Laura's Loom

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A Convoluted Journey

Laura’s Loom – combining the best of British wool with Yorkshire know-how

It’s hard to say which has had the more convoluted journey:

By Paul Kirkwood
Saturday, 1st January 2022, 6:00 am

the wool that ends up in scarves and blankets produced by Laura’s Loom or Laura Rosenzweig herself, an artisan weaver and former cartographer who has ventured from Yorkshire to the US and back again via Switzerland, with loom in tow.

Last June she moved from Farfield Mill in Sedbergh to a studio at Kirkby Lonsdale on the western fringe of the Yorkshire Dales. One loom, her first which she brought over from the States, has pedals like a church organ with the added operational challenge of leaning forward to throw the shuttle from side to side.

A new six-foot loom, equally as complicated with a bewildering web of heddles and threads, is powered by what looks like an exercise bike. Both devices are mechanical and there’s barely a computer in sight. Reels of yarn are set out on the floor in themed colour groups, some inspired by the blues and greens of the Dales, as the early stage of the design process.

Laura uses the yarn for her blankets and scarves. (Tony Johnson).

Laura uses the yarn for her blankets and scarves. (Tony Johnson).

Recent items in production were shooting sock ties for the mother-in-law of Laura’s new landlord.

Laura is passionate about wool, weaving and provenance. She sources all her fleeces – around 500 every year – direct from local farmers. “Sheep are sheared in July and August and I collect fleeces in September and October and get them sorted, taking off spots of dung which are good for the garden,” she says.

“I wait for a nice day and do it all outside. I really like talking to farmers and knowing exactly where my yarn has come from. That’s really important to me. What galvanised me into doing this is that when we moved to Sedbergh, I was looking around at sheep everywhere and thinking I’m a weaver and surely I can do something with this wool.

“That was when farmers were burning their wool because they were getting nothing for it. Wool is such a wonderful, natural material and I thought why does it have no value and can’t I put value back into it? I was really interested in how to create good weaving yarn that could be turned into woven cloth, particularly blankets which few people were producing.”

Laura pictured making ties for shooting socks by hand on her American jack loom. (Tony Johnson).

Laura pictured making ties for shooting socks by hand on her American jack loom. (Tony Johnson).

She says different breeds produce fleeces that suit different products. “Bluefaced Leicester sheep produce wool that is fine and light but still warm and not scratchy, which makes it ideal for blankets. Socks need yarn that’s a bit more robust as they wear through quickly.

“My Hebridean wools were perfect, especially when we blended some Shetland into it to get different colours. Farmers started asking me ‘do you want a bit of this?’ and I was getting home to find a bit of anonymous fleece on my porch. I had so many pieces I put them all together.”

Laura started as a hand craft weaver using silk and merino wool making one piece at a time but, over the last 10 to 12 years has branched into other less fine wools. She now also manages the conversion of her fleeces and yarn into products made by mills. In fact, this larger-scale side of her business now accounts for about 90 per cent of turnover.

First her fleeces are scoured, a laundering and drying process, by Haworth Scouring and Thomas Chadwick, both of Bradford. Spinning, by which fibres are combed, twisted and made into yarn, is undertaken by Lightowlers Yarns, of Meltham, near Huddersfield. Laura then sends yarns to four mills in the Scottish Borders for dying, weaving and cloth finishing. She produces about 100 blankets and 150 scarves per year in this way, based on her designs and samples woven on her looms.

“I’m a bit of a production weaver and a bit of an artisan, craft bespoke weaver. One of the reasons I bought the new loom is to get back to weaving. I’m a weaver at heart but I call myself a logistics manager. I have friends who help with bits and pieces of the business like sewing on labels but the actual management of the business is just by me.”

Laura grew up in Goole and studied regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania from 1986 and then moved to Rhode Island and Boston to work in environmental management. While she was there, she met a weaver in a knitting wool shop, tried it for herself and was instantly hooked. The weaver taught Laura for a year and ultimately inspired her business. She bought the US loom that now stands in her studio 27 years ago. Her first project was a baby blanket for her son.

She and husband Phil moved to Switzerland with his work in 1996. “I was raising our children at the time and wove to stay sane. I began selling items to friends, went to craft fairs and got commissions. When we moved to Sedbergh in 2002, I decided to see if I could build something from my hobby. I quickly learnt that it’s hard to sell enough to make money to pay the rent. It can take three days to make one scarf.

“I started to wonder how I could make it pay as I wanted to carry on. I also didn’t want to be at home as I was in a new town and didn’t know anybody. For a long time I resisted getting bigger as I didn’t want to lose sight of why I started this in the first place, which is to produce lovely woven items from British wool. A friend who was a painter was struggling in a similar way. She had resisted having her paintings turned into prints but eventually decided to do so to make some money. She said that I could consider my handwoven pieces like my oil paintings and mill-woven pieces as my prints.”

Laura studied on a two-year programme for hand-woven design at Bradford College to improve her design skills. “As a scientist, I like the technical aspect of weaving. Most of my previous professional work was involved with computerised cartography. The need for attention to detail when working with computers and data analytics also applies to weaving.

“You have to thread every thread individually by hand in a certain pattern and concentrate. If you get it wrong, sometimes you have to do it all over again. I like sitting, threading and setting up the loom, thinking about how the finished piece is going to look and feel. A map has to look good so that people read it but the main work that goes into it is the science of putting all the data in the right way so that it comes out correctly. So I see a lot of parallels between what I did as a professional and what I do now.”

Inspiration comes from many sources. Laura designed a scarf for a friend’s birthday based on a walk they shared in Scotland, the hues representing the mist, heather, bracken, loch, and sky. A commission for a blanket was based on colours in a client’s favourite painting. During lockdown, a customer from Canada bought a blanket for her sister from LA to remind her of their Yorkshire roots and lift her spirits.

Similarly, Laura received an online commission from a British customer in New Zealand who, unable to get back to the UK, wanted a blanket made from Bluefaced Leicester wool to remind her of home.

“There are moments like when I’m hauling bags of wet fleece around when I think ‘why am I doing this?’ If I say that out loud my family and friends say ‘because you love it’.

“I feel really fortunate to be able to come to a place like this and do what I want to do every day and make things that people really seem to appreciate.”

Where the Mountains Meet the Sea

Sea Fever

John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

 

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

 

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

 

 

This well known poem was a favourite of my grandfather and because it was one of the first poems I got to know (and because it recognises the wonder of scudding clouds) it’s one of my favourites too.  Earlier this year I spent a week exploring the Isle of Skye, from where this photo was taken.  Like many people I’m drawn to islands and have many more on my list yet to visit.  I love that magical space at the edge of the land, where one can cast an eye across a sweep of ocean, listen to the heartbeat of the sea, take a deep breath, and feel rejuvenated.

Thank you for supporting Laura’s Loom in 2021.  I couldn’t run it without you!  Your comments and feedback are invaluable and very much appreciated.  Knowing that so many folk value what I create makes it all worthwhile.  It’s also really satisfying to be able to return to my farms year after year and tell the farmers that, yes, I’m still persevering, still banging the drum trying to persuade more people that our British wools are fabulous, are so highly versatile, make the most beautiful cloth, and should be much more highly valued.  Your support of my business means I can continue to do my bit to push that message ‘out there’.

It’s definitely been an odd couple of years, and for many it’s been a sad and difficult time, but I hope the New Year brings you good health, safe passage, and a chance to be with your loved ones.  Wherever you wish to go in 2022, I hope you get there.

Warmest wishes,
Laura

Fibreshed

You may have noticed that some of our products have a new logo ‘pinned’ to their description.  This logo indicates that these products meet the Fibreshed criteria:

 

  • Made using 100% natural fibres and natural dyes (if used)
  • Produced within one or more of our Fibreshed’s counties; Cumbria, Lancashire, West Yorkshire, Yorkshire Dales, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and/or Cheshire
  • Traceable provenance of all materials used
  • Regenerative and/or organic and/or biodynamic farming practices supported
  • Transparent and informative product labelling re: biodegradability etc.

Laura’s Loom has always sourced the bulk of our wool from farms in and around Sedbergh, our hometown which sits on the border of the Yorkshire Dales and Cumbria.  Except for the Real Shetland wool which we buy to blend with our Hebridean and other black wools, we now source all of our raw material from farms within a 30 mile radius of our lovely market town.

Not all of our farmers want publicity but we can tell you exactly where the wool in your blanket/scarf/socks comes from.  We visit the same farms every year and have developed long-standing and trusting relationships with all of our wool suppliers, going on for more than 12 years now.  We can also tell you that at least three of the farms we source from practice organic and/or regenerative methods of farming — Whingill Farm in Cumbria, Backsbottom Farm in Lancashire, and Hill Top Farm in the Yorkshire Dales.  We hope that their methods will gradually become more commonplace amongst all farmers and that the link between the way animals are farmed, how we use their fibres for our clothes and how all of the processes involved affect our environment and us in turn, will become much better understood by the general public.

Our wool is scoured and spun in West Yorkshire.  All of our woven products (except for the handwoven pieces which I make myself) are woven for us by a weaver in Langholm, another lovely market town which sits just over the border from Cumbria in the Scottish Borders region.   Drove Weavers is actually the closest weaving mill to us, being just 70 miles away by road, and we have a longstanding and very happy relationship with them.   Our socks are still knitted in Leicestershire, which is outside our Northwest Fibreshed region but again, this is a longstanding relationship which shouldn’t be knocked for the sake of geography.  The fact is the yarn that makes the socks is still very much a local product and the benefits go straight to my farmers and are returned to my local community through sales in local outlets.

We haven’t used the Fibreshed logo on any of our dyed products as the dyes are not natural but this is something we are working towards.

Fibreshed for me feels like I have come full circle in my life.  At 18, I went to university to study Human Environmental Studies at Kings College in London.  It was a relatively short-lived degree programme, way ahead of its time, but it solidified for me what I could see even with a child’s eyes — that man’s impact on his environment was massive and we ignored it at our peril.  At King’s we studied the relationship between man and his environment, learning about natural cycles and how they affected human physiology and psychology (lead, asbestos, water, fossil fuels….), as well as looking at how human decisions affected those natural cycles (tearing up hedgerows, building on floodplains, monocultures…).  I then went on to study Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, under the great Ian McHarg and his successor Ann Whiston Spirn.  I came away from Penn with skills in Geographic Information Systems.  Again, I was there as this new technology was beginning to take off.  GIS gave us a new way of looking at the world, through the medium of maps, enabling us to look ‘between the layers’ to seek a deeper understanding of the relationships between man and nature.

Fibreshed is in the same mode.  It pushes the message that whatever we do to the land will affect us in one way or another, whether we like it or not.  It behoves us to listen to nature and to find ways to work in harmony, together.

 

Let your light shine

By The Stream

Paul Laurence Dunbar – 1872-1906

By the stream I dream in calm delight, and watch as in a glass,
How the clouds like crowds of snowy-hued and white-robed maidens pass,
And the water into ripples breaks and sparkles as it spreads,
Like a host of armored knights with silver helmets on their heads.
And I deem the stream an emblem fit of human life may go,
For I find a mind may sparkle much and yet but shallows show,
And a soul may glow with myriad lights and wondrous mysteries,
When it only lies a dormant thing and mirrors what it sees

With warmest wishes for the coming winter and hopeful thoughts that 2021 will bring us all much light and sparkle.

Laura

Thank you for all your support throughout 2020.  With your help, Laura’s Loom has donated a total of £2250.00 to the Cumbria Community Foundation.  The CCF have now raised over £1.5 million for their COVID-19 appeal, providing much needed services to many many groups and individuals throughout Cumbria during this difficult year.  I couldn’t have done my bit without the farmers who supply my wool, the scourers, spinners, dyers, weavers, knitters and cloth finishers who help me turn my wool into fabulous products, and my customers who buy those products for themselves and their loved ones.  I love what I do and I love that you love what I do.

Sit back and relax….

…and watch my little video — an introduction to Laura’s Loom.   I put this together for Woolfest Online 2020 which took the place of a normal year when Woolfest would be running at Mitchell’s Auction Mart in Cockermouth over the last weekend in June.  Hopefully we’ll all be back in the mart next year with thousands of visitors safely grazing over 140 stands of woolly wonders.

 

 

 

 

 

 

British Wool – from sheep to loom – an interview

This interview first appeared on the Make It British website in 2017:

Find out how wool is processed from fleece to fabric and why using British wool is important, as we chat to Laura Rosenzweig, the founder of Laura’s Loom.

Laura Rosenzweig, founder of Laura’s Loom.

Laura, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you first learnt to weave?
I first learned to weave in the US, over 20 years ago now. Weaving was something I had always wanted to have a go at. When I had the chance to sit down at a loom for the first time I was completely hooked.

I grew up in Goole in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, England’s most inland port on the River Ouse. My granny taught me to knit and my dad was artistic but there are no professional artists or weavers in my family. I still have my first bit of cardboard weaving made at primary school and I clearly remember visiting an old decrepit weaving mill somewhere in Lancashire when I was on holiday.

My other interests and choices led me into the world of land use planning and environmental protection and this is what I focused on in my early career until I moved abroad. Moving to another country with a young family and no job, I started to weave more and more. By the time we moved again, to the UK, I had decided to focus all my energy on Laura’s Loom and started to build my business out of my hobby.

You use a lot of local wool, can you tell me more about that?

Here in the Yorkshire Dales we are surrounded by sheep. They are mostly hill and mountain breeds, hardy animals with hardy fleece. All wool is good wool in my eyes, but each fleece type has certain uses – if it’s good for carpets it’s not necessarily going to be good in a scarf! It seemed wasteful to me to be always buying in yarn from abroad for my weaving when there was so much raw material right on my doorstep.

Instead of buying in yarns that weren’t quite right I decided to make my own. Looking around my home in the Dales I started to think about what breed might suit my purposes. Most farmers around here have a small flock of Bluefaced Leicesters. They are bred with the native Swaledale to produce a hybrid called the North of England Mule. The resulting cross has good meat, good wool, and is a hardy animal reliably producing two lambs each year.

I chose to work initially with Bluefaced Leicester wool because it is a fine, long-staple, semi-lustrous fleece and can be spun to a fine count. It’s not as itchy as some other wools so it is good for scarves as well as blankets. In fact, when it’s worsted spun instead of woollen spun it can be one of the smoothest fibres available anywhere.

Bluefaced Leicester Sheep (photo:  Bonnysheep.com)

For those who don’t know, can you talk us through the whole process that you undertake from fleece to fabric?

I collect my fleece from local farms after it has been sheared in late summer. It is usually rolled up in big bags called wool sacks. I then set to work on each fleece individually. I don’t grade my fleece, which involves dividing the fleece into different qualities of wool, but I skirt them which involves spreading the fleece out on a flat surface and carefully removing the daggings (aka poo), all the vegetation that might be trapped in the fleece (straw, briars, leaves, etc) and anything else you might find such as bits of string and wire. Any parts of the fleece that are heavily matted or felted are taken off as well. Then the fleece is rolled back up again and stored in a clean bag.

The fleece is then sent to the scouring plant. I use Haworths Scouring in Bradford. Here the fleece is washed and dried in a series of giant washing machines and tumble dryers. It is important to me that the fleece stays as natural as possible so I don’t use bleach or any other harsh chemicals on my fleece. This means that you might get the odd bit of straw left in but at least it’s clean straw!

The next stage is spinning. I work mostly with Lightowlers Spinners in Meltham just outside Huddersfield. Here my fleece is blended and carded ready for woollen spinning. Nothing is added other than necessary oils for the spinning machines. The size (count) of the yarn and the twist needs to be considered ahead of time – I produce fine woollen singles yarn suitable for weaving scarves and blankets. Occasionally I might have it plyed to produce a thicker loftier yarn suitable for knitting as well as weaving.

Spinning

From the spinner the yarn then heads off to the dyer if I am interested in adding colour to it. I work with Ettrick Dyers in Selkirk. I will supply colour swatches and they will test my yarn to see if those colours are achievable. BFL fleece is quite creamy in contrast to the brighter white you might find in a Shetland yarn. Creating pastels from a creamy base is difficult so it’s a good job I prefer rich deep colours!

After dyeing the yarn is ready for weaving. I weave sample fabric swatches at home on my own loom, designing with the yarn to see how it works best. I like simple designs and subtle colours. Once I have worked out what I want I will discuss this with the weaving company who will weave up several hundred metres of cloth for me. I work mostly with Drove Weaving in the Scottish Borders. If I don’t give them the right instructions I won’t get the fabric I want so I have had to learn the language of powerloom weaving which is quite different from the language of handweaving I learned 20 years ago!

After weaving there is one more process to get to the final fabric and that is cloth finishing. All of my fabrics are sent to Schofields Dyers and Finishers in Galashiels. Here the cloth is washed (known as fulling for woollen cloths) to both tighten and soften the quality of the woven fabric. It is then dried on a tentering machine where it is stretched to shape and fringes will be twisted into place if required. Then the individual blankets and scarves are cut and folded and are ready to come back to me for quality control, labelling and packaging.

With the amount of fleece I collect I am able to produce one ‘collection’ of throws and scarves each year. Any remaining yarn is knitted into socks at J. Alex Swift in Leicestershire, or is sold on for others to weave with it.

Tell us a bit about the people you work with during the process, the farmers, spinners, dyers, weavers and knitters. How do you find the right people to work with?

I found my people through word of mouth – a farmer who introduced me to other farmers; a weaver who introduced me to a spinner who introduced me to a scourer and suggested a dyer; a weaver who introduced me to a cloth finisher and took me up there to meet them. It was a steep learning curve in the beginning – you might give a scourer 100kg of raw greasy fleece but you only get 50% back if you’re lucky because the rest is actually not wool at all, it is dirt, grease and moisture!

There’s a lot to learn and the only way to learn it is by asking questions and learning the correct terms so there’s no room for mis-understanding. A handweaver can make changes on the loom on the fly, but you can’t do that so easily on a powerloom. It’s a fascinating world out there, taking a craft skill and turning it into an industrial process, even on the small scale that I do it and I am constantly in awe of the people who work in these industries. Their knowledge is a treasure-trove.

Laura has been working with a local couple in Dentdale who raise Alpacas.

You do everything locally, from sourcing your fleece through to weaving, what value do you feel keeping it local adds to your brand?

People increasingly like to know where their food and clothes come from and who made them, what processes have they gone through to be made. Being able to point out the sheep on the hillside from where I get my wool is of great interest to the customers who visit my workshop. Telling people about the area where I live and how I am using a local resource is important to me. It helps the farmers, the community and me and it gives my customers, many of whom are visitors to the area, a taste of the place to take home with them.

For customers from further afield, they like to know that my product is an honest one and that I am trying to do something to give back to my community. What I do is a tiny drop in the ocean and most people won’t hear the splash but it matters to me. It is particularly gratifying that all of the farmers I work with value the work that I do. They all share in my success and are fascinated to see and learn about what happens to their wool when it leaves the farm.

They are no longer burning or burying the fleece now that they are getting more value for the hard work that goes into looking after their sheep.

Your passion for wool and weaving is so clear. Can you tell us what Made in Britain means to you and why it is important for your brand?

I have tried to keep things as local as possible but have had to learn that sometimes you need to go further afield to get specialist skills as they’re not all on the doorstep. But keeping it British is not a problem at all – we have all the skills I need for my business right here and if we don’t use them they will quickly be gone.

Many of the companies I work with struggle to find and keep young people. The pay is not great, the work can be dirty and noisy, there are times when jobs are flooding in and there are not enough hands to do them all, and then the work falls off a cliff edge because of global market swings and people are out of work or on short hours.

British industry relies on work coming in from elsewhere but it also needs a strong and healthy home-grown market. We make great things here in Britain and I believe British-made goods have a level of quality that is renowned worldwide.

And we couldn’t agree more!

London to New York

Success Story – Laura’s Loom from London to New York

(This story first appeared in the Blue Patch newsletter 2018)

Small businesses in Britain are looking for representation with the right kind of stores. With this in mind, Laura’s Loom, an artisan weaver based in Sedbergh in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales, sent their Cumbrian Summer Blankets by post to Blue Patch HQ, to be featured at London Design Fair 2018.

(photo of Laura at her loom, with BBC Countryfile presenter Joe Crowley)
Laura’s beautifully woven blankets were an instant attraction and visitors  were delighted to see the blankets easily covered a double bed (168cm x 250cm). Check out Laura’s blankets at The Black Bull and book a stay in the Howgill Fells.

Now you can buy one of Laura’s light and warm blankets in New York at Top Hat, a discerning artisanal store that brings unique products to their customers.

Nina, from Top Hat, spotted Laura’s work at London Design Fair and had this to say: ‘I do actually remember seeing it for the first time very clearly – something very quiet in a loud place… I think it’s striking when something quiet makes you listen (or, in this case, look). The blankets are so beautiful, we’re very happy to have them with us in New York – also a very loud place. I imagine the eventual owners will feel something of the magic with which they were made.’

Top hat, New York

Nina Allen, owner of Top Hat, New York

Top Hat: 245 Broome Street between Orchard and Ludlow. Top Hat is open 12 – 8, Tues – Sun.

London’s got them too, at Emery House Design (photo credit above) and at Artemidorus, a boutique artisan craft shop in Herne Hill can be found at  27B Half Moon Lane, London, SE24 9JU. Open Tuesday – Saturday :10:00-18:00

Amanda from Artemidorus

Laura’s Loom has a natural palette, based on the flora and fauna of the Yorkshire landscape; moss, sedge, lichen, heather, wild fruits and brackens. The delicate blues of the Cumbrian sky and limestone also feature. These soft, light blankets are from the land and reflect the land. Starting with the raw wool off the sheep’s back, hand sorted, washed, spun and woven locally.

The sheep are raised in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and neighbouring Cumbria – Bluefaced Leicester, Hebridean and Wensleydale.

                              (photo credit:  Bonnysheep.com)Laura won the Blue Patch New Heritage Award in 2017  which we presented at London Design Fair – which led to Laura taking a look around and deciding to exhibit on the Blue Patch stand in 2018.

Looking Down From The Howgills

I recently wove a blanket and decided to call it Looking Down From The Howgills as it was largely inspired by two photographs I have from this wonderful place where I live – one taken from The Calf, the highest point of The Howgills, looking down into Sedbergh:

the other looking along the length of beautiful Dentdale:

I have been playing with these textured throws for years, ever since I first wove this structure at Bradford College when I studied there for an HNC in Handwoven Design in 2004/05.  A lot of people tell me the structure of the weave is deflected double weave but I think of it as “plain weave with floats”.   Some of the yarns shrink more than others and by playing with this differential shrinkage I am able to create texture in an otherwise flat cloth.  Previous blankets have been woven from a mix of cotton, chenille, silk, and linen.   But this time I wanted to create one in 100% wool and not any wool but my own yarns.

I started with a palette of blues and greens.  It wasn’t hard to find colours that picked up on those in the photographs as I take all of the colour inspiration for my yarns from this very landscape:

I have several different blues and greens in my palette and two different dyed yarns – Cumbrian Tweed and Bluefaced Leicester.  By combining the different yarns in multiple ways I could create a subtle undulating ripple of colour across the whole fabric.   The yarn was wound on the warping mill in a fairly random-looking fashion, but there is always a method to my madness even if it’s not obvious to the casual observer!

I have often described my approach to weaving as ‘painting on a loom’.  I get myself into a terrible pickle when I put warps on the loom because I change things around as I am setting up.  This is not the way it’s supposed to be done but it’s how I work and it keeps things fresh.  Too much structure, too much planning, and too much in the ‘right’ place takes away my spontaneity.   As I wound this warp and looked at how the colours blended my ideas just continued to develop and so did the blending of colours as I sleyed the reed:

There has to be a ‘shrinking factor’ for these blankets so, wanting to keep the whole thing woollen, I used complementary lambswools from my stash.  These wools are softer than my yarns, spun with less twist, and so they shrink more, especially if you give the wool room to shrink (i.e. long floats!):

Ten metres of weaving (and about a week) later it was time to cut the cloth from the loom and check it for faults. I was fascinated by how, in this off-loom state, before washing, this woollen cloth caught the light and looked almost irridescent:

Had I woven this fabric in silk and wool I would have maintained that sense of shine and trapped light.  That’s a thought for another piece.  This one however was cut, pieced back together in a different dimension, and sewn, then washed to create the overall textured effect I was after:

The irridescence is gone but the subtlety of shading remains.  I wanted the colours to ripple across the surface of the fabric, from side to side, echoing the colours of the landscape, as the pattern of floats rippled up and down, mimicking the stone walls which climb from valley floor to fell top in these Yorkshire Dales.  As the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson wrote in his wonderful poem, Wall:

They built a wall slowly,

A day, a week;

They built it to stand,

But not stand still.

They built a wall to walk.

The finished blanket is currently on display as part of Farfield Mill’s Resident Artist exhibition, Design in the Dales (running until 01/01/19).  I hung my poncho next to the blanket – I also wove this in my Cumbrian tweed yarns.  My sewing efforts were rescued by Katriona Field who lives in Garnett Bridge, near Kendal, who added the beautiful collar and twisted tie detailing.

“A textile made from good vibrations”

I really enjoy trying to turn other people’s ideas into fabric and when I get the response I’ve used as the title for this piece it just makes my heart sing.

My most recent commissioned piece involved creating a large shawl that incorporated “long slim pleated stripes” in vibrant colours, mixed with flat areas of solid colour “scattered in a loose style”.  My client’s inspiration came from the colours of Gustav Klimt and the textures of Mariano Fortuny’s pleated gowns, as well as a delicately coloured Japanese kimono:

 

 

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I have never met my client, who lives in Germany, but we have worked together before on a throw for Fledi.  We correspond via email and she sends me lots of images along with wonderfully evocative words to help me understand her ideas, such as these:  “the whole pallet of pink and gold. a symphony of glowing and blaze! so much that all dark thoughts pop off.”

We have developed a way of working together while so far apart in both distance and language.  As my German is non-existent (the only phrase I have is “eine kleine weisse bier bitte”!) we communicate in English and through the medium of images.  I choose yarns and send these to my client so she can pick her colours and textures, then I work on samples and send those.  My client sends me brilliant feedback.  The words are often few but chosen so well that the detail of her imagination is clear.  I tweak the samples and send photographs and scans until we reach a finished idea.  Then it’s down to the really hard work of weaving the full piece.  These are large pieces, woven in sections and eventually sewn together to create the final outcome.

Working on commissions is quite a daunting task.  I’ve worked with a number of clients over the years but have met very few of them.  Somehow, between us, we seem to create successful projects.  I try to ask lots of questions very early on and I’m willing to sample initial ideas to gain immediate feedback so I don’t spend too long going off in the wrong direction. They offer useful input in the form of images, swatches, colour chips and words.  Although these challenges push me out of my comfort zone I love these interactions because they stretch my abilities, both creatively and technically.  I have to find ways to produce a fabric which even my clients themselves might not be able to imagine.

Here are a few images which show some of the developmental stages of Sabine’s pleated shawl, from second sample with feedback overlaid, to setting up on the loom, to the first section in its stiff off-loom state, and the finished piece after washing and sewing.  The whole piece was eventually woven as four long panels, a total of almost 8 metres of fabric to create a finished shawl of approximately 180cm square.  A very fine pink silk was used as the weft to help create pleats in a crammed and spaced warp of cotton, glitter and silk yarns.

The response:  “Yesterday in the evening the holy moment of revelation.  What a fire work of friendly and happy colors!  It matches very true my imaginations…indeed a textile made from good vibrations”