April 2020 Newsletter
Hello Fiber Friends,
Staying at home is not a hardship for me. It is a privilege to be guilt-free about not going to the gym, to prepare a recipe that requires many steps and prolonged stirring, to take my time making yarn wraps and planning yet another project. No anxiety about having a different WIP* at every seating area in the house plus a basket beside the bed. Anxiety about other people’s well-being? Well yes. Spending time on the internet trying to find out, what? Yes, I’m doing that too. However, there is so much being shared among the online fiber community that is sustaining, helpful, reassuring and good to read. We are among the folks who already have a handle on the power of our habits and attitudes to keep us going during uncertain times.
Staying at home is not a hardship for me. It is a privilege to be guilt-free about not going to the gym, to prepare a recipe that requires many steps and prolonged stirring, to take my time making yarn wraps and planning yet another project. No anxiety about having a different WIP* at every seating area in the house plus a basket beside the bed. Anxiety about other people’s well-being? Well yes. Spending time on the internet trying to find out, what? Yes, I’m doing that too. However, there is so much being shared among the online fiber community that is sustaining, helpful, reassuring and good to read. We are among the folks who already have a handle on the power of our habits and attitudes to keep us going during uncertain times.
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Weaving has power! In member notes you can read an uplifting account from a third grade teacher who sent her students home from their last day at school with weaving looms and supplies. I am enchanted by the words of this wonderful teacher and her students’ embrace of weaving! I wonder if there are other teachers who could benefit from a contribution of weaving supplies for their classrooms when students are allowed to return to school. Mary Oates is using this time to research the plans for a Viking warp-weighted loom that can be used for demonstrations and events, like the community tapestries woven at the Fair and at Everson School. Three days ago I set my box of small looms supplies out on the porch, and wiped it down with disinfectant. My neighbor and her pre-teen daughter picked it up this morning, and Susan reports that Charlotte is in awe of all the supplies! They have promised to send more photos, and to help me organize weaving classes for Charlotte and her friends when we can get together again.
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Carol’s neighbor Charlotte trying out her new “small loom.”
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Daffodils are blooming. Bird sounds are much more audible, in the relative quiet. I have started Indigo seeds in a flat on my front porch. The beets that went to seed in the raised bed last fall are sprouting on their own. The peas are up. It has been three summers since I planted Madder, and now I can dig it up! Tapestry weaver Sarah Swett blogged last year about Madder from her garden, and her tests of dried versus fresh roots (dried are supposed to be better, but the fresh gave her red yarn, giving me the inspiration to try mine out soon!) Sarah blogged more recently about her years of social isolation in remote Idaho, when shopping for groceries happened twice a year, and the internet hadn’t been invented. Joanne Hall told me about her first years in business in Montana, without even telephone service. She communicated with customers via postcard, “which worked just fine.” I do look forward to Guild meetings & programs, getting back to the Jansen Center, helping friends put warps on their looms in person, carpooling to yarn shops in Skagit County and other exotic and precious locales. In the meantime… I am missing all of you. Be well, and we’ll be back together, with some awesome show and tell!
Carol Berry,
2019-2020 WWG President
*WIP: Work in Progress (which should be my middle name!)
