I would like this to be a post about how I feel … attached to, even inhabited by or at least dwelling alongside the things I make, but I do not yet have language for that.[1]

So it will be a bit about how I think about what I do when I make things with my hands, especially woven things. I want to make things well, that will last and have their own integrity and bring pleasure to people, but I am not especially interested in textile art, either in making my own or (mostly) in that of other people. Weaving, that is — there’s lots of wonderful textile art out there, but most art weaving just leaves me with my head tipped to one side.

Well-made things with their own integrity (I don’t exactly know what this means) that bring people pleasure. It’s not clear to me why I am bone-deep certain that this is a worthwhile pursuit, but I am. Art is great and I’m glad people make it, truly. I just … want to do something else. A well-made blanket moves me. And when, as now, most everything around me feels profoundly random and I struggle to find sense in any of it — I pick up fibre. It hardly matters what, although weaving is my deepest love; any combination of fibre and tools in my hands calms me, and restores my sense that here, at least, I can locate meaning. It feels a great deal like having found a still point in a dizzily spinning, off-kilter world.

So, here is a thing I just made:

And some of its stages:

This, of everything I’ve woven, was the thing about which I took most care. It is for someone beloved, and I wanted to infuse it with love and joy in the making. But beyond those intentions (and at a more prosaic level): the material was more expensive than most I work with, the warp wider and finer, the pattern more elaborate. (Remember, I’m very much a baby weaver.) It was important for many reasons that I do this carefully and get it right.

And I did; I made a thing I’m proud of, that’s now out in the world having its own integrity and bringing someone pleasure. That’s a very good feeling — but also distinct, I think, from the still-point-in-a-turning-world feeling that comes from doing the work itself, and which doesn’t turn on whether the outcome is praiseworthy or disastrous. I mean, watching something you are making descend into chaos is its own special kind of hell, but I am still grounded by/in the making process even as it goes terribly wrong.

So — I have not been trained as a weaver (although I am working to remedy that now) nor as a scholar of textiles or of material culture. This is not, in any respectably professional way, my field. But, when left untrammeled, here is where my thoughts go: to a loom, to a spinning wheel, to a warping board or a bump of roving or a skein of yarn. To what I will make next. And to trying to puzzle out what relationships are at work in that making. I am making tiny, tentative ventures into incorporating this kind of making-sense into my professional (writing, publishing) life, and will see where that takes me. But the making will continue, regardless.

[1] I remember hearing weaver Lily Hope (Tlingit) address a weaving as she was cutting it off the loom — “You are free, you being!” — and of course this is not at all the same context nor are my woven things remotely comparable to a Chilkat robe. But it is interesting and maybe heartening to me to know there are cultures in which (some?) made things have the status of beings. I will say also that this post began with recognizing the feeling of loss I experienced after mailing away the wrap pictured above, and it did feel as if a presence, something more than “merely” an object, had left me.