Weaving Immersion Through Time was a totally new experience for me. I’ve written bits and pieces in the past about getting the new-to-me six foot Shannock loom and weaving this first piece on it. I haven’t, however, devoted an entire blog post to it.

This loom came into my life in the early spring of 2021 and I knew I wouldn’t be able to plan a weaving for some time. I was in the midst of building my online classes, The Many Faces of Soumak and Elements: Art Through Tapestry. Both huge undertakings and so a big time commitment.

It was well over a year before I could even think about getting started.

I did, however, know right away that I wanted to weave big and experience the full width. But I was also realistic and got the seemingly bright idea to weave wide but short pieces to go above some of the sliding glass doors we have in our home.

So the format was decided, but the design took much longer to emerge. For months I filled my journal with countless blank boxes to play around with the format.

First along these lines…

Then these…

In the end, I kept coming back to something like this.

Finally, well over a year after that first photo was taken, the day arrived to get started. The loom had been warped for a number of months at this point, and I had played with colors while weaving the bottom turnback. I had even created a full-size cartoon with the major outlines!

I had not imagined I would start the weaving with random Soumak, but that’s exactly what I did. The entire border is very textural and completely random in all-over knots. I played a lot with this weaving, seeing what other textures I could create, like the contrasting broken line in linen and the rock-like forms in a paper yarn I’d recently acquired.

At this point, the date is December 23rd, 2022 when I took this photo.

It sat like this for a while before I began the lake-like image. It was time to go “back to the drawing board” and see how I wanted to progress. Still staying fairly true to the cartoon.

After I started weaving the “water” there were a few false starts.

The main elements and lines were all still there, but when I reached the completion of the long lake-like shape in the middle, I was stumped. I was feeling resistance to simply weaving a solid area to complete it. Again, it sat quietly waiting for quite some time before I sat down one day and started weaving little rectangular shapes (see lower left image in the last photo of drawings).

It was at this point that my son was visiting and came in to my studio- looked out the studio glass doors and said “You’re weaving…. this?” and pointed to the outdoors. He nailed it. It wasn’t the view from my studio, but more a composite of various views from our surroundings - the rocks, the pond, the rock wall - reconfigured.

Sometimes we just can’t explain where a design comes from - or how it evolves.

Weaving "Immersion Through Time"