18th century Floor Coverings

I will be teaching a weaving class at the John C Campbell Folk School from January 14th through the 20th on old rug styles. The link for the description is: http://www.folkschool.org/index.php?section=class_detail&class_id=822

It's a very interesting weaving class, and although this is listed as an advanced class, I often have a brand new weaver or two in my classes and that would be fine for this class as well.

There are 3 students signed up right now, with a good promise of a fourth, but as this is a round-robin style class with 6 different rug warps, it would be great to have a few more students.

We are going to weave samples of Swedish drall, Venetian carpeting, Jerga from the American southwest, Shaker rag rugs, boundweave and all wool overshot from Canada. There is a brown & blue sample of the overshot in the photo below of Cath Dodds - it's on the end of the table and is brown & blue.

For those of you who have never been to the Folk School, it's a wonderful place to spend a week immersed in craft and community, and the food is great. I've been teaching there for ten year and I try to go once or twice a year. I'll be back again in September to teach a modular knitting class.

Drop me a line if you are interested and have any questions!

A Lily poem

My first born daughter is working on her poetry portfolio today and we've been emailing about a poem. She said I could share it with you here.

The Art of Simple Life

July Fourth I come home
to a light brown linen tent, set
into the backyard, with heavy
sides that sway only a little in the wind.
The tent hugs a big barn loom, five by five
by six feet, built a hundred years ago, rebuilt
a hundred times by my mother;
in Connecticut and Vermont

and Virginia. Often she spins the thread
for the warp, the big wheel in our house
facing west towards the blue
mountains where I was born. I eat cold boiled potatoes

sliced in half, with salt and pepper, and drink a tall dark
Swiss beer. Nothing big happens. There is enough time. Moving
from upstairs to down the air pushes weightless layers of my
skirt to my elbows, suspending my heels mid-air in the moment.

This is such a welcome addition to my day. I was driving in to work this morning and thinking about Grace. I feel like I've been looking for more grace in my life, and this morning the phrase "Give us grace for today, feed the famished affections" popped up in my mind and I savored the feeling of famished affections. Grace. And here comes our Lily, with a poem that speaks of grace.

The photie is of my Fiber Pavilion, which Peter & I set up on the 4th of July this summer so I could weave on one of my big ol' looms. The warp was a wool blanket woven in the old style, half width to be seamed up the center. This warp has a pattern of 7 blue stripes that run up the sides of the blanket. The design comes from the time of box beds in Scotland, where the weaver did not trouble with pattern except where it would show, hanging out the side of the box bed.

Miss R still has my camera, but I promise a photo of the finished blanket soon.