54: Claudia Chase of Mirrix Looms (transcript)

Transcribed by Laura Fry, 20 November, 2010 on November 20, 2010

54: Claudia Chase of Mirrix Looms (Transcript)

Where warp meets weft, this is WeaveCast with Syne Mitchell

Musical interlude

Hello and welcome to episode 54 Claudia Chase of Mirrix Looms.

This episode our guest is Claudia Chase, the founder and owner of Mirrix Looms. We talk about tapestry and bead weaving and her journey as a business woman running Mirrix.

We also discuss politics, what it’s like to hear colour, and other fascinating topics.

After the interview Claudia and some of her family members feature in a special holiday themed outtake. So, stay tuned for that.

Since this is the Thanksgiving episode I’d like to start out by saying how thankful I am that you’re listening. Whether you’re new to the show, or have been with us since it began back 2006, thank you for tuning in.

I’m also grateful for the help and support of the wonderful WeaveCast volunteers. Several people have worked on the show providing interviews and helping with audio editing. Nancy Smith-Kilkenny just turned in a wonderful interview with J. C. Boggs and Ruth Temple edited the audio in an interview with Sarah Pilgrim that’s about marketing your handwoven goods.

Both of those will be coming up in a show this winter. I’m honoured that they’ve given me the gift of their time.

Last episode I talked about how I’d spent my summer. Nancy Smith-Kilkenny spent her summer working on a new book called Craft a Guild.

It’s all about how to start a new fibre guild or re-vitalize an existing one and if you’ve ever wanted to be part of the behind the scenes working of a guild, or just wondered what’s involved in running a guild, it’s a great resource. You can find the book and additional supporting content on line at http://craftaguild.com

I’ve been getting emails about my bookmark kits and I’m happy to say that the rigid heddle bookmark kits are back in stock. The last of the original colourways was snatched up by my students at the Golden Gate Fiber Institute. I put them out on a table and *poof* - they were gone within minutes. I don’t think it came to blows but it was kind of close.

But just the other day I received a brand new shipment – six gorgeous all new colourways for the new season. The kits contain hand painted Tencel by Kathy and Diane the artists at Just Our Yarn and what you get in the kit is enough yarn to weave up four jewel like colour and weave bookmarks. There are instructions on how to weave up the kits on line, or you can get a print out that is a 9 page full colour pattern that has additional content that’s not available on the web.

The bookmarks weave up fast on a rigid heddle loom and make wonderful holiday gifts. Through the end of December I’m running a special – the complete kit with all the yarn you need and the 9 page full colour pattern booklet – is 25% off.

That’s only available through to December 31st.

And if you want to do it for holiday crafting you should place your orders now.

You can find the bookmark kits on line at http://weavezine.com/shop

In other exciting news registration for the Madrona Winter Retreat is now open on their website. This is a wonderful event that happens in Tacoma, Washington in February. You can find out more about it on line at http://madronafiberarts.com

I’m teaching two brand new classes there this year. E-textiles for knitters and weavers, that is garments that light up and do other interesting electronic things.

And a second class called Clothing from the rigid heddle loom which I’ll be co-teaching with Selah Barling. I’ve already gotten emails from a couple of the students who registered for the classes and they are really fun folk. So I’m really looking forward to it. If you are interested and you are in the Pacific Northwest area, that is http://madronafiberarts.com

Next up I have a weaving question from a listener. Louise emailed me and asked “When I weave on rigid heddle looms and shaft looms the ends of the weaving beat higher than the middle. It seems as if the reed stretches the weaving when beating. I’m at a loss as to the cause as it happens with all my weaving. Could you please tell me what to do, or what I am doing wrong?”

Okay Louise. First of all, thank you for your question. I think this is going to be a really fun feature for the show and you’re helping kick it off.

Now what is happening when you’re weaving is that you are not putting enough weft material across in each shot. And this is causing the selvedge threads to be drawn in, to pull together closer. So while the body of your cloth might be weaving at 12 ends to the inch, what you’re sleyed it at, the selvedge threads, because they’re being crammed together, might be effectively 24 ends per inch or 30 ends per inch.

What this does to the fabric is it makes a warp faced textile, only at the edges, and you’re not able to pack as many weft shots into an inch in a tightly set or warp faced fabric as you are in the centre of the cloth.

So what happens is, you get fewer picks per inch at the edges, and more picks per inch in the centre. And that is what creates that smiling shape.

That’s a very detailed explanation of something this is very simple to fix. All you need to do to get rid of those smiling edges is provide more weft in each shot. Now how do you do that?

Some weavers when they throw the weft, they create a bubble. The yarn comes from one selvedge curves up an arc and comes down to the next selvedge. If that’s how you weave you just need to make that bubble taller because that will put more weft into the centre and spread the warp back out where it’s supposed to be.

Some weavers like to put the weft across at an angle. If that’s how you weave you just need to make that angle bigger. Again that will put more weft into the cloth and your selvedges will straighten out.

If you put in too much weft you’ll get loops at the edge of your cloth which you don’t want, so the way to fix smiling warps is to get exactly the right amount of weft in each shot.

How do you determine whether you have exactly the right amount of weft in each shot? You have to experiment because it depends on the thickness of the yarn, the tension you’ve put on the loom, how you throw the shuttle, the humidity in the air, there are too many variables. So what I do, whenever I sit down at a loom, I start to weave and I look at my selvedges. If they’re doing what they are supposed to be doing then I know I’m good.

If they’re not doing what they are supposed to be do, I look at what they are telling me about the cloth I’m creating and adjust my bubble or my angle accordingly.

I’ve taken a lot of workshops with some wonderful teachers. I’ve read a tremendous amount about weaving in books, magazines, on-line, but I find, and I tell my students, that the best, best teacher to help you improve your weaving is the loom.

The things the loom tells you are always true.

That’s my long-winded answer. My short answer is add more weft.

I love teaching and I love the idea of bringing a little bit of what I do in workshops onto the podcast, so I would love to have more of your weaving questions on the show.

I’m so excited about this idea that I’m going to raffle off an autographed copy Peggy Ostercamp’s wonderful new book Weaving For Beginners.

To enter, all you need to do is send me a weaving question between now and March 30th. Everyone who sends me a question will be entered in the raffle whether or not their question is used on the show and there will be one raffle entry per person. You can ask as many questions as you like but each person will only be entered in the raffle once.

There are instructions about how to submit a question to the show up on the site. If you go to http://weavecast.com and click the Ask a Question navigation link at the top of the page. There are 3 different ways you can send me a question. You can send an email, or you can send them as audio.

Our sponsors this episode are the talented ladies at Just Our Yarn, independent artisans creating hand dyed luxury yarns and kits for weavers and knitters. Their colours are simply luminous.

You can find more information about their yarns and their upcoming show schedule on their website http://justouryarn.com

Musical interlude

SM I am here in Edmonds, Washington with Claudia Chase, who is the owner of Mirrix Looms, which are some very cool copper tapestry and bead looms. So, welcome.

CC Thank you.

SM I’m always curious, how did you get involved in weaving?

CC I was pregnant with my daughter. I had majored in poetry and I was too distracted being pregnant to write poetry any more. So I took a tapestry class. I think I attended three of the classes and they were also teaching us how to do natural dyeing. But I figured out natural dyeing also included some pretty nasty chemicals and I was not going to do that while I was pregnant.

So, I took the little rigid heddle loom that I bought and I brought it home and I wove 9 scarves. Which had nothing to do with tapestry. (laughter)

Once she was born I started weaving tapestry on that rigid heddle loom.

I kind of taught myself.

SM And did you weave tapestry for a while, then?

CC I wove it for quite a while. I was in New Hampshire at the time. I got juried into the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen and started selling these little tapestry purses.

Colour is my thing. I assume a lot of weavers are like that. They just love colour. So colour is the basis of everything I do and I had this weird thing called synesthesia. When I hear things I see colours. When I feel things I see colours.

So there are always colours swirling through my brain.

SM So what colour is the sound of the bell?

CC It depends. I have to hear the sound. And each letter has a colour. Numbers have colours. Everything has shapes. You know, if I think about a year, there’s a shape to months and where they are. It’s interesting when you’re born with that and you don’t realize everybody doesn’t have this. My siblings all have it too.

At some point, someone pointed this out to me and I read about it in Scientific American magazine and oh, my god, that’s me!

I hear pink!

(laughter)

I see red. But, the way you discover if you really have it is you go through the letters of the alphabet and each one has a colour and the colour is always the same.

SM So A is always orange, say.

CC Yes. Red.

(laughter)

Things aren’t always solid colours. They move like feelings move from one colour to the next so it’s colour series that go with emotions.

And pretty much they’re always the same, you know joy will have the same colour, same pattern.

It completely affects my reason because I see colour constantly. I experience colour constantly. I’m never not experiencing colour.

I don’t focus on colour theory because it’s like, I live colour theory. It’s kind of like someone who just hears grammar perfectly. They don’t have to understand the rules.

It’s like living in a paintbox. I will lie in bed and I will just let colours run through my head to calm down and then I’ll weave them.

SM So you could actually weave something using your synesthesia to have words built in using the colour that you associate with letters.

CC I could do that. You know, that’s true, oh my gosh.

SM You could write secret messages to yourself.

CC Oh my god, that’s…well was telling my sister who has it and she said the way she memorized phone numbers is red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow, orange, pink. You just take the colour association.

But you know, you’re right. That’s interesting. That’s a good idea!

SM So you and your siblings, do you agree on the colours.

CC No. That’s the neat thing about it. Except for ‘O’. Most people have this thing, ‘O’ is white and zero is grey, grayish-white. That’s pretty common.

SM That’s fascinating. I mean you could weave something that expressed joy or shapes or…

CC What I do, I weave emotions. So whatever colours add up to whatever emotions will be there. That’s how it works more than mini-words or concepts.

And so I remember one day I was really, really, really upset. It was years ago. I crashed my computer. It did one of those erase the hard drive kind of thing. You know, years ago we used to do that kind of thing.

And I remember being really upset and going into the room where I had my upright tapestry loom. There was a weaving on it that totally expressed calm. And I remember standing there for an hour and looking at these colours so I would calm down.

And it worked!

SM Going from being tapestry weaver to manufacturing tapestry looms is quite the jump. How did that happen?

CC By this time I’d gotten rid of the rigid heddle looms and I purchased large wooden floor looms, a Tissart and a Glimakra, but I had nothing that I could bring to soccer games and gymnastic events. I needed something, I didn’t know how to knit at the time and didn’t know how to crochet. So I needed a toy to bring places.

So I would try little wooden frame looms and I would weave and weave and weave and then I would cut them off and throw them away because the loom wasn’t good enough and the selvedges weren’t correct.

So I wanted a portable tapestry loom with great tension and a great shedding device. And I got together with a friend of mine and we designed the Mirrix Loom.

He worked for a company that made fire engines, so he went into his garage and he took out fire engine parts. The aluminum beams that are the top and bottom beams were originally fire engine trim.

We have these pieces extruded specifically for our needs. The copper was from plumbing jobs he’d been doing. We bought and eventually made all the other stuff, but basically it started with fire engine parts.

The first prototype was not so different from this. We perfected a bunch of the pieces but many of the pieces are manufactured by other companies.

Mirrix Looms is located in Wisconsin, but the actual loom itself looks very much like what we have today.

The top and bottom beam is made of square tube aluminum. The sides are two thread rods that come up from the bottom beam. The top beam has two copper tubes coming down from it. So you have those two pieces of the loom and they go together. The copper encases the threaded rods.

And then there are wing nuts that allow you to put tension on.

And then you have a big fat copper tube that goes in front that serves as a shedding device.

SM I have to confess. I actually own a Mirrix Loom and I’m a huge fan of it and it’s actually a good enough loom that it’s made happy to do tapestry because I…

CC I like these confessions.

(laughter)

Gee, that’s too bad, I’m so sorry.

(laughter)

SM But one of the things that, for me, made working on the Mirrix Loom such a joy is the shedding device. It’s something I haven’t seen on other tapestry looms. It seems very intuitive and easy to put into place and it stays in place.

How did you come to create such an interesting little shedding device?

CC Well I had owned a Hagen(?) Loom which is kind of a similar concept in tapestry looms but they’re made out of painted steel. In fact I don’t think you can get them in this country anymore. They were imported from Norway, I believe, and so you can’t get them.

I had had one of those. It was about 22” wide I think, so it wasn’t real portable.

It had a shedding device that was sort of similar, sort of not. It was wooden. It had only one bar that you attached to the warp, not two bars, and it didn’t attach to the loom very well. It was very shaky.

So I took that concept, which I think is a pretty traditional concept of a shedding device for a frame loom, and we perfected it.

Now, that’s the piece that changed the most over time. Our original clip that held it onto the loom were not as good, in fact I’ll get back to that, we had, instead of screw things to hold the bars we had little like round hole things. We’re actually changing the Mirrix Loom now, the clip that you see there?

SM Uh-hmm.

CC Are becoming wooden.

SM Oh!

CC My brother is creating new wooden clips that are going to be quite different.

SM So why the change from plastic to wood?

CC The plastic clips, they’re made out of malleable plastic which costs a fortune. It’s $800 for a square metre. And the people who make them for me don’t always get them perfect.

That got me very angry because I want everything to be perfect. So, we decided that we could do them out of wood and we can make all perfect.

SM You started weaving. You wanted a portable loom you could take to your kids sporting events. How then did it grow into a business?

CC This is the funny story. My husband at the time, my first husband, was a business person. Once we had designed this loom, he said “Oh you should go into business selling these looms!” And I said “No, that’s the last thing on earth I want to do, is go into business selling these looms.”

I just wanted to use these looms. But he put pressure on me to do it. We made the prototype in January, in June we had gone into business. And the way that started was fascinating. I called up Earth Guild, because I knew they were going to be at Convergence, and I said “If I send you 20 of these looms, will you have them at your booth? And if they don’t sell, just send them back to me, I’ll pay all the shipping.”

And then I hired Kathy Sporing, who is a tapestry weaver, to demonstrate on one of the looms. Actually I gave her a loom if she would sit there and demonstrate.

Convergence happened. A couple days later I get a phone call from somebody. They were at Convergence and wanted a Mirrix Loom. I said “I sent 20, why didn’t you get it there?” She said “They’re all out.”

And I thought okay, this is going to work.

SM Why don’t you tell me a little bit about how Mirrix Looms are manufactured?

CC That’s another wonderful story. I started this company with the guy who originally made it out of fire truck parts. He manufactured them in Wisconsin. He lived in Wisconsin. I moved back to New Hampshire.

At some point he wanted me to buy him out. At this point I had already divorced the husband who had me go into business. I was able to do it because I was making money, and this guy wanted me to buy him out.

I didn’t have the money to buy him out. So I contacted another friend who lived in Wisconsin and he bought my first partner out.

He moved the manufacturing to a place called Sunshine House. Sunshine House is the place that employs mentally disabled people. It’s a wonderful place.

Normally they just take work from various places. They bring it in. But Mirrix became completely housed there. So he set this wonderful thing up for me.

And then I decided to buy him out because I like running things by myself and we agreed that would be a good idea. So I bought him out but Mirrix Looms stayed at Sunshine House where it is to this day.

And it’s just fabulous.

SM So they are manufactured in the USA.

CC Everything. And anything that we don’t actually mill ourselves we have milled by a company in the United States.

SM Before this interview I did a little bit of research and found out that you actually have an interesting day job.

CC Yes. (laughter) Which one’s that?

(laughter)

Yes, I have a day job as a state rep. I’ve been doing that for, this is my 3rd term. We have two year terms and it’s my last term.

SM How did you get into being a state representative?

CC I don’t know. I guess I was really angry about what was going on in politics. I’m kind of a left leaning politician. I was in a very right leaning state. I wanted to see some changes made.

My daughter was attending university at UNH and she had discovered there was a mother-daughter state rep. There were two of them in the same district and she suggested to me that we should do that.

So then I decided to run but I decided I didn’t want her to run because she was a freshman and I wanted her grades to stay A’s. So instead she became my campaign manager.

We had no idea what we were doing. Layna decided that the colour of our campaign should be magenta and it turns out, you can see those magenta signs from miles away.

No blue, no green, no red for us. It was a magenta campaign.

I was Chase for Change. The other side didn’t see us coming because no Democrat had ever won in that district since the Civil War, and no female Democrat, ever.

We won by four votes. But initially we lost because they didn’t count the votes correctly and then in a recount we won.

As a result I wound up on election law so that I could make sure that those votes are always counted correctly.

SM What’s it like being a small business owner and a state representative?

CC The problem with being state rep is you’re in sessions 7 months a year and in New Hampshire you don’t get paid for this job.

Well, we do. We get $100 a year. And in fact when I first ran I lost and then won in the recount. And when I lost everybody around me was upset and I was relieved because I realized what I had been getting myself into.

(laughter)

And then I won and was, like, okay. It’s hard to run a business and be a state rep at the same time.

And I really want to go back to just running Mirrix.

SM Were you able to accomplish what you wanted to as state representative?

CC Some of the social issues we were able to get. Some of the financial things, no.

It’s really hard to accomplish things in politics I’ve figured out. But I’ve accomplished some things.

SM Well, you’ve got me curious – what were the social issues?

CC Same sex marriage. We did pass medical marijuana but then the Senate killed it. There were a lot of things that we accomplished in the House that later got killed by the governor or the Senate.

SM I’ve got friends who got married in New Hampshire, so yay you!

CC Thank you. It was huge. It was huge. It was huge. They’re trying to turn it…

SM Yes.

CC They’re not going to succeed.

SM One of the interesting things about Mirrix Looms is that it’s not only tapestry loom but people also use it a lot for beading.

CC Yes.

SM How did you get started using for beading?

CC I’m in business. I have this tapestry loom. Now the tapestry market is not huge. I had this friend Jean from Jean’s Fiber and Beads. She was selling it as a tapestry loom. She suggested that we use it as a bead loom.

That’s where I discovered a method of actually weaving beads on the Mirrix Loom. Normally when you quote weave quote beads what you’re doing is you have the warp on the loom and you string up your beads and you put your strung beads behind and in between the warps in the loom. You press them to the front and you sew through them.

So you’re actually not weaving beads.

Native Americans have used something called a heddle loom which I think is similar to a rigid heddle loom and they’ve used that for actually weaving beads. Putting the beads in between the raised and lowered warps.

So, thinking about that I realized that because the Mirrix Loom has a shedding device we could use the shedding device to actually weave beads.

Jane helped me with this. It was hard for me to conceptualize this in the beginning because I wasn’t a bead weaver and I didn’t like beads.

Now I love beads. And I love bead weaving.

But then, they just seemed very tiny and annoying.

And they roll around a lot.

But what we discovered is, when you weave beads on the Mirrix Loom you put two warps in every dent instead of one and so when you raise half of the warps you will have warp next every bead. So you’re raising half the warps and you stick your beads behind and in between the raised set of warps.

And then when you lower those warps and raise the other warps, you lock your beads in place.

And there will be a thread next to every bead. That was so hard for me to get that in the beginning because if you set it up the way you would for tapestry, and wove the beads in, you’d have a thread a bead, a bead, a thread, a bead, a bead, a thread.

So this makes a very stable fabric. The bead purses that were woven in the ‘30’s were woven on regular weaving looms with a regular weave set up, not with double warps. And so they would have to leave an empty thread between each row of beads to stabilize it.

And I didn’t want to do that, so we came up with this concept.

SM How does the drape of this technique compare to the drape of a more traditional bead weaving?

CC It’s similar because in a more traditional bead weaving you have twice as many wefts because you’re sewing back through.

This one you have twice as many warps.

The drape is actually similar. The piece is stronger though because your warps determine the strength of your piece. So if you’ve twice the number of warps, your piece is going to be stronger.

It basically looks the same when it’s off the loom.

SM You’re actually in town teaching a workshop on this technique.

CC Yes.

I’m going to be teaching at Semantics Gallery. They sell my jewelry. They’ve done that for a few years. I decided – my son is in school in California, and he had spring break and my brother and his spouse live in Edmonds and I needed to get the heck out of New Hampshire. So I decided randomly that I wanted to teach a workshop here. Originally I thought I might teach it at my brother’s house, but then I contacted the gallery that sells my jewelry and he said he’d love to have it there. I thought oh, my god, how wonderful to teach weaving in a gallery setting.

Put it all together, got 6 students to sign up and I’ll be teaching this weekend.

SM Have you done a lot of teaching?

CC Before I got into politics I used to teach tapestry quite a lot. I’m just getting back into it. I love it, so I’m glad to be getting back into it.

SM So you have a wonderfully designed loom. Do you have any plans for changing it or things you would tweak on it?

CC As I said we’re creating these new clips out of wood. We have been tweaking it all along. What we always keep in mind is that the first Mirrix Loom has to work with anything we create afterwards.

Any accessory, anything we do, is compatible with our first looms.

I do every couple of years, come up with a new size or a new concept because that’s fun. Right now we have 7 sizes ranging from 5” wide to 38” wide.

We have this little mini-Mirrix that, my concept you can carry in your pocket, it’s not quite that small, but that’s the ultimate soccer game-watching loom.

SM I’m glad to hear about that because my son just started soccer.

(laughter)

CC This is important. This is really important!

SM So how did your kids feel about you weaving on the sidelines?

CC I don’t know if I ever wound up doing it that much. (laughter) The concept was great but I took up knitting. I think I did more of that and the reason was, when you whip out a loom you get too much attention. (laughter)

And I didn’t have the little mini-Mirrix when my kids were still doing soccer. That would have been better because you can sort of hide it under your coat, you know.

But I used to take it on the plane when we first designed the loom. I took the 16” loom on a plane and I put it on the tray. I don’t think you can do that now. They’d probably take it away.

SM Why? It’s not got sharp edges.

CC You could hit someone really hard with it. But you know, you’re right, maybe you could.

But I put it on the train and we took pictures for our original ads – you can take it anywhere.

SM How long have you been in business?

CC Since 1996.

SM Fourteen years! What’s it taken to be successful and continue doing business all that time?

CC Working at it a lot and not being the state rep is really going to help, but it’s just the perfect company. It’s a niche market, nobody in China has decided to copy me, yet. Although I once heard a funny story about that. Mirrix customers are very loyal. Very loyal. And they can’t stand it when they think someone has ripped off the Mirrix Loom.

Someone contacted me and said “There’s a loom that looks like the Mirrix – it’s on eBay. You gotta do something about that!”

I went on eBay and looked at this pitiful loom that really didn’t look like a Mirrix – I know what a Mirrix looks like. And I could point out everything that was wrong with it. And they had about 6 of them that they were selling. Weird sizes, too.

I don’t remember if I contacted the person or not. I don’t think I bothered. But then some of the customers that bought these contacted me and started complaining about these Mirrix rip offs. Do you get it? You just bought a competitors rip off of my loom and you’re complaining to me!

I can’t do anything about it.

So they didn’t sell any more looms after those 6.

SM Now I have seen what I am are assuming are Mirrix Looms on eBay.

CC Yes.

SM So you now do have an eBay presence?

CC Every once in a while I’ll sell a second hand loom on eBay or, there was a time when we were having a horrible time with our server and our website was crashing all the time so for a while there I was selling a little bit on eBay.

SM Okay, I bought my Mirrix from off eBay and I thought ‘oh gosh, I hope it’s not a knock off’!

CC No, but you would know.

(laughter)

CC you would know. I mean really, you can tell from these pictures like this is not a Mirrix Loom. I think the other thing was the person must have thought, okay I’ll just go and get plumbing parts, this and that, and I’ll whip one of these up. Well, they probably put more money into making that loom than what they sold it for.

Because there are economies of scale. We buy thousands of pounds of aluminum and thousands of pounds of copper and we have thousands of pieces made and manufactured for us which you really can’t reproduce in your garage.

SM Is it getting harder to produce the looms with the price of copper falling?

CC Our manufacturing costs pretty much tripled over the last few years. That was hard. But I didn’t want to raise the price of the loom so we’re just kind of dealing with it.

And then we found a good deal on copper one day so I bought thousands of pounds of it, so, we’ll have copper for a while.

SM I’m curious about the name ‘Mirrix’. Where did you get that?

CC I made it up. I looked up some Greek and Italian terms for ‘to wonder at’, ‘to mirror’ and I can’t remember what the original verb is with mirrorar or something like that and then I stuck the ‘ix’ on the end like Klennix.

I guess I wanted to sound like ‘I’m weaving on my Mirrix’, and they do! It’s so cool. They don’t say that ‘I’m weaving on my tapestry loom’ they saying ‘I’m weaving on my Mirrix’.

So I made it up, to wonder at, to look at, to mirror.

SM Do you think most of your customers are beaders or tapestry weavers at this point?

CC Wow – that changes. That shifts. I think probably bead weavers because there are so many more bead weavers than tapestry weavers.

But I think the tapestry market is now growing again. There are so many shifts. The bead market just exploded. Every corner had to have a bead store. And now they are ramping down because there’s just not that much business to go around.

Plus I think the internet makes it more difficult for bead stores to survive. But what was interesting about the bead market is, it was hard to get into. The tapestry market was easy. Here’s a tapestry loom, weavers like looms, but there aren’t a lot of people into bead weaving. But more importantly the equipment for bead weaving was always kind of inexpensive and not so great.

So when you presented bead stores with a loom that was actually relatively expensive and very weaverly, you know, not what they were used to, they baulked.

So I called the bead store and say “Yes, you have to sell this loom, it’s really great, you know.” “Weelll, not really into bead weaving, nobody’s really into it” and then someone would come into the store and say “Do you have a Mirrix loom?”

And then they’d call me up and say, “Okay, I want to sell your looms now.”

Okay, I’d sell them a minimum of two looms and a customer would buy it and sometimes the bead store owner would figure out how to use it and sell a lot of them, and then other times they’d just put it on the shelf and it would just sort of sit there and look sad and that would be the end of that outlet.

We have some really great stores that sell the loom and they do a really good job.

SM I remember eons ago, I was trying to learn beading on one of those $6 little things, they had, like, no shedding device whatsoever. And it’s entirely a different experience.

CC Yes.

SM And maybe that’s why nobody like bead weaving is because the equipment just wasn’t that good.

CC I think that is very true. Bead weavers have a tendency to think the loom’s expensive. The 16” loom is pretty much the most common size and it costs $250.

So if you’re used to spending $6 on one of those little things which don’t really work, paying $250 seems like lots.

However, you can spend $250 in beads in about 5 minutes!

(laughter)

You know, considering a tube goes for like, $8.

SM Those Japanese ones are spendy.

CC Okay. You really want your equipment to be great. And tapestry weavers understand that. Once you can convince them if you have a great piece of equipment those beads are going to weave themselves a lot better than if you have junky equipment – you know once you get over that hurdle, you’ve got them sold.

SM If somebody was interested in buying one, how do they go about doing that?

CC They can go to our website http://mirrixlooms.com

There are stores throughout the country that sell them. Weaving stores and bead stores. And stores in other countries. I’ve had stores in Australia, England, France, I believe, Germany, and I’m not sure if they still carry them. But we do a lot of sales outside this country from the website.

SM Aside from the looms, what other things do you sell?

CC We have stands that you can put all the size looms on and we also have a treadle, an add-on treadle.

SM That raises the sheds?

CC Yes. That was something *I* wanted. I thought portable tapestry looms have to have the option of the treadle. Absolutely had to have it. So we designed the treadle which is connected by a cable so that the treadle can be anywhere on the floor.

And you can use it either with both feet going horizontally or vertically with one foot.

It’s fabulous. It raises and lowers the shed, it’s just wonderful.

SM You have to like hold it the whole time that you’re…

CC No, it tends to stay in place. So if you take the treadle and the stand and the loom you have a floor loom. But if you break it down and put it underneath the bed. It was one of the things I didn’t like about tapestry looms is that the big ones take up an enormous amount of space.

Our 38” loom which can do a very wide piece, and the stand and the treadle you have a floor loom that you don’t have to look at all the time if you don’t want to.

SM Now I’m still trying to understand the treadles.

So you push it and it stays down and then you push it again and it changes the shed?

CC It’s on a hinge and it’s two pieces of flat aluminum that are about 4” wide and about a foot long. So there’s two pieces of aluminum and there’s a hinge in between them so it rocks back and forth on the hinge and there’s a cable that goes up to the loom and you take the handle that goes into the shedding device and then replace it with this other mechanism. So when you push the treadle one way, it sends information to the cable to turn the shed.

When you push it, it stays in place.

SM And then you rock it back the other way to change the other shed.

CC So you can do it left and right foot on it or just one foot on it.

SM Oh! Very cool. Very innovative.

So what else have you got?

CC We have kits. I always come up with little bead kits because they are so much fun. And we sell bead patterns.

I like the designing part. There’s a saying that if you love sailing don’t buy a sailboat company. I always thought that was bogus. I mean if you love sailing you *should* own a sailboat company, right?

One of the wonderful things about Mirrix is I have to weave all the time. I have to come up with new ideas. I have stay interested so that when I talk to my customers I’m excited about it. As excited as they are.

The other thing is when I talk to customers I’m always learning new things that I incorporate.

I recently taught a workshop. I’m teaching these two women and I’m learning all these new things about my loom while I’m teaching, thinking ‘this is why I need to teach again’. It’s so much fun.

SM Have you ever incorporated any design changes based on customer feedback?

CC Yes, I just did from that workshop, actually. (laughter)

A way of putting on heddles that would be a lot easier I got from that workshop. I was trying to come up with a new way and we worked it out there. Yes.

Constantly.

SM If you have to characterize what you’re guiding principles are, for running Mirrix, what would that be?

CC This is going to sound so corny – customer service. I deal with every customer. I love to meet customers because people who buy the looms are buying the ultimate toy. They’re happy people. So dealing with them is just fun.

SM Unlike the people you have to deal with as state representative?

CC Yes! Exactly!

(laughter)

I have happy customers, and sad constituents. And also the whole manufacturing process for Mirrix is just wonderful. It’s a very happy pleasant environment. Nothing bad ever happens. People who manage Mirrix are wonderful.

I’ve been really blessed. Really lucky with this whole process. I don’t think it’s like any other company in this world.

SM What are your plans for the future.

CC Recently I decided that because I’m going to retire as state rep, I’m going to retire from politics, I’m going to devote all my time to Mirrix.

My daughter now works for me. She’s my marketing director. So our plans are to double, triple, quadruple the size of Mirrix in the future.

I do want to grow. It’s kind of time.

Musical interlude

The next clip is an out take from the interview. I didn’t include it in the interview because it didn’t quite fit into that segment of the show but it was just too seasonal not to include.

One of the interesting things about this interview was that, for the very first time, the interviewee’s whole family stayed and watched the interview.

Claudia Chase’s brother and her daughter Layna were there and some other relatives who, I’m not exactly sure, but there was a crowd and I don’t know about Claudia, but it made me a little nervous at first.

I had to kind of get used to it.

So in this out take you can actually hear her family laughing and interacting and her brother is the comedian of this bit.

Musical interlude

CC I was on tv once, it was the weirdest thing I ever…I was on as a state rep with two other state reps and when it turned out, they wound up asking is, it was nothing to do with politics. They asked us about how we prepare our turkey!

And I’m like, “I’ve never cooked a turkey in my life” and then my husband calls up and he’s like “I’m the one who cooks the turkey in this household!”

It was hilarious. It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done in my life.

SM They didn’t tell you ahead of time?

CC No and they had, yes, 3 of us were on, were like, very geeky politicians, and none of us were really into the cooking turkey thing. So we were pretty amazed.

SM Well, you’d think it would be like relevant information. Oh like, you know, by the way, we’re going to be talking to you about turkeys.

(brother) Well, they said they were going to talk turkey but she thought…

CC Yes, I thought politics. So there was nothing – it was just – and the person who was doing it is a very political person, very liberal, you know, I love her, and it was about…

SM I hear a phone off the hook.

CC Yes, there’s a phone off the hook, guys. We’re going to start soon, so save all yelling for afterwards.

Musical interlude

Coming up is a song about thanksgiving. I couldn’t decide whether to go with the sentimental, sweet song, or the somewhat crude and funny one.

So I’m going to play both.

The first song is Thanksgiving by Steve Stellavato. And it is the sweet one.

Musical interlude

Our next song is I Heart Thanksgiving by Robert Lund. This is the funny song.

Now if you’re easily offended, well, best just turn off the show now.

On the other hand if you are a fan of Weird Al Yankovic you are in for a treat.

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.

Our musical guests this episode were Steve Stellavato with Thanksgiving and Robert Lund with his musical parody I Heart Thanksgiving.

Our sponsor this episode are the talented ladies at Just Our Yarn, independent artisans creating hand dyed luxury yarns and kits for weavers and knitters. Their colours are simply luminous.

You can find out more information about their yarns and their upcoming show schedule on their website http://justouryarn.com

Musical interlude