When I Cut

Let’s begin at the end: I lift my scissors, take a deep breath, and cut.

The cloth I have woven falls free from the loom, limp and lovely, freed at last from the tension of the loom, draping as I have never seen it before. If I am skillful and lucky and have been working on a well-built, precisely square loom, the new length of fabric does not twist. Its selvedges are reasonably straight. It has the ‘hand’ required for whatever use I have in mind. It is long enough and wide enough to become something more than a length of fabric.

***

I dream in colors now, colors that when woven together delight me as each new mélange reveals itself, an ever-changing palette. As a weaver of the 21st century, I have thousands of yarns available and almost no practical use for my goods. I have the once-unimaginable freedom to play around with what was deadly serious for thousands of years.

For almost five hundred generations, spinning and weaving made the difference between a warm household or a cold one, a family protected from the elements or one sent out to freeze, a naked child, or a beautifully clothed one. Today, handweaving is nothing more than the passion of an artist or craftsman or an historian's eccentric way of experiencing the lives of those who came before us. Very rarely, it is a hands-on, historically appropriate experiment for a student of the nearly magical process still at the heart of industrial textiles.

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The making of cloth began sometime before twelve thousand years ago, but weaving is even older. Think of what might occur to you as you interlaced branches, vines or anything malleable for fences, shelters, and baskets. After a millennium or two you might have enough leisure to experiment with the fine fibers you found inside a flax or hemp plant. String has many uses. You might accidentally, nervously, twist a tuft of wool caught on a thorn and wonder if you could lengthen that by twisting it together with a second tuft. Now you might have three or four inches of wool roving, and if you twist this tighter still, you may have twelve inches, and you will have invented spinning.

If you keep doing it over and over again for a few days you might have enough to make a very small blanket, perhaps to put across your shoulders. This is true only if you are smart enough not to stop with inventing what you might decide to call ‘yarn,’ but to see that this new thing brings new possibilities to interlacing. You’ll call that ‘weaving.’

Like all of our ancestors, you will experiment, and most of the fibers you will try will fail. But what would it take to make you think of unwinding the fibers of a caterpillar’s cocoon? How much patience would you need if spinning and weaving had to be done on an impossibly fine scale? It would seem as if you would never have enough for a single silk handkerchief.

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The oldest manmade object in my house is a weaving from 2,100 years ago, from a Coptic tomb, the gift of an Egyptologist friend in the 1970s, because I was a weaver even then. It is plain-woven in an amber color with red and blue decoration embedded as tapestry. I can see exactly how it was woven, and I could create a duplicate artifact for my own far-off descendants, but the effort would be immense:

1. Domesticate sheep.

2. Raise sheep, shear wool (Invent scissors?), clean wool.

3. Discover which plants and other materials (like ground-up insects or shellfish) will yield dyes stable enough. To last two thousand years.

4. Invent the drop spindle and learn to spin. Begin thinking about a design for a spinning wheel.

5. Build a loom.

6. Learn to weave.

7. Weave with your new invention, yarn.

8. Learn tapestry techniques to decorate your weaving. Because, of course you want to send a message to your descendants: never do anything without considering how to do it beautifully.

9. Live in a desert, bury the weaving, preferably in a cave, and mark the spot with stones carved deeply enough to attract the attention of those far-off descendants, not right away, but in about two thousand years’ time, approximately the year 4,100.

I can foresee the amazement and delight of the archeologists of 4,100. I know that among them will be those who recognize the hand of a weaver. Among our children’s children's children will be those still working to create something fine and decide when it is finished. With courage and a good pair of sharp scissors, they will make the cut, and from whatever still counts as a loom, something new and warm and beautiful will fall into the world.