rage making

my old bloggy friend bill sent me this beautiful piece on rage making by sarah kendzior. she seems to have been able to put voice to what i've been feeling and doing — directing so much of my attention and time to threads and making, in the face of feeling helpless to stop the madness my fellow countrymen are wreaking and have wrought in electing a senile spray-tanned wanna-be king. 

there are so many parallels in my own weaving story to hers. i too got my loom from a wonderful 80-year-old woman who is teaching me to weave. we are both searching for meaning and something tangible and beautiful in the threads. 

i am enthralled with the threads themselves...i love the process of setting up the loom - i love using the slay hook (just learned that term from sarah, it's called a rittenål in danish and i am learning this craft in danish). i love that every single individual thread passes through my hands countless times before becoming a whole piece of cloth. sarah seems a bit more frustrated by that, wanting to get on to the making part. but i love the time the process takes and i love getting to know each and every thread.

people keep asking me how long it takes to make a tea towel. once everything is all set up, i can weave one towel in about 2 hours. but the last batch of 11 took me a total of 46 hours from when we began to make the warp to when i hemmed and ironed the last one. there's no way to put a price on them that would compensate me for that work. but the work is priceless to me in terms of keeping me balanced and sane. 

i love that this craft is being passed down to me by a woman who learned it properly back in the day and who wove many beautiful things on the loom that now stands in my home. she got the loom from one of the early, famous danish weaving teachers of the 20th century, cis fink, who also wove countless beautiful things on it before it became emmy's. and now it's mine. i wish it could tell me tales of all the threads its seen and known and held. sitting at it, turning threads into cloth, feels like joining that long tradition and line of women who came before me. it feels wholesome and good and odin knows we need that feeling more than ever today. 

while the need to create something tangible and beautiful and useful from mere threads is driven by a need to escape from a world gone mad, surely it's also healing somehow. repairing the tears in our existence, creating something beautiful that i can hold in my hands and give to friends as gifts. i feel joy every time i dry a dish in the kitchen with the beautiful rainbow towel i made. and i feel so happy when i gift one to a friend and they tell me later how much they enjoy using it. maybe those small joys will help us through this and it will all be ok in the end.