Finding a place to trust
“Find a place you trust and then
try trusting it for a while.”
-Sister Corita Kent
The weaver is a tenacious and trusting craftsperson. They begin with an idea, and through the process of warping a loom, they must commit. It’s not a rigid committal to all the details of the cloth. Some parts remain experimental - materials and colors of the weft, treading patterns that dictate the design. But there is a commitment and acceptance that some things will not change. Each warp yarn is chosen, destined for the loom, to be wound and threaded in its individual place. Around the warp beam, through the heddle on its shaft, in the center of the cloth, or the selvedge - the outer edge of either side of the textile. Many preparatory hours are devoted to this blip of an idea. Once the process starts, it moves forward in a linear trajectory, one step, then the next.
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Planning textiles and dressing looms has lead me to reflect on trust as both a creative tenant and a life virtue. I prefer the verb to the noun, and the best way I can define it is “to be unsure and to keep going.”
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I used to paint as my main expression, both oil and watercolor. Oil painting allowed me to change course at any moment, and I often did. I would use my brush to smudge out the last thing I painted over and over again: it’s a tree, no it’s a face, no it’s a landscape. I found a sort of nauseating freedom in painting. I learned to paint in watercolor years after oil, and it’s semi-permanence changed my process. The water carries the pigment across an absorbent paper. Once the paint soaks into the paper fibers, which it can rather quickly, it becomes part of the piece. My only choice is to accept the brushstroke and keep moving forward with each new iteration.
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In weaving, I am unsure a lot. I draft and design and do yarn wrappings to compare colors next to one another, but nothing short of the weaving on the loom will prove or disprove my idea. So I warp the loom and touch each warp end with my hands at least five times throughout the process, each time assigning a role in the greater weaving. And then I treadle to lift the warp threads, throw my weft through the space in between, and beat the yarn into place. Repeat repeat repeat. The woven cloth disappears as I advance the warp, pulling more warp yarn from the back of the loom and slowly wrapping the finished cloth around a beam near my knees. All my trust, compounding on itself, hoping that each small snippet of cloth that I produce will be cohesive when it comes off my loom at the end of my weaving.
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Trust means, “keep going.” It doesn’t mean “it will work out” or “it will be good” but it means “you’ll never know if you stop now.”
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