An Accidental Weaver

My Mother’s Son:

I grew up playing with all the tools my mother had acquired over her years of practice. Throughout my college years, the woman I dated performed its rituals. At age twenty-eight, I took a two-day beginner’s class from a master. I became a guild member on the fifth of January, 2021, just before I turned thirty-eight. Seven days later, I stood outside an over-filled storage unit in Van Nuys writing out a paper check as exiting cars squeezed past me and my new machine.

I was buying a floor loom. I was becoming a real weaver. Just like that. If only it were that simple.

My mother wove for much of her life. She didn’t learn this from her parents or family. For her, I think weaving was a way to connect to culture. A way for her to grow into a lifelong community. A way for her to refocus her pain and find herself through learning from others.

My mother values the stories, experiences, and history of the residents of Gee’s Bend, Alabama— a community famous for patchwork quilting. She cried when she visited the Gee’s Bend exhibition at the Whitney Museum. She sends USPS letters with Gee’s Bend stamps. She sends me articles about Gee’s Bend, and I can hear her tearing up as we talk about her memories there.

Quilting isn’t weaving, though. I think, maybe, I should have been a quilter.

I’m not suggesting that quilting is easy. I’m certainly not minimizing the Gee’s Bend quilters. I’m suggesting that quilting’s got to be easier than weaving. At times, it’s certainly less solitary. The Whitney exhibit included Gee’s Bend quilters singing together just as they do when they are quilting. Their craft is clearly the product of a community.

I don’t know as much about Gee’s Bend as my mother does. With that said, here’s my take on its history: formerly enslaved families on a geographically isolated peninsula along the Alabama River decided to “stay on” as sharecroppers at the time former cotton plantation owner Joseph Gee relinquished his grip on the land following emancipation. They created a world together and they supported each other. White residents across the river tried to keep them isolated and under-supported— even leaving a rickety and barely functional cable ferry in place as the residents’ main connection to the wider world— but Gee’s Bend thrived anyway. Despite racist intentions, Gee’s Bend prospered. Families were able to grow their food and enjoy safe living with little interference from the white community that stayed many miles away.

My mom dropped out of college in Wisconsin and left her parents and all seventeen of her siblings behind to volunteer in the civil rights movement. Never having talked with a black person except at state basketball tournaments in Milwaukee, she got on a bus in Wisconsin and stepped off in Selma, Alabama, in the heart of America’s “Black Belt” at the height of a national civil rights reckoning.

As a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) volunteer, she was sent to train and organize in Gee’s Bend. What she saw stuck with her. What she learned changed her.

The industrious women in Gee’s Bend instilled in my mother a desire to go out and find her own skill in a craft. Years later, in West Virginia at age twenty-eight, my mother joined a weaving program. It helped her to focus her mind beyond recent life traumas; it helped my mother “kill the blues.”

Later, my mother would have three children. Much later, one of them would become interested in weaving. Her youngest son. Me.

This is where the history of my mother’s love of weaving becomes a history of my own.

Imagining My Future:

Growing up, I always found myself in the attic, the basement, or a storage closet. I liked to rummage— alone or with my siblings didn’t matter— and my parents had plenty of weird old stuff to rummage through. They were yard salers, flea marketeers, and always had been second-handers. To get my mitts on the weaving tools, however, I didn’t need to go deep. My mother kept these in the open, either in the living room or out in the garage. They gave me countless hours of joy and entertainment for years, so long as my imagination was awake.

I’d sweep dark-stained, wool carders back and forth against each other and listen forever, it seemed, to the fine hooked bristles moving across each other. I’d pick up smooth wooden yarn shuttles and fly them around the house or the yard like they were planes or spaceships. I’d step on the foot pedals, called treadles, of my mother’s large floor loom and watch the mechanisms move, pretending I was working at a factory. Easily, my favorite tool for these impromptu sessions of playful imagination was the antique spinning wheel.

The wood was nicked in a dozen places— two dozen— but it was so smooth and worn it seemed it had been made that way long ago. There were countless little stains in the wood from water or coffee or oil or who knows what else. It had a single treadle that still pumped up and down (even though it no longer spun the drive wheel). There was a rear bobbin stand that still worked for winding on freshly spun wool. The spokes in the wheel were softly rounded. On the wheel itself, carved grooves ran along the thin outer lip— tracks for a missing drive belt— and I would lose myself staring into those slightly shifting grooves as I made the wheel spin. More than any of these details, though, I recall the dull, dark glint of the rusty hardware; the antique, almost copper look of the hooked and curved metal pin that held the drive wheel to the long lost footman, an upright joint that once connected the hooked pin to the treadle.

My mother’s spinning wheel was missing its footman. This meant that, since the treadle did nothing, the only way I could turn the wheel was by hand rotating the pin, by pulling down on the spokes, or by simply spinning the edge of the wheel.

The song of the drive wheel pin turning against the wood uprights of the spinning wheel frame rang as ancient and strange and mesmerizing. I couldn’t stop once I’d started. I’m sure I thought I was listening to time itself, to the realities of existence coming through the wood and the metal. I’m sure I thought I was learning something just by playing with that old wheel. It was a simple kind of joy, manipulating a spinning wheel for hours and making no yarn.

I believe the fascination for me was also one of horror. I’m sure I’d imagine Rumplestiltskin forging his evil bargain with the young spinning girl, and I’d get to experience her fear as I listened to that pin screech against the old wood. I’d pretend I was a spinner, myself, and that he was coming to make a deal with me. I could almost see the misshapen, greedy, shadowy retch approaching slowly as the pin sang and the wheel turned.

And so we’ve struck on the other passion in my life: storytelling. Somewhere along the way growing up, I decided that playing with weaving tools wasn’t enough. Around that time, I wrote my first poetry, songs, and fiction stories.

All of my early stories were projects for school, and they were all pilfered. There was one about scientists time-traveling to stop the Roman Empire’s abuses, destroy the Cosa Nostra, and save Martin Luther King, Jr at the Lorraine Motel. That one was pretty much a copy of Quantum Leap. There was a story about an island populated by genetically modified lizards with hooked claws (which might have been influenced by Michael Crichton, somehow...). And then there was the story about a haunted highway exit that was basically fan fiction for The X-Files. Later, in eighth grade, I wrote a collection of stories for an astronomy project that was more or less a blend of Star Wars, The Fifth Element, and Alien.

It turns out, I always seemed to know that the storyteller’s job was all about borrowing, rearranging, and disguising basic story shapes. Patterns from the masters. Ancient archetypes.

I devoured Aesop, Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and August Wilson. I watched movies and television like an apprentice, memorizing camera angles, lines of script, and facial maneuvers. I studied each Hitchcock film, every Buster Keaton movie, and all of Chaplin’s productions. I was addicted to watching Spartacus, Malcolm X, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre on repeat.

As I grew older, my list of beloved movies and books grew longer and more varied, and my own writing improved. Eventually, I wrote my own real book with mostly my own real ideas.

And then I did it again, writing a second book. I’m currently finishing my third.

Along the way, something auspicious happened to me, seemingly out of nowhere. At the age of twenty-eight, my mother gifted me a two-day beginner’s weaving class at the studio of a master weaver. Strangely, my mother had been the same age when she learned to weave.

If memory serves, my mother told me, “You always used to love to play with all my old weaving stuff, and I thought you’d enjoy it, so I signed you up for the class. Happy Birthday!”

A Writer Plays at Weaving:

I learned enough over that weekend to realize the act of weaving was intricate and troublesome labor requiring large amounts of thought, understanding, and time. Practicing felt intuitive as if it were already stored in my memory somewhere. With each passing hour that I wove, I was simply remembering what I’d known all along as ancestral knowledge.

I loved everything about weaving, especially the challenges. Its complications. The hundreds of steps. How patience-intensive. Ample moments of frustration— over strings, essentially. The humor isn’t lost on me. Extreme frustration spent over pieces of yarn will humble your soul very quickly. I found I needed weaving because it helped me to let go, to feel okay with difficulty.

At first, I wove on my mother’s four-shaft table loom from the ‘70s. At this point, some notes and particulars about weaving may help.

There are all kinds of looms; some are small enough to sit on a table (table looms), while others are much larger, laying directly on the floor (floor looms). Some don’t even have shafts (rigid-heddle looms) and are often smaller and more portable.

A four-shaft loom has four thin, wooden racks, called shafts or harnesses, that are raised or lowered as needed. Table looms lack foot treadles and instead rely on levers or pull tabs to lift shafts, which are fitted with dozens of sliding metal or cloth eyes, called heddles. Long, individual strings of yarn, called the warp, are secured through a single heddle eye on a particular shaft, fixing that warp yarn in a pattern.

Of course, sometimes, instead of shafts raising (as on a jack loom), some looms have shafts that lower, while others are counter-balanced against each other so when one shaft rises the other lowers. Are we having fun, yet?

Weaving patterns are made in two steps. Strands of yarn must first be arranged from the front of the loom to the back through heddles in specific pattern orders (called dressing the warp). Second, separate shafts are raised in specific orders to create an opening through which yarn is passed above and below the warp. This opening in the warp is called the warp shed. The yarn that passes across the warp through the shed is called the weft yarn. The weft yarn is usually wound onto bobbins and positioned into wooden shuttles which are actually “thrown” or “shot” through the shed. More simply, weavers manipulate shuttled weft yarns through the warp shed by treadling harnesses according to the heddle threading pattern being used.

I told you this was fun and addicting! And shooting a shuttle over the warp is like making it glide or ice skate, and is such a satisfying feeling each time it works as planned.

On my mother’s old table loom, it took serious pounds of pressure to depress the rusty metal shaft levers. I learned how to engage these using the gravity of the falling harnesses to make the whole process easier.

The technicalities of weaving might sound like they would drive a person to exhaustion; I’m sure some jargon-heavy sentences above made a few readers wince. I grew up on those How Things Work books and by following diagrams with my dad as we built things together. For me as a beginning weaver, engineering helped. For others, I think the same understanding can be reached by relying more on an understanding of the craft.

I practiced very basic patterns of weaving on a straight draw threading, which means the warp yarns are heddled through the harnesses in a direct order— the first thread heddles through harness one, the second thread through harness two, the third with harness three, the fourth through harness four, and repeat. Weaving patterns depend on the threading, and which harnesses are raised in what order. The simplest pattern for most threadings is the plain weave, called Tabby.

Tabby raises shafts one and three, alternating with shafts two and four. Back and forth. It’s an even, sturdy, grounding weave structure. Tabby is often thrown into more complicated and demanding patterns in-between “pattern shots” to stabilize complex weaves. Tabby is what many weavers of tapestries and rugs rely on for a bulk of their practice as they “hand-pick” weft by color and shape. Plain weaves can become very complicated and demanding when more colors or intricate hand-picking is employed.

Straight draw threading allows for more than just Tabby, though. A lot more. Twills, Herringbones, Chevrons, Uneven Zigzags, Ms and Ws, Hopsacks, Mini-Herringbones, Bell Celtics, Mock Sateen or Mock Satin, Extended Herringbones, Horizontal Bell Celtics, Mixed Twills, Broken Twills, Point Twills, Canvas, Mock Monk’s Belt, Bedford Cord, Interrupted Diagonals, Tabby Twills, Log Cabins, Hounds Tooths, Interrupted Points, Double Layer Tabby, Intersecting Double Layer Tabby…

Those are just structures that can be created on a four-shaft loom warped on a straight draw that I can name off-hand. That list also doesn’t mention pickup techniques— where flat, smooth, wooden tongue strips are placed into the warp as the shed is formed to pin down certain warp threads, creating a “cage” or “pocket” effect. Or twisted pickups, which… are stunningly beautiful, and let’s leave it at that.

I first wove a long “pattern sample.” I used a ton of weft yarns in many different colors. I took vague, incomplete notes, or no notes at all. I had fun. The sample came out beautifully. I wound on another warp, and the loom sat there. Ready to go. For years. And years…

An Exhausted Teacher Finds His Way Back:

A lot happened in life at the end of my twenties and into my thirties which distracted me from weaving. I moved to California’s Central Valley. I started a Master’s Program combined with a California teaching credential and taught in the area for 3 years. I moved back to Los Angeles and took up another teaching position, where I would be for about 5 years. Apart from grading papers, any spare time was spent on developing extracurriculars for my underserved students.

I moved my mother’s old table loom around with me for years and finally gave it back to her. She finished weaving the warp that I’d wound onto it years earlier.

I started work on my third book after ten years away from writing fiction. For ten years I’d only written reports, teaching memos, class blog posts, or updates to my personal blog. The pandemic spurred me to chase a weird little story I’d tried writing once before and given up on, and to rework it as a longer book. This would be my Coronaissaance.

My years working as a professional taught me several things, good and bad:

1. How to ignore my personal needs (for creativity, fair treatment, health, etc.).
2. How to write with more brevity, consistency of tone, and impact.
3. How my happiness as a human being requires challenge, grace, and connection.

I’m no longer teaching. I’m trying to make a business as a weaver and as a writer. I’m resuscitating my resume and searching for jobs where people might respect me, our world, and each other. I don’t think I can work anywhere again where people and our planet aren’t guaranteed respect, encouragement, and gratitude.

Weaving allows me so much time to focus on beautiful things that I love about life. That might not sound big, but as a recovering teacher, that’s what I need more than anything. I’ve been surrounded by bullying, immaturity, and lack of creativity for years in the school system— and then there’s the students!

In all seriousness, weaving allows me to let go. I was talking with my brother months ago and described to him how weaving teaches me to release anger and pain. “Each time I throw the shuttle across the warp,” I told him, “I let go of a little sadness.”

So if there are twelve or seventeen or twenty-five weft shots to an inch of woven fabric, that’s twelve or seventeen or twenty-five chances to practice letting go and gain more of myself back. Every inch I weave teaches me to be a happier and more whole person. Every inch! Weaving, for me, is building inner peace inch by inch, with fabric as a byproduct.

There is something poisonous about modern Capitalist life that we all have experienced, and to which all of us can relate. The commodification of ourselves, and of our precious time on this planet. Selling large chunks and moments of our lives, and not necessarily at fair market value. We live only one life, and yet spend a third of it sleeping, and a third of it working. There is an inherent sadness to modern life that’s difficult to escape. We give so much away.

Yes, there is an exchange— time for money— and that exchange brings some reward. Unfortunately, Capitalism also allows for a large degree of abuse to occur during that exchange. Capitalism says that if someone doesn’t want to be abused at one job, they are welcome to quit and find a different job that will abuse them differently. The result is that people all across America feel undervalued, under-encouraged, underloved, and unheard.

I am willing to believe there are better workplaces. I hope there are. I’ve talked with people who say they love their jobs and the people they work with. I know of one such place and was lucky to work there for a time. My brother still works there— a private investigation firm. Folks there were the nicest people I’ve ever worked with, even through huge difficulties.

Weaving brings me happiness I’ve never experienced at any job before, and I’ve held many different kinds. It’s similar to the joy I experience as a writer, just simplified. Purified. Denser. Distilled.

I’m glad that feeling so lost for so many years as a teacher helped me to find my way back to this fundamental practice in which I actively rebuild my own joy with the world.

Reconnecting in a More Ancestral and Ancient Way:

A fellow member of the Southern California Handweavers Guild, Virginia Postrel, is an accomplished historian. In an article published by The New York Times, she took a deep dive into fiber arts history and came back up for air with some fascinating treasures.

For instance, are you aware that the average Roman senator’s robe— just one of their robes— might have represented 10,000 hours worth of weaving work? Do you know, for another example, that the entire Viking fleet, with all of its required engineering, manpower, and sheer lumber, was not nearly as impressive by half as the amount of labor that went into producing the sails for the Viking navy? Or that ancient Chinese emperors collected woven fabric as a tax instead of coins or crops?

Another historian, Chris Buckley, presented at a Guild meeting over Zoom, and detailed the history of weaving looms across Southeast Asia. He spoke about his travels and research investigating the origins of Southeast Asian weaving from body-tension looms (setup between a person’s waist or shoulders and a rock or tree) to ones more similar to modern-day multi-shaft looms. He presented diagrams of huge looms with attached pattern wheels set on a cylinder above the weaving structure as a kind of early player piano. This pattern wheel helped weavers know exactly which type and color of weft yarn to throw for each pattern shot and acted like a village weaving directory. When a weaver threw a pattern shot they’d take the front reed out of the pattern wheel and put it at the back, then continue to the next reed in line.

Mr. Buckley also remarked that specific looms were developed and sometimes abandoned for simpler versions depending on the needs of a given community. In other words, specific peoples may have discovered a more advanced type of loom and then abandoned it for a simpler version because it fulfilled their needs. So the advancement of technology had nothing to do with intelligence, it only had to do with need. Simpler loom technologies across the world have helped develop extraordinarily beautiful textile artifacts and products, no matter what their competitors might have used instead.

Many of these weaving histories remind me of my journey as a human being on this earth, and my struggles navigating my place in a modern world. Perhaps this is difficult to explain, but each of these stories from weaving history illustrates that we are truly community-connected creatures. I can imagine the community that worked with a loom and abandoned it for a simpler model. I can hear all of those conversations and understand the adjustments that people needed to make. I understand this better than I understand some of the jobs I’ve worked, why they were even necessary, or what they actually did. I am myself trading in a more complex, professional career for a simpler model out of personal needs.

Reading Virginia Postrel’s writing, or listening to Chris Buckley, or finding my own resources and coming across old images, I can imagine the effort and time a young apprentice put into learning to weave on a body-tension loom. I can feel their need to stretch their muscles every hour or so. I get their desire to find a shady weaving location so they’re not exposed to the harsh afternoon sun. I know their need for someone else to cook while they continue to weave. Perhaps they tied their warp around a tree near a beach, or on a rocky hillside in the mountains, or in a meadow along a running creek at the heart of a deep and bright valley. Maybe they were only in a courtyard in their home village or town with all of the sounds of everyday life striking around them. Or in a busy family room. I can see them. All of them.

I can imagine children, just like me, being made unwilling assistants and over time gaining the knowledge, confidence, and patience required to become accidental weavers. I can imagine little children playing with their mother’s or sister’s or father’s weaving tools, fascinated eyes and drooling mouths and unsteady fingers and all. I can see myself in these old stories and histories, in the old photographs, and even in the pixelated pattern diagrams.

What fascinates my imagination about weaving is when I think of all the different materials that can be used to make yarn, all of the different patterns possible, and how certain places and peoples on earth ended up focusing on or specializing in specific handwoven products. Folk weaving and traditional weaving in one place show us a glimpse of the same kind of human creativity that can be seen in a different way someplace else. In other words, all woven products actually capture human emotions and experiences unique to specific locations. All handwoven fabric tells a story about place and time and people.

Virginia Postrel reminds us that weaving is also the blending of the community and the family in another fundamental way. She speaks of traditional historical storytelling that relates the strength and flexibility of the warp yarn with the male archetype, while the patterned, colorful beauty and stability of the weft yarn relates to the female archetype. Weaving, then, is the act of blending the male and the female to produce something new, a third archetype which is the combination of the two; something bigger than gender. Something human. Perhaps woven fabric embodies community itself— the blend of different perspectives creating a society.

Just as quilting takes scraps of fabric from the community, combines them, and presents them back as something new and whole, so too does weaving entwine the labors of the community and return them transformed. Brilliant. Inspirational.

Finding My Unique Pattern:

When I visit the Guild storage unit in Van Nuys— to buy yarns or tools, to pick up or return Guild library books, or for any other reason— I make sure to chat with the Guild reps who manage the inventory. They ask about my progress on my new loom, and we talk craft.

On a recent visit, I mentioned listening to music and audiobooks while I weave, or half-watching the occasional bad movie or tv show in the background. One of them objected to listening to books and allowed for music, while the other objected to listening to anything at all.

These are my people, now. I belong to a community in which I learn, share, and grow in conversation with others. It’s a club that spans the world, near and far. Weavers are everywhere.

Planning a weaving project is about time more than anything. Weavers become yarn addicted very quickly, and so soon enough having available materials is no longer a concern. Certain weaving structures are more complicated than a weaver’s skill, so designing a project becomes about what can be made, and how long making it will take.

Weaving is the application of focus over time. In the early stages of a project, meditative “sound bath” playlists help me to set a tone of quiet observation, allowing my mind and soul to fall into line with the yarns, with the pace of weaving a single inch, and then another. Once my body has learned the pace and the pattern, then I allow audiobooks to help me pass the time and keep my attention with every pass of the shuttle. Histories, short stories, how-to’s and self-help’s, science-fiction books. Most recently I’ve been listening to The Canterbury Tales, a book that has always been on my list.

The significance of handweaving in the 21st century on a machine that hasn’t changed much for hundreds of years while listening to epic, lyrical prose is not lost on me. Working in this way, incorporating stories and histories, has recharged my love of life and the world. I might not catch every detail in the audiobooks, but they help me connect the present moment to traditions that are more archaic, mysterious, and elemental. Combining weaving with the act of learning through reading makes me feel like a better weaver and also a better writer and reader, much like the studied benefits gained from walking while reading.

I’ve taught myself to hemstitch while the fabric is on the loom to make finishing much easier and more successful. I’ve learned to notice and catch errors before I’ve already moved on one or two or twelve steps down the pattern. I’ve learned simpler, easier, more effective ways to do certain things, like tying on the warp by myself so that every yarn thread is under even and equal tension. I’ve taught myself how best to keep the loom clean to protect the yarn. I’ve learned rudimentary materials science and basic color theory to better select types of yarns.

All of these little skills and habits ground me in the world of the present, while also connecting me to a wealth of ancient and precious human knowledge as a maker of fabric.

Weaving fits into my life like daydreaming stories, like breathing deeply. It shows me a way to slowly build confidence. To understand myself and feel inner stillness. It is an active practice of mindfulness and attentive focus. I find myself over and over again by losing myself in the threads and the patterns and the practice of engaging so directly with history. I find myself a member of a bigger community online and in workspaces all over the planet than I’ve ever been a party to before. While the universe can seem so large, so quiet, and so cold, weaving reminds me that it’s really just one song, as its name implies. We are all in the same story, and I am finally weaving myself into it. I’m finally learning to feel comfortable crafting my own pattern.