A Swedish Pattern, Goose Eye & Mysteries.

Last week I decided to try a Swedish design that Warril from the Guild showed me. The first two photos show Warril´s sampler and the draft for this pattern. I decided to make a table runner. As you can see my experiment is slightly different from Warril´s sample as I simply followed the draft.

Next I set up the loom to make a scarf for my niece. Of course it had to be pink. I chose a goose eye twill, different from the one I had tried for my first piece on this same loom. I like how the pattern looks like small flowers. My niece has not seen her new scarf yet. I have a feeling she will question why it has a blue stripe.

The next, slightly overdue, project will be double weaving. Hopefully, with beginners luck on my side, I will be double weaving like a Bauhaus master. I will be trying to channel Anne Albers. Fingers crossed. 

I came across a book* about an American weaver, Mary Meigs Atwater, at the Guild library. There, in an excerpt from the "Shuttlecraft Guild Bulletin", Mary had written about "The idea of the Guild". She wrote about how in the Middle Ages the various crafts banded together into Guilds or Mysteries. She went on to say that the exclusiveness this created was the eventual downfall of the Guild system. I thought the use of the word mystery was interesting. But then I remembered that pagan rites were also once referred to as mysteries.

Atwater went on to say,"It is unfortunate that many weavers of this modern day have this same attitude toward their art - they wish to keep it a mystery, to keep out others. They refuse to give help or information, and do all they can to make handweaving appear to the uninitiated a very complicated and quite unattainable thing. Nothing, it seems to me, could be more unwise. To my way of thinking, the more people who know about weaving, the better for the craft." I totally agree with this, and not just with regards to weaving. Fortunately for me Guilds have a long way and at least my experience at the Burwood Guild has been far from mysterious.

Share. No one can take away from you what you know.

* "Weaving a Life. The Story of Mary Meigs Atwater", compiled by Mary Jo Retter, Edited by Veronica Patterson, Interweave Pr, 1992.