A Studio Tour

January 19, 2023

It has taken me longer than I imagined to settle into my studio. I mostly had things unpacked and in place at the end of August after we moved in July. There have been small tweaks and some equipment came and went. Shelves were built, worktables in place and yet it didn’t quite feel right. I didn’t feel really compelled to be in the space and I wasn’t quite sure what was going on.

Design wall to the left. Fabrics stick to the flannel so they can be viewed, photographed and observed. Quote on this wall is from a Mary Oliver poem. Work table and drawers to the right.

When winter set into the land of 10,000 now frozen lakes, I figured I’d go heads down to work. I did for the most part, but I felt unfocused and meh about a lot of things. Last week that began to change. I added another bookcase to capture the height of the room. It allowed my reference books to spread out more, keepsake display space and supply bins to hide clutter to now have a place. They are easily reachable, but visually the shelves are clean.

Antique shuttles that I’ve been given. So many books!

My poor parents would be amused to know that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more fastidious about mess and clutter. I’ve worked in a variety of studio spaces, some shared and I know I work best in clean spaces.

Work tables for various tasks. Computer area items can be condensed for hand stitching as well.

This weekend my husband and I built another bookshelf for the space behind my loom for yarn storage. I had a shorter shelf there before and the whole area was a bit of a chaotic disaster. Now I have covered storage for colored yarns, shelves for white coned yarns and the clutter has a place to go. Most of it was rehomed into my storage area as we moved the smaller shelf there.

Main weaving area. Tools for weaving in the drawers, yarn in the cabinets and winding items for yarns on the table area.

Next, we painted the bathroom. Before it was a late 90s/early 2000 shade of dark teal with dim lighting. We painted it the same color as the studio walls and installed daylight bulbs above the vanity. It is transformed and it just feels better. There is a ridiculous amount of storage in this bathroom. The vanity drawers are full of shop towels, measuring spoons and cups, the cupboard holds drop cloths, dye powders and the shower has bins and a rolling cart tucked inside. I feel very fortunate to have a space with a wet area. The shower makes an excellent place to tuck wet yarns and fabric into for drying.

The bathroom that offers more artwork display space! A large and hidden drawer on the vanity base offers more storage. I didn’t discover it until a few weeks ago.

Today’s project was to reclaim the space under my main worktables. We had a four shelf wire unit that was sitting unused. I measured it and realized it would be perfect under the tables as two units with two shelves. It now holds rolled textiles, shipping box with pool noodles for textiles rolls, and various other things that I need here and there.

I’m all about capturing as much space as I can in studios. Textiles is an equipment dense pursuit and the clutter of it can be overwhelming. Finding a home for each tool or supply takes time and there are many tweaks. I get annoyed when I go to look for something and can’t find it. It’s inefficient and can break the workflow. One of my favorite studio tools is a label maker. All drawers and closed storage bins are labeled.

Sewing area with printer tucked under. Printer shelf is on wheels now so it can be pulled out for expanded use. Rolling cart has weaving yarns that can be moved when I’m at the loom.

One of my favorite thing in my studio can be found in the storage closet. I used a small wire rack to organize loom reeds and tools. I don’t know why but speciality reed storage are crazy expensive.

It isn’t a Pinterest studio space for the most part. The main workspace is organized, clean and spacious given what I have in it. There are tight areas around the loom, but it works.

And I’m working too. I feel excited to get to the space in the morning and I’m finding it hard to leave at night. I like being in the space, ideas are flowing, and I’ve started making a daily list of tasks I hope to get to that day.

On the list for tomorrow is this weaving that I began in the last post. It is off the loom, and I have some hemming to do before doing some more work on it. Will it be a piece? I don’t know, but there is an idea there that calls to me. So, work will begin on it tomorrow.

Another favorite part of my studio is this saying above the utility room door.

“Minä istun iloissani ja annan surun huilata.”

“I sit here contented while sorrow catches its breath.”

The Finnish saying came from a letterpress artwork that we have framed in another part of the house. I had a bit of an exchange with a Finnish instructor, and he thought that contented wasn’t a strong enough word – delighted, maybe. I’ll stick with contented. It seems like a deeper more lasting feeling. I’ve found it here in the wild and wintery north.

The marsh is frozen over while we bask in the sunshine.

Working in Uncertainty

December 22, 2022

When I was learning to weave, I wasn’t quite sure what goes where, how much, or how long. I felt like I had too many hands and yet not enough. Eventually things gelled, skills built and when there was a problem, I knew how to solve it or at least where to begin to come up with a plan.

The prep stages of weaving are often my favorite part of the process: measuring out the length of yarn for the warp (long yarns that get threaded onto the loom), and the slow, repetitive process of handing each yarn end multiple times to get it ready on the loom. There is a lot of repetition that is meditative for me. While my mind can wander a bit, I must be present in each task to ensure I don’t make mistakes or at least to minimize them.

The hardest part for me in weaving is bringing the idea in my head into existence. What colors to use? What materials? How do I want to weave it? Making functional items like blankets, towels is easier. Decide and then do it. But making art pieces is a totally different game. I am a process artist. I fumble and experiment to slowly realize the image in my head. The materials and the process of making are all informative to the result. I’ll admit that very often the finished product isn’t even the point for me. The artwork in these instances is the making. In contrast there have been a handful of times that I know exactly what I want to make and then it is just a matter of doing it.

*Convergence 2014* 20” x 23 ½” Woven Brocade - cotton, and rayon. 2014

Being an artist for me is a balance of certainty and uncertainty. Knowing what to do and how it will finish in the end vs. putting in the hard work, time and not knowing how things will be completed in the end, or even if they will be completed at all. Abandoning ideas, pieces and scrapping them happens a lot. After unpacking from our move, I’ve sorted through many items that I’ve kept to use the materials again.

Learning something new as an adult is challenging. By contrast, children are used to not knowing how to do many things. They are accustomed to learning new things in groups of their peers, and they have less ego involved with initially being really bad. Everything is new. The Buddhist have a term “beginners’ mind” that I’ve thought about a lot as I was teaching and again when I was in graduate school assisting other students. There is a golden optimism in the beginner’s mind. Everything is open, possibilities exist everywhere, and there is an eagerness to engage. I’ve learned so much from beginner weavers who don’t know “the rules” or that “you can’t/shouldn’t do that.” I try to cultivate my beginner’s mind when I’m in the studio, leaving behind the should, shouldn’t and instead ask myself open questions to keep my curiosity in play.

Engaging with certainty and uncertainty can be challenging. The pandemic has thrown many of us into the realm of deep uncertainty. I remember the fear of the early days and trying to wrap our collective arms around things we thought we could control. In my own life, I’m having to admit to myself that I’ve had a year of upheaval. Most of it has been good, but some of it has been hard. Health issues, moving, fixing issues in a new home (a paradox after we’d already fixed so much in our old home), weather changes and relationship changes. I saw this meme the other day on social media:

Ouch.

I found myself sitting on the floor under my loom the other day having a moment. My current loom uses a new-to-me technology that has thrown me deeply back to the beginner stage. I do not yet have the knowledge to see how to correct the problem that I’m having. It is frustrating. My tolerance for frustration lately has been low. It’s been a challenging couple of weeks with many things needing solutions that are outside of my knowledge zone. So I complained about it on social media, and walked away from the loom. The next day I came back and broke the problem down step by step. I had done some reading and I had a better idea of what I needed to do. As I gain more experience with this loom, I know it will likely get easier.

For now, I’m slowly weaving on a piece or something. I’m using it to get to know my loom more, to feel the pleasure of yarn between my fingers and to sit with uncertainty in a neutral way.

In other news, a few weeks ago I applied for Art for Water, a division of Minnesota Water Stewards program offered by Freshwater. This program trains participants on water issues, and preservation of waterways. Being part of Art for Water, I will take all the trainings, work with local partners and create artwork to help inspire and educate others on water issues. I’m honored to have been accepted in the 2023 cohort! I’m looking forward to learning and working on the issues. My artwork has included water in them for years, and since moving to an area so rich in water resources, I’ve felt the pull to learn more. This opportunity will provide so much research and resources for future projects.

***Watersheds: Open Door*** 24" h x 22" w x 1" d Cottons and linens. Hand dyed cotton, lace and linen manipulated fabrics, handwoven fabrics, hand & machine pieced with hand embroidery. 2022

We are hunkering down in the Twin Cities with many sub zero days. Yesterday was the solstice and the promise of more light each day brings hope and promise. Happy Holidays to everyone.

Frozen marsh and lake in the Twin Cities. Beautiful.

Stitching What We Did Not Say: A Textile Story

October 12, 2022

“The feeling of not being needed in this new society, or forgotten by the ones we love is uppermost in our minds. Perhaps they do believe they care, but there is no longer time for the closeness and love in the frantic scramble to survive with the most money and possession in the world of today. They miss so much, as we—who are older and remember those close family ties can only sit quietly by, watching the young ones whizz by to their doom—and their loneliness in the years ahead.”

-Excerpt from essay Loneliness and Depression by Elsie Jestila Roehl

In my mother’s family, silence was a tradition. It was difficult to get information about people, family history, or even how we felt about each other. Instead of talking, my mother spoke to me primarily through her making. Proficient with sewing, macramé, crochet and knitting, under her tutelage I learned to hand sew as a young girl. Later, when I was a teenager, she taught me to knit and crochet. Her hands were seldom still, and she was always tinkering with her own patterns.

When our relationship strained, textiles were a connection point between us. The two dolls that she made me when I was three years old now sit on a bookshelf, though their original clothes have long gone missing. The afghan that she made that covered me when I was home sick from school is folded in my linen closet all these years later. When she was absent, her work comforted me.

A younger version of myself with the dolls.

My mother died in 1999 at an early age, and in my grief, I launched into genealogy. My quest for answers to questions that I hadn’t even been aware of began.

In 2010, I visited my aunt in Arizona with my husband. I brought family photos with me for her to identify the people in them. We spent much of our visits reminiscing about my mother, while so many questions stirred inside me without the words to ask them. Near the end of our visit, my aunt showed me a framed cross-stitched needlework sampler she had on the wall and told me her grandmother, Maria Sophia, had made it. She was so proud of the sampler, and I was shocked that I had never seen it before. I snapped a quick cell phone picture of it and could not take my eyes off it. I had been studying early samplers in art school and here was an existent piece from my own family and proof of another generation of makers.

I thought about that sampler a lot off and on over the years. It didn’t pass to me when my aunt died. When my local weaving guild study group made a proposal to use Swedish linen yarn for a project, I knew what my own project would be. If I could not have the original sampler, I could recreate one of my own. Using the photo, I mapped out the design, simplifying where I could not articulate the stitches due to the photo quality. The design was done in counted cross stitch and it was often challenging to get the count correct between the photo and the actual work. My woven linen cloth brought a sense of devotion to the project – I had a lot of time to think about Maria and what little I knew about her and her life. But I felt such a strong bond with her that I thought she would understand my intentions.

My great grandmother Maria Sophia’s Sampler photographed left and my recreated version on the right.

I turned to my genealogy research to help understand the sampler. Maria Sophia, my great grandmother, stitched the sampler in 1880. She was twelve at the time and living with her family in Sweden. The sampler features an alphabet and numbers one through zero at the top. Below are the initials of her father and mother under a crown like design, an arrow or berry/flower motif separates the parent’s initials. Near the center of the work are a chalice and cross, and two churches with gardens. At the center bottom prominently in tan are Maria’s initials MSA with the S stitched backwards. I find it fascinating that she did this since the S in the alphabet is correctly positioned. After much consideration, I chose to render the S in her name as she had, backwards. Flanked on either side of her initials are two sets of initials for her siblings that were alive at the time the work was completed. A few motifs frame out the composition and the whole work is framed with a maroon zig zag.

In her eighties my grandmother, Elsie, took creative writing classes at a local community center. She published some of her essays and poetry in her local newspaper and slowly shared them with me. Elsie was largely a mystery. She would tuck her stories about her life, raising her children and some of her longings, into an envelope and mail them with short letters to me. The letters contained brief sketches of her day or her worries about my mom, and little else. Through her writings, though, I got a glimpse of her inner life. I felt I didn’t write back often enough, but even when I did my inquiries about our family largely went unanswered. I spent a lot of my time quietly writing my own stories and poems. I did not share them with many people, but on a whim, I mailed a stack to my grandmother and waited. During the winter holidays, on our last visit together, my grandmother brought up my writing. I expected to bond with her over my writing; instead, she criticized it. Rather than react to the stories themselves, my grandmother quibbled over what genre the writing would fall into and ignored the content. I felt the sting of rejection from her along with her silence. I was angry with her, and my grudge continued even after her death. Our shared passion for writing should have been a connection point but instead was a point of contention.

After my mom died, I received several boxes of items that my aunt mailed to me. One of those boxes contained a heavy metal safe filled with fourteen 8 mm film reels. On some of the reel cases, labeled in my mom’s neat handwriting, are paper labels fixed over the faded ones. I didn’t open the box of film when it first came to my keeping in 1999. It wasn’t until 2020 that I opened the box again and rediscovered my inheritance of silent movies of silent people.

My grandfather was the first movie maker in our family. After his death, my mother took up the camera. I selected three reels in the collection and sent them to be digitized so that I could view them for the very first time. When I received them back, I watched them with growing heaviness. I didn’t recognize the people in the film – only my grandmother, Elsie, my mother, and her siblings. I hoped the reels would be a way to connect and to discover my family. Instead, I felt shut out from them and the secrets they carried. The films felt like a burden – I could not discard them, but I could not understand them either.

After watching them a few times, I wondered that perhaps I could look at them with the understanding that they were from my grandfather’s point of view. With the reels, he was capturing what was important to him and wanted to share. That change in perspective prompted me to reexamine the reels. One reel, labeled 1948 cottage, felt very significant as my mother’s frequently spoke about the cottage. My grandfather’s family kept the Finnish tradition of having a summer cottage that they would retreat to and enjoy the natural surroundings.

In the cottage reel, there was a vignette in which my grandfather approached my grandmother sitting in a lounge chair. Elsie sat with a big floppy hat covering her head, near their summer cottage on the shore of a lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In her hands she held some stiff fabric and needle that laced in and out of the cloth. Her arm arched up in the graceful, fluent curve of experienced hand stitching. It is a movement I’ve made thousands of times, that I’ve seen my mother make, and that that Elise’s mother, my great grandmother made as well must have made as evidenced by her sampler. I was stunned. I did not know my grandmother sewed.

A still of Elsie stitching from grainy family film

I’ve watched the footage many times since. Each time, I’m struck by the playfulness in the moment. The camera/grandfather coming upon a woman stitching by the lake. She looks up to see the camera and drops her hands to her lap and playfully nestles into her chair like she will soon take a nap. She smiles openly and knowingly at the camera. There is an intimacy there, a little quiet snapshot of the relationship between my grandparents — my grandfather silenced by a painful, early death and my grandmother’s silence that hid secrets and so much pain. My inheritance of these many film reels, once such an expensive and cumbersome burden, now unlocks little secrets. My grandmother sewed. My heart aches and I find myself releasing resentment that I held unconsciously for so many years against her. My grandmother was like me. Like her daughter. Like her mother.