Looking for the shifts

wrestling with spring and an update on a favorite pattern

Spring is my unsettled season. To me it has always been a season of waiting.

When I was a kid, my family relocated every two years, so spring was about waiting for the house to sell. My senior year high school spring was about waiting for college acceptances. My senior year college spring was about interviewing for jobs…and waiting to hear about said jobs. In middle age, it is spring and the kitchen project has slowed as Kord works tirelessly on a new venture that is due to launch sometime this spring. Spring is a remarkably quiet time in craft retail -- once gardening season starts, weaving season ends. I’m not one who can relax into the quiet time and just enjoy the sweetness of doing less (or nothing). I am not good at coasting. Never have been. I’m as ahead on as many project as I can be, both personally and professionally. The waiting on everything else just makes me feel stuck, as whatever I am waiting for is out of my hands.

I’m a fall baby and autumn is my season. Labor Day is my New Year’s and I am never so energized or productive as I am in the fall. The season of renewal, regeneration and growth paralyzes me. Maybe this is because I am not a gardener. Every single year, spring catches me off-guard and renders me unable to move. This year feels particularly torpid. It’s hard to read the news and not feel like the world is in complete ruin. What do you do in the face of school shootings, war, inflation, and climate change? How do you move forward?  Maybe you don’t, or shouldn’t. Sometimes you need to stay put and observe. If my now very lapsed yoga practice has taught me anything, it’s that sometimes the thing to do is to sit and observe your breath. Breath constantly moves, maybe not deeply or fully, but it is physically impossible for breath not to move. If you are willing to extrapolate that concept, you realize that everything must change over time. Nothing remains stagnant. Things may not move in a direction you want or on your time table, but they will shift, eventually.

So I’m studying my breath and seeking out the shifts. Courtesy of our home’s previous owners, I’ve watched the white daffodils replace the yellow daffodils in our neglected, overgrown and weedy yard.

white daffodils dry remarkably well and the petals feel like parchment

Then came the phlox. Then came the lilacs. One day last week, the bed outside my studio window exploded with irises.

My view is proof that nothing stays stuck -- that there are always shifts -- shifts in color, shifts in texture, shifts in circumstance. When it feels like you are always looking at weeds, one morning you wake up to irises. I can’t help but think this is a philosophy my Aunt Rae would have embraced. So looking for the shifts is my theme for the season.

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Clearly I should have called this month’s project the Shift napkins, but I bestowed the Shift moniker upon a project last year. The Bordered Fade Napkins are the natural evolution of my spring 2020 Gist project, the Farmhouse Napkins.

Farmhouse Napkins, spring 2020, Gist Yarn

This was my first ombré project, an attempt to literally weave movement (albeit in color on cloth) into a period of the pandemic when time literally felt like it stood still.

Two years later, the design has evolved:

Bordered Fade Napkins, 12” square, perfect for coffee or cocktails

I love the multiple transitions in this cloth -- in color, saturation and texture. In re-imagining the Farmhouse Napkins, I wanted a fade in the weft as well as the warp -- hence the grid was born, which lends itself to weaving square napkins. But this pattern allows for so many possibilities in playing with the border colors and length of the repeats.

Bordered Fade variation: two border colors and a mirrored repeat to make towels

I kept it pretty simple for rigid heddle but made the color shift a bit more subtle for the shaft loom version. With bolder color you lose the sun-bleached look, but in my opinion, the Wall of Troy twill design emerging over the course of the cloth adds back that well-loved, antique feel.

Wall of Troy Napkins, May/June Handwoven Magazine. Photo by Matt Graves, courtesy of Long Thread Media.

One cone each of Gist Yarn Duet and Mallo will make eight Bordered Fade Napkins. Two cones of Gist’s Italian Cotton Linen will make eight Wall of Troy fade napkins. The rigid heddle pattern is in the Etsy shop and the Wall of Troy Fade pattern is in this month’s issue of Handwoven. I hope you enjoy them! If you do weave these projects and post them on Instagram, please tag me @soulspaceart — I’d love to see your creations.

Thanks so much for reading! I have a really good feeling that by the time we meet in June, the kitchen will be done!

xx,

Christine