A Weaver Lives Here

I was straightening up the house the other day and started to see all the clues that a weaver lives here. There are some of the obvious things such as rugs, wall hangings, looms, shelves of yarn, Handwoven magazine, and a fiber library. But there are also lots of other relatively innocuous things you might not expect.

A non-weaver might wonder why there are blunt tapestry needles in almost every room, a bottle of Fray Check on the coffee table, scissors and rulers in every pencil holder, a fringe twister in a kitchen drawer, and a fair amount of lint in general. I move around. I’ve woven on a rigid-heddle loom and an inkle loom on our porch and in our living room; I’ve woven sitting on the back steps with a pin loom; and for a while now, I’ve had a floor loom in my bedroom, which explains the shuttles on the bedside table. I could go on.

A non-weaver might also wonder why I have 5 handwoven potholders that don’t match, 10 hot pads that also don’t match, and have had to commandeer a second drawer for my extensive handwoven towel collection. They might shake their heads at the piles of hexagons in the laundry room waiting to be wet-finished and the stack of napkins waiting (for quite a while now) to be pressed and hemmed, using the thread that is on my kitchen desk. Shelved among my cookbooks are binders with titles such as Overshot and John Murphy’s Bird’s Eye Twill, and I keep my hexagon loom there also.

Depending on my mood, I can research weave structures, look for new recipes, or perhaps start a hexagon without leaving my kitchen. Photo by Susan E. Horton

I live with a couple of non-weavers, and I am pretty sure they have both resigned themselves to life with a weaver. Periodically, I have to laugh when one of them asks me if I have a piece of string for something they are doing. Hmmmm. Let me think. Did you want 10/2 or 5/2 cotton, or were you thinking hand-dyed silk? I’m pretty sure I have some string. Let me check. There might be a bobbin in this drawer right here next to the couch.

A weaver lives here.

Weave well,

Susan