The Textile Place

09/10/2022

Facebook on my iPad is all messed up this morning. I’ve got a kind of half window (vertical) in the middle of my screen. It asks me what’s on my mind, but when I answer, I’m answering on a new version of one of my own pages that I never asked for instead of on my home page. I have a weird set of icons on the bottom, an emoticon, a marker like on a map, something that looks like it might be a calendar that brings up a list of events and “…”, which basically brings up an empty page. So now I’ll see where this posts. Even odder is that both my iPhone and my Portuguese phone are just fine.

03/20/2021

I am always interested when a handskill so thoroughly lost, sometimes for hundreds of years, is essentially reinvented. This very special muslin is one of those.

★★★★ Directed by Purabi Matin Written and researched by Saiful Islam Documentary film review by Hannah Sayer “I think it is time we appropriate our own history. We hope that through our story we will turn the lens around and it will be the weavers and the spinners who tell their story thro...

03/17/2021

From the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. If I were just a bit younger and in the US, I couldn’t resist applying.

We’re Hiring!

TAC is looking for a part-time, textile-trained Studio Manager to join our active team in NYC. Experience working in a textile studio is highly preferred and a passion for public programming and textile education is required.
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Schedule: 25 hours per week, Sunday through Thursday
In-Studio at Gowanus, Brooklyn.
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Open Call for instructors!

TAC is also seeking instructors for our TAC at Home and in person courses. We are looking for artists and designers working with traditional and experimental textile materials and techniques.
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Link in bio to learn more and apply! ⁠
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12/11/2020

I am waiting for a delivery in about a week to complete my new loom. I had thought that even though I decided to go for 24” (61 cm), it wold fit on the round table in my apartment. No such luck. It’s support legs hug off the edges of the table. So I measured it and ordered a table it will fit. If I moved forward in the directions, attaching the castle, it would be much heavier to move onto the new table. So I wait.

11/07/2020

Before I moved to Portugal, I gave away several looms to the local weaving guild.

One was given to me a while after I completed my studies at FIT. I kept signing up for a weaving class just to have access to a floor loom, and there was one that sat to the side of the weaving room. It belonged to a teaching assistant, who had built it from a kit. Having access to the looms in the weaving room, she gifted that one to me. By giving it to the weaving guild, I made it possible for another person who couldn’t currently afford a floor loom to weave anyhow, perhaps to learn to multi-harness weave. Another was a loom that had belonged to an organization I founded. That’s it’s location it the heading pictures. But the location was sold, and another location turned out only to be good for 3 (highly treasured) months. I also gave a rigid heddle loom and an inkle loom. I only brought with me a second rigid heddle loom.

I knew I would miss my multi-harness looms, but it would have cost too much to move them.

Mostly because of Covid, I put of buying a new loom, this time an 8-shaft table loom, until I had been here a year. I had wanted to visit the shop, several hours away by train, and I wanted to make sure my finances turned out to be what I had predicted. After I’d been here a year, the finances were fine, though, at nearly 70, it still wasn’t safe to travel, so last week, I ordered my new loom, and this week, I’m putting it together.

I am not fully myself without a multi-harness loom. It feels good.

01/26/2019

OK, I was wrong in my last post. I have made some things since I lost my studio at McGuffey. A few. I’ve been reminded by coming across them in working on packing to move to Portugal. Not tomorrow. Frankly, there are still considerable obstacles to overcome, like selling my house for what it should sell for rather than what folks who like trying to take advantage of seniors want to pay for it. But that’s entirely off topic. I finally decided to write because I have learned to use a new tool. A Mayan spinner. The picture is the spinner itself and the yarn I spun with it. I like it. It’s something I can tuck in my carry on, take anywhere,...and defend myself with if I need to, I guess. It’s also going to be very good, I think, in getting rid of the bat wing under my left upper arm. (Ilm left handed.) Wish I were ambidextrous, because it’s going to look weird that I have a big muscle and no bat wing under my left arm, and no muscle and a bat wing under the other arm.

01/16/2018

Hi all. I’ve noticed that there have continued to be new views here. If I had given up on all this, I would have shut down the page. I haven’t really made a thing since I lost my studio at McGuffey. I knew that would happen. This house is just too small to contain all the things I already had for my various makings as well as all the things I invested in for the studio and all the things people gave me for the same reason that I hold onto so much. I cannot stand good making materials going to waste. At least while I had the Textile Place or the studio, I could simply give things away as I happened upon someone who could put them to use. But that doesn’t happen here at the house. I guess I live in perpetual hope of sorting things out to the point of making again. And I am making slow progress on that. If I had a car rather than the ELF, it would be faster. In the meanwhile, change happens, and I have felt the need to spend a lot of time on the desperate situation of my country, even to make plans to leave this country if necessary. I know that isn’t what you were looking for when you came to this page. Some day, maybe sooner than I think, that will happen. In the meanwhile, I just felt the need to explain.

10/31/2015

I want to start collecting and posting pictures of textile work that inspires. This is not mine, and i don't know whose it is.

09/24/2015

Thanks all you folks for looking here. I know I've practically abandoned even this idea. Sometimes things don't work out the way you'd like. I still wish. I still love all things textile. (Don't I have a cotton spinning kit with me right now trying to learn something new and hoping that learning to spin cotton will help with my other spinning. There is not time for all things in life, even when you don't work. That's a sad fact.

06/09/2015

One more time. Andrea Korotky's latest, a lace weave.