Yes, And; Stacey Honorarium Commission

On Thursday, October 28th the First Baptist Church of Ann Arbor held an intimate service for the piece that they commissioned me to create in memorial of their pastor, Stacey Simpson Duke.  It's hard to put into words how honored I am to have gotten to create this piece for them. Being hired to design and weave a piece with this level of emotional and personal intention, yet, still have the freedom to create in the way that works best for me was truly a wonderful experience. 

I made it through the service without crying too much and was invited to speak.  A big thing for me with this piece it's the first of my word-based weaving that is not only a commission but will hang in a permanent home.  So far these types of pieces are publicly exhibited but then come back to me. Which has made sense as they relate directly to me and my emotions or how I'm handling (or not handling) something at that time in my life. This was a different level of emotional learning for me. The internet deep dive that I fell into researching Stacey's voice of hope and inclusivity made me feel connected to her without ever having the opportunity to meet her. Once I started learning about her, the ideas and inspiration for this piece came in droves. 

They presented this weaving in the church sanctuary at first and towards the end it was taken to be hung so we could witness it's initial hanging as a group. I was so surprised when I walked into the hallway and they had chosen to hang it from the ceiling in the center of the stairwell. Initially we had discussed hanging it against the wall, but when I had spoken about how my double weavings are visible from both sides at a church meeting back in February the way it was to hang changed, I just didn't realize that it had been confirmed. 

I stayed and answered questions and we spoke about Stacey, a number of people told me that she would have loved it and the other popular comment was that I reminded the attendees of Stacey, with my curly hair and large fuchsia cat eye glasses.

The other exciting thing (to me) about the way this weaving is hung is that the time of day will show off the two sides differently. In the evening the side facing the upstairs hall was in full color and the light shining on it lit lit it up but that light also shines through it. So from the back side, with the light shining through you don't see the colors as vibrantly but you do get the outlines of the words and shapes. I had just given a program about my work and was trying to explain that I weave a bit more open than most and when the light comes through my weavings the colors and often designs disappear making it look more like plain fabric.  This piece doesn't look "plain" by any means, but that effect was lovely to see in-person.  I usually end up with a favorite side of my weavings, but this one is really balanced and I like them both equally, so I'm glad it ended up being hung this way. 

The Service Handout

As much as I always say I don't take commissions, lately when I do they really are worth it, I feel confident that I've done a good job for the group the commission is for and I get a lot of joy out of doing it. And that's how they should feel. This piece actually pushed me to put the most amount of color I've ever included in a weaving before and also learn a vector based design program so I could add movement to the words. I'd never have thought when I was in art school that I would ever end up creating pieces that would be hanging in places of worship (or that I would need to use Illustrator/Inkscape). I didn't think it was out of the question either, I just...didn't know where I or my work was going back then.  

This weaving has so much going on with it that I did my best to narrow down all the detail shots, I hope whoever likes to look at my blog out there enjoys them at much as I do. 

Yes, And Sample 1

In November and December I went about dyeing new rayon for a church commission that I have agreed to do this year. I did a lot of playing with colors and had a meeting that included putting skeins of yarn that I had dyed up against the wall that the weaving will hang on. We (the committee at the church for this honorarium and I) agreed that saturated colors looked really wonderful and so I set about winding a warp and dressing Beatrice. 

Drafting the way I wanted to warp for this double weave pickup became an obsession. I was rolling it around in my head and sometimes waking up in the middle of the night thinking about what I needed to do to make it work.  This piece is the first where I have one warp threaded as plain weave (which is normal) and the second warp prepared for a twill weave option. The colored layer is plain weave with a striped color warp and the black is twill.  I thought it would be nice to make the more textured fabric in black and it's absolutely wonderful in person. 

One of the things about weaving something that's been in your head can be that you hope it works out in some sort of interesting if not exciting and perfect way, but it can end up being a flop. I was ready, I didn't have my hopes too high, I knew I'd probably have to go in and fix threading errors that would pop up and drive me nuts, or the 2 fabric structures wouldn't play nice together or...something.  It's a miracle. No threading errors and as I started to weave the design it just...worked. I'm still waiting for the shoe to drop on this but it's not, it's just perfect. 

I started with an 8 x 10 of the actual cartoon that I'm working on. The 32 in x 48 in cartoon is just being finalized and working a narrow section of  it gives me a good idea of how the spacing and font sizing is going to look.  After weaving one small portion of the warp (in case I couldn't find the time after a stint of multiple days off in a row) I decided that I wanted to have a long strip to weave and move from one color weft idea to the next. So I printed a 10 x 48 strip of cartoon to work with next. I didn't do too long of a warp because I knew I might want or need to change it up and I didn't want to get stuck with feeling like I had to weave all of it. I think its safe to say that most of us weavers hate to waste warp. So this warp ended up with a 10 x 8 sample and a 10 x 25 sample.

In the above photo I also have a 3rd sample. I tried one more warp with a little bit of color in the black warp.  Just to see how it reads. I didn't want to be weaving that idea on a later project and think "oh man, this would have been great in Stacey's weaving."  I'll talk more about that one in the next blog post.

I met with the church on Sunday. They had a lovely service and afterward an annual meeting that they were happy to have me at to introduce this commission piece in honor of Pastor Stacey. I was so glad to have samples that I could pass around so the church members that attended had something to touch and see as the project was explained. I held the pieces up against the wall. I was afraid to let the blue be too bright, but I need to dye the next batch brighter. I don't naturally tend towards really bright colors, I want more muted tones. This has been nice to get me out of my color-comfort-zone and it really brightens the studio! 

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Here I am working on one of these samples.