Not an original title, I know.

As a start, my padlet, where I’m trying to keep a record of my textile work/play. A subset of that photographic record goes on Instagram, where I am @crankyweaver.

Here I thought I might make a list of all the texts I am potentially looking at for this project, and the characters, and perhaps a quote for/from/about each. Eventually, maybe, I will turn this list into a textile. To begin:

Ntozake Shange’s novel Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo:

The eccentric family her family had worked for as slaves, and then as freed women weavers, had seen fit to grant Sassafrass the looms her forebears had warped and wefted thousands of times since emancipation…. Sassafrass had never wanted to weave, she just couldn’t help it…. Her mama had done it, and her mama before that; and making cloth was the only tradition Sassafrass inherited that gave her a sense of womanhood that was rich and sensuous, not tired and stingy. (81)

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s Daughters of the Stone:

He took note of all the activity, but the tall black woman who walked away from it all with not so much as a halting step or a backward glance captured his attention…. He had bought this woman [Fela] because of her hands. The auctioneer said she had magic fingers, and his wife… insisted she needed another woman in her taller. (8)

Olive Senior’s “Ode to Pablo Neruda,” from Over the Roofs of the World:

Maybe I’ll accept after all my commission as apprentice Spider
who spins from her gut the threads for flying,
for tying up words that spilled, hanging out tales long
unspoken, reeling in songs, casting off dances.
And perhaps for binding up wounds? (102)

Denise Harris’ Web of Secrets:

So that was how she began to crochet what later no one could ever put a name to, ‘but I took the pattern off of the spider’s web which floated above my bed,’…. She paused only for a moment, then grabbed the crocheted web and, running to the window, cast it out. For a moment she felt nothing and her heart fluttered. Then she felt the pull, the drag of it. Without a backward glance she climbed onto the mango tree outside the window and worked her way down. And so she found her future husband lying beneath the tree, tangled up in her web of crochet made according to a spider’s design. (24-25)

Honor Ford-Smith’s “Lala the Dressmaker” from My Mother’s Last Dance:

When Lala died
in the backroom of the shop
the girlchildren she had clothed,
who futures she chose from those cupped in her hand
unpicked the beaded dresses to find what she hid
stitched in the lining.
They put the beads in the locks of their hair
their needles flashing (dangerous and quick)
collecting the light…. (11)

Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable:

Grown fat and comfortable, [Icilma] sat on her oversized gallery embroidering linen hand towels, using mostly satin stitch to fill in the outline of the designs that she first pencil-sketched onto the fabric: the coconut trees, the seascapes, the farmers using their hoes, doubled over their crops, the sunsets, and her favorite, the cross being carried to Calvary by a broken Jesus, his back bent with humanness. She used thread so thick and a stitch so closely spaced that the final result was almost three-dimensional. She gave them away no sooner than she’d finished a set of three — to schoolchildren passing to take for their mothers, to her house help, to the few nuns who were left.

to be continued…