Warp and Weft
Dear Friends,
A few weeks ago, the Alexandria Art Therapy team met up for a summer gathering, where weaving artist Sam Self taught us how to make woven tapestries with yarn scraps.
We assembled our looms and strung our warp strings, and then we turned our attention to the center of the table. In a large basket, Sam had placed a jumble of yarn scraps for us to use.
In the group of artists, no one hesitated–each of us knew what “spoke” to us. Kathryn and I reached for the fluffy blue yarn. Laura nabbed the mustard yellow. Katie and Adele took aqua and coral. We immediately saw the potential in the scraps and began to gather our own individual piles. The rough and soft, thick and thin, neutral and vivid.
After some instruction from Sam, we began to weave. The room went silent. Our hands knew what to do, even though none of us had woven a tapestry before. There’s something intuitive in the warp and weft. We know the rhythm of over and under. The inhale and exhale of air in our lungs. The struggle and ease that we feel tugging our lives.
While my family has had a fairly easy summer (vacations, new ventures, swimming lessons at the city pool), I’m struck by how many people in my orbit have experienced the opposite. Friends going through unexpected marriage breakups. Aging relatives in and out of the hospital, and the strain this puts on the rest of the family. A new house…with a brown recluse infestation.
Sam taught us to weave our particular projects from the back of the tapestry. As you’re working, all you see are the messy bits–the tucked string tails and taut wool. It’s only when you flip the loom over that you see how the finished project will appear. Even as it’s coming together, you’re constantly checking and re-checking, seeing if the messy, scrappy work behind the scenes is creating something beautiful.
It’s never smooth behind the scenes, is it? Everyone is grieving. No one is getting good sleep. Everyone is frantically Googling late at night because we fear something is truly wrong.
This week, after a year of internet friendship, I finally got to meet my friend Jill in person. Over Indian food, we talked about our first Foreign Service posts.
“When we talk about Chennai, we’re usually telling funny stories about things that happened, but the truth is, it was incredibly hard,” she said. “There was horrible flooding, and people there couldn’t find their family members because entire neighborhoods had been swept away…”
It was the same in my family’s first posting to Riyadh. On the one side of my tapestry is the story about running from the religious police in the IKEA parking lot. There are rows for communing with baby camels and seeing irises bloom in the middle of the desert. But on the back side, missiles from Yemen exploding overhead.
There’s a quote I like (source unknown) that goes “Almost every experience in life can be categorized as a good time or a good story.” But I’d argue that behind even the good stories are the loose ends–the messy parts lingering behind the humor or beauty. The parts where we were afraid, shocked, broken.
Our lives are rarely an entire skein of perfectly-wrapped yarn. It’s all made of scraps–we’re trying to tuck them together to form some kind of order.
But I suppose, too, that the scraps aren’t just the things that happen to us. They’re also the things we seek out. The glimmers. The connections, the relationships, the communities. The practices that can help us hold it together through hard times–making art, reading novels, exercising, therapy.
Scraps can be things reclaimed. I keep thinking of the news story out of London about birds breaking the metal anti-bird spikes off of buildings and using them to fortify their nests. If, in your life, the universe is hostile, you still have the right to make a home. Rise up.
In the tangled jumble of everything this summer, I’m taking my new loom and continuing the quiet practice of weaving. I’m sitting in the stillness, making gifts for dear friends. I’m letting the intuitive rhythm of the warp and weft calm me. And I’m staying attuned for the scraps that speak to me. I’m gathering them close, piling them up. Weaving them into the story of this short season of my life. Over and under. Over and under.
Take good care,
Dot
You can see some of Sam Self’s weavings on her Instagram and Etsy shop. She’s also teaching a weaving workshop at the Made in Virginia store in Old Town Alexandria on August 19th if you’d like to try out scrap weaving for yourself!
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