From the Loom: Picking Up the Pieces

COVID hit everyone hard (understatement, surely). I had just started gaining traction with my arts education career when everything shut and cancelled. It was devastating. But I didn’t let it stop me. I chose to re-invent how I was teaching, what I was teaching, and how I would reach my students. This phoenixing grew into something I could have never imagined before taking the hit, regrouping, and choosing to grow.

My tapestry world took a hit as well. In September 2020, my studio yurt was chewed through and invaded by mice and squirrels! Within three days, they turned my extensive yarn stash into a web, snarl, and shredded disaster. I felt just like the Cailleach, stepping back to my loom to find the destruction of Raven, only add rodent pee and feces to the mix! I gasped, my eyes wide, then rolled up my sleeves to begin cleaning up and assessing the damages.

While I never got to meet my grandmother of Swedish descent (she passed from cancer before I was born), one of her sayings lives on in the family. Whenever she would hear a smash or shatter, she would yell out, “Save the pieces!” This was definitely a save the pieces kind of moment.

Everything had to come out of the studio—at least everything that could. I was nearly a third of the way into a large passion project tapestry, inspired by a photograph of three Sandhill Cranes wading in reedy water. The image was taken by Kathy Bishop, a friend and fellow artist who has a cabin here in the Northwoods of Wisconsin. The tapestry is 40 inches wide, with 10 epi (warps per inch), so 400 warp threads wide. This is stretched on a refurbished Varpapuu tapestry loom (to follow that saga, please check out my blog on my fiber space www.erindaletapestrystudio.com). The loom is too large to fit out the door of the yurt when assembled!

Horrified the rodents might come back and destroy the tapestry-in-progress (thaaaaaankfully they had not yet, or I likely would have been a sobbing puddle on the floor), I wrapped it up as best I could, plugged the squirrel hole, and crossed my fingers. For months I cleaned and sorted yarn. We bought new sidewalls for the yurt and installed them before the depths of winter set in, and the work carried on. I learned my lesson, though, and keep the yarn stash in the house now!

But progress on the tapestry was halted again as I reinvented my teaching career, embracing Zoom and engaging with an enchanting network of folk schools and weaver’s guilds. This meant TONS of new curriculum to design and create, and time for passion projects slipped away. The piece was on hold but not forgotten.

Starting last year, I became determined to circle back to my UFOs (unfinished objects) and actually finish them. Two larger geometric pieces are finally off their looms, and now it was time to make friends again with the piece that had managed to survive the varmint attack. I had my basket full of yarns, and it felt like I was starting over, trying to figure out where I was, what decisions I had previously made about color, line, and texture, and just like the Cailleach, begin again.

The process took much longer than it should have, as I wended my way back through the decisions tree. I’d pick up a ball of yarn and hold it up to the tapestry. “Did I actually use this color anywhere?” The shading of ripples is so subtle, there are nearly two dozen different blues in my basket. “Nope, didn’t use that one.”

After two hours, I had a section of 2×9 inches woven—agonizingly slow for my handweaving speed. But it was progress! I often find getting over inertia is the hardest part. Now that progress has begun and I’ve made at least some sense of decisions five years old, each time I sit at the loom will be a little easier, until the project and I are old friends once more.

This could easily be left to tomorrow and tomorrow, and five years would become ten, until the unfinished piece would be passed onto whoever inherits the loom after my time on this earth. It does not have to be a grand start, but it does have to be a start, picking up the pieces and carrying on.