s made of carbon fibres – if it’s struck by lightning – which happens a lot – you burn a hole in the outside of the airplane that’s about the size of your head.

 

And it’s hard for it to stay airborne if it’s got holes in it. So what they had been doing was using copper screening and layering it on and holding it in place with an epoxy or something that embedded it. But that was heavier and made it less useful so the nickel plated carbon fibre fabric would make a better skin.

 

They were also using it to put on the masts of America’s Cup racing ships so that they wouldn’t become lightning rods in the ocean. And they were also telling me that they were going to use it on bicycle frames.

 

It seemed to me if there’s a big thunderstorm, wouldn’t it be smarter to get off your bicycle and get low?

 

But who knows.

 

SM So you were essentially weaving Farraday cages?   Is that what you were doing?

 

SA Yes! That’s right.

 

(laughter)

 

SM Oh wow!

 

SA And that’s only one of the engineering projects.

 

SM How did you get involved in that? It sounds like such a fascinating project.

 

SA It was just serendipity that a fellow had come back from Wales because his little company was being subsumed into a larger one in Wales and he had been looking for a mill that would make just small pieces for him. Of course no commercial mill is geared up to do that.

 

So he decided on the plane that what he needed was a hand weaver and at that time there was a hand weaving store in Salt Lake City. So he went to the store and said he had this project and would they know of anybody who could do it.

 

The woman who was working there didn’t think that she wanted to do that so she called me up and said “There’s a guy here who wants to hire someone and would you like to talk to him?”

 

So I said sure. So he came to my house and showed me what the materials were and we were on.

 

It comes by word of mouth in odd ways. I do work for a man who collects antique juke boxes and they were very innovative, even before World War II. They had a network so that they plugged into the same electrical circuit, the speakers could be in another room without a trailing wire, just through the electrical system. Which amazed me, that they were doing this before 1940.

 

They’re very fancy. And he is absolutely meticulous. He is also a graphic designer, so when there were panels that were made to look like fake wood, he finds an original piece and duplicates it and then he sells some of his duplicates to help support his continuing project. 

 

So he went to the Utah Arts Council Folk Arts Division place in Liberty Park in Salt Lake City and said that he was looking for someone who could weave the cloth that covers the speakers. Because without exception, that cloth is blown. It’s been vibrating with all the bass going on through it and it’s usually been in a place that was maybe smoky or dirty, a road house or whatever. And so it has to be replaced.

This fellow will come to me with a tattered piece of cloth maybe 2 inches by 4 inches, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, filthy. Sometimes spray painted on it, that was one. My job is to figure out how it was woven and duplicate it.

 

The trick is to find the materials because a lot of the time it’s a 1/16th inch flat metallic and those are rarer than hen’s teeth. You can find them that are flat, but have two binder threads to help support them and you can find metallics that aren’t flat but it has to have a mirror like finish to look the way it was when it was brand new.

 

That’s a challenging job, and fun, because the fellow who does it is so passionate about his avocation that he goes on and on about the things, and I like learning new things, so I have learned a whole lot about how the old juke boxes worked at the height of their popularity. 

 

He could have a museum. I’ve been to see them and they all work. He has a little cup of quarters that he uses to start them up, and then of course empties them out so he could play them again.

 

He has original recordings in some of them, too.

 

SM Oh wow!

 

SA It’s really interesting.

 

I’ll do about anything as long as it’s honest work. And I’m paid enough to make it worthwhile.

 

If it’s an interesting job, so much the better. If it’s ugly cloth, it’s very disheartening and that takes it’s toll but most of the time it’s not.

If I’m designing myself, I make sure it’s not.

 

SM Would you talk a little bit about your design process? When you’re designing for yourself?

 

SA It most often starts with a colour. I’ll see something in nature, usually, a wild flower or a bird or a butterfly, or just a scene, or some ephemeral colouration in a sunset that will catch me and if I keep thinking about it, then I know that that’s something I need to use.

 

I used to do the swatch collections for Handwoven and adored it. I really loved it and was always for looking for some combination of colours that caught my eye and sort of caught me by the heart if you will. And for those, once I had the colours in mind, then the structures sort of come together, partly I guess because I’m familiar with structure which helps. But most of the time I make up a structure that I’ve never seen.

 

I can imagine in my mind’s eye a cloth, where the floats would be, if there are any, or where there would be a twill line, or whatever, and, but I do, even though I use a computer, I make a sketch, a rough sketch, of where I want the elements to be in the cloth. And then from that sketch, and I keep it rough because this is sort of a delicate thing. If I try to pin it down to much, it flies away – like a butterfly.

 

So, I make a rough sketch and then I look at it and see how many shafts it would take to make these features appear in the cloth. If there’s an area that always weaves plain weave, I’ll assign that to one and two. If there’s an area that floats but weaves plain weave after then I know I’m going to have to give it at least two because the plain weave will need it, so on that sort of thinking I figure out about how many shafts it’s going to take to make this thing and then I figure out what sheds I would need to make to make that come into being.

 

The beautiful thing is that if I’m using my looms, they’re not counter balanced, they’re jack looms. With the counter balance you’ve got things linked together where you don’t with a jack loom. But if it’s a jack loom, I know that if I’m thinking about what’s happening in the area, say, that I’ve threaded one and two, I don’t even have to consider that the rest exists. And I can figure out what I need to lift out of those.

 

And then I do the next section, whatever the threading is, until I have got it all and then of course all of that together becomes the lift that you tie to a treadle or peg into a dobby or use your computer and put into a dobby.

 

And that’s the way I design almost everything. By working it out that way. It’s really very straight forward and very easy. 

 

I don’t know of anybody else who’s even talking about doing it that way so nothing of teaching it so I try to sneak it in to almost every topic I teach, even though they’re different topics somewhere in them I’ll try to squeeze that in so people can get an insight into how it’s done.

 

SM So it sounds like you see weave structures as almost a palette to play with.

 

SA That’s a very apt description. I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but you’re right.

 

And it’s fun. Oh, it is so much fun.

 

SM What kind of loom are you weaving on?

 

SA I have two, well actually I have three looms. I have a Macomber that’s 40 inches wide, it has 16 shafts on it and I use that mainly for the art work that I do. Because it doesn’t take 24 treadles or 50 or whatever, to do the kind of thing I’m doing. Because what I’m doing is four block double weave and 16 gives you that option and it has enough treadles that I can do what I want to do.

 

The other two looms are both AVL looms and they’re the ones they call the Production Looms, although I wouldn’t say I’m a production weaver because I associate that with someone who weaves 50 yards of the same cloth over and over again. That’s not really what I want to do, or like to do.

 

I have a 48” wide AVL that has 16 shafts and a Compu-Dobby and a 60” wide loom with 24 shafts also Compu-Dobby. 

 

I use the wider loom when I weave blankets and when I’m weaving upholstery because upholsterers usually like to sell the cloth to the customer because they make another little mark up on that and so forcing them to re-figure their layout for a narrower cloth than they want makes them understandably cranky. And I want to be able to work with them and not have to fight on the issue. So I weave the upholstery full width on the loom.

 

SM I’ve not woven upholstery. Is it true that you have to set things very, very closely for it?

 

SA It’s true. Yes. I figure the set with a formula that I use that gives you a pretty good estimate for a balanced cloth, and then I usually increase that number by cloth to 25% but, I have to beat it to get that to be squared.

 

Weaving upholstery is hard work. It’s one of the reasons why I have a sheepskin on the bench of my loom because I get lathered up when I’m doing it!

 

(laughter)

 

SM Do you teach a lot?

 

SA Yes, I do. I started teaching in 1976 right after I got the Certificate of Excellence in Handweaving . I did that because I wanted to round out what I knew, and having had only 7 hour and a half lessons, everything else I’ve gotten from books. 

 

But fortunately for me I learn from books easily. Different people learn different ways. But I was lucky, I had Mary Atwater at my shoulder and you know, everybody, even though they weren’t living at the time, by their books.

 

So I thought that having a degree in chemistry wasn’t a big recommendation as a teacher that, they’re going to hire me because I’m a chemist?

 

Probably not! But if I had something in hand that shows them that I at least know quite a bit about weaving, that should help.

 

Now, having a certificate doesn’t guarantee that someone is a good teacher. But I think about it a lot. Actually, I think a lot. That’s one of the wonderful things about being a weaver. You’ve got time to do that.

 

And I work always on trying to find the clearest way to explain a particular topic so that people will hear it, get it the first time around. But if they don’t I find another way to go around and say the same thing but in a way that may be accessible.

 

I tell a lot of stories in my workshops. That helps to cement the idea so there are people who will, for example, never forget the threading of log cabin because I demonstrate it by walking and then hopping on the same foot twice to say okay, this is where you’ve got two dark in a row, and then they all laugh, but they remember. Little things like that that help to make it stay.

 

SM That’s brilliant.

 

SA Thanks. 

 

SM Yes, I think the human mind is just wired for stories.

 

SA Yes, I think you’re right. I think you’re right.

 

SM What sort of things do you teach?

 

SA I’ve got about 12 topics. My website http://www.sharonalderman.com no spaces, no capital letters, lists them. And there are about a dozen at this point. I have worked out three new ones but I’ve been on the road too long to put them up on my website. And website design is not something that I’m trained in, so it’s sort of labourious for me to get that done.

 

SM Can we get a sneak preview?

 

SA Yes. The new workshops, there’s a trio of them. And I thought that I should give a workshop, and these would have to be round robin, in different structures that will make stripes. And then, different structures that will make grids or plaids, or checker boards. And if you take those checker boards and you sort of blow them apart and you’ve got dots.

 

So the third one will be about structures that will make dots. Because when you learn weaving necessarily you sort of climb a structural tree. You study twills. That takes you out on one branch, which is very interesting and very vigorous branch. But if you want to do waffle weave, then you’ve got to go to a different branch and what I’m trying to do is to get people to integrate what they know, sort of hop from branch to branch where ever they want to be.

 

So if they think to themselves, I want a cloth that sort of looks like this, what do I know that makes that kind of shape or texture or whatever.

 

And I think of it sort of as developing a mental Rolla-dex. 

 

And I’m hoping that these new topics will do that. 

 

But I teach Colour and Weave Effect, Double Weave, really good colour theory class, I teach a workshop on how to use really snazzy yarns so that they don’t get lost when you weave them into cloth which happens more often than not.

 

SM What’s next for you?

 

SA I’m going home to weave 45 yards of grill cloth for antique Philco radios for a company in Mesa, Arizona. It won’t be the most exciting thing I’ve woven, and it’s a rather long warp. 

 

I know there are people who put on a hundred yard warps all the time, but I don’t. That’s the next job. I’ve got about 12 inches of width already measured out and sectionally warped, and beamed, and those sections are tight as a drum. You can knock on them like wood. 

 

So I need to go home and do the others just as well. And then weave and weave and weave and weave.

 

SM Do you have any more books that you are writing?

 

SA I think it would be fun to write a book about colour as a hand weaver uses it. Because my friends who are painters, if they want a little dot of crimson right there on the canvas, they just put it there. But if I don’t want it to appear in the warp direction and in the weft direction, I have to be ingenious to make it happen.

 

And there are things that are different about weaving from others. Now, having said that, colour theory is colour theory no matter what your medium is, but the way that you handle getting the harmonies that you want is different for a weaver.

 

The pointillists were trying to duplicate nature by making little dots of colour. Because when they looked at things closely, they saw the colours weren’t flat, that they were made of many, many colours.

Well, that’s something that weavers can do better than anybody because if you use small threads you can have variety of colours and make a new colour by crossing one with another that is richer and seems to have more depth than what a painter can do.

 

SM Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to us.

 

SA Oh my pleasure.

 

 

Musical interlude

 

That’s all for this episode, and now it’s time to get warped because everyone knows you have to be warped to weave.

 

Today’s sponsor is Lunatic Fringe Yarns. They sell a variety of yarns in weaving kits including their famous Tubular Spectrum and Grey Matter colour gamp kits. You can find them on line http://lunaticfringeyarns.com

 

Musical interlude