Daily Weaving

On Jan 1, 2005 I started making a 3” square weaving every day partly just to see where the project would take me. At the end of the year I knew I wasn’t finished. Considering the space required for another 365 squares, I decided to embellish each one the following year (2006). I thought the first year’s pieces were done too quickly to be finished works, but in working on them for a second time I found I was wrong. It became like life, what you do in the past is covered up by but also influences what you do next. I have continued these daily weavings until the present time. Each year varies from the one before. During the year I view the piece as it grows and observe how a theme emerges from the physical doing of the individual weavings. The 2007 project consists of paper that came into my life during the year. Many of the individual pieces are rewoven into themselves as a metaphor for all the invisible work we do in our daily lives. I used staples to help secure the strips during the weaving process, which over time came to mean security. The piercing nature of stapling became a metaphor for the price of security. 2008 was made on random sized pieces of scrap mat board continuing the weaving around the back. The pieces were covered in encaustic wax. I went back to weaving paper into itself in 2009 without regulating the sizes of the pieces, smallest of the years in 2008, largest in 2009. In 2010 I made the warps from a single cone of yarn until it ran out. This methodical use of a single yarn until its end became a metaphor for the patience to see a project through over time and the confidence that it would eventually be finished; over time a certain peacefulness emerged. The next two years 2011 and 2012 were made of alternating strips and squares so that they could be arranged back to back and be viewed from either side. I found it difficult to switch gears monthly from strips to squares. Thinking I’d run out of ideas, in 2013 it occurred to me I could right and left align the paper strips and create negative space. Until this time individual days had been centered. It took another year to figure out how to make that negative space show up and another couple of weeks of painstaking work to stitch knit strips to outline the shapes. In 2014 I let the idea of straight rows of strips and each day orderly following the previous one go to make random patches of torn paper weavings made while I was at home and strips of 3” squares during the days I was away from home.

March 2023:I frequently take time on my daily walks to sit in the woods and enjoy the view. Recently,  the daily weavings spoke to me again when I was struck by how much the linear nature of the trees reminded me of the strips of my daily weavings. The weavings took on a new dimension when attached to the trees. They had a depth and spaciousness not evident when they are hanging on my studio wall. It was much harder to photograph the impact of the strips in the trees than I imagined. Best to come sit in the woods with me to contemplate their beauty and perhaps some of life’s meanings.

For the last several years, I’ve been layering each subsequent month on top of the previous strips keeping the years to a fixed size. Three hundred sixty-five of anything takes up a lot of space and my house is full. When the pandemic started I began making smaller daily weavings. I felt diminished by staying home, losing all my teaching jobs and trips many never to return, too much free time to be the most productive. But, as in past years, thoughts and ideas emerged from the smaller daily weavings . Like in life, as the months and years progress, the past fades, it becomes obscured by current events. So I’ve continued to make the small weavings and still enjoy hanging the finished month’s strip and remembering where I was and what I was thinking about. As each month and year progresses, the strips cover up past years, days, and life events as our memories fade in real life. Although we seem to be nearing the end of the pandemic, at this writing there is no end in sight for the tiny weavings as the weavings have taken on a life of their own.