The Weaving News
Cortez, CO I came straight to Cortez when Jennie Slick and I returned from our Boston workshop to attend the Southwest Traders Rendezvous. This event is sponsored by the Cortez Cultural Center and provides a venue for traders to discuss their stories and the past, present and future of the trading business. As you might…
Jennie Slick and I are getting ready to return home to Arizona. We took a couple of days off after our workshop in Boston and I’ve been looking at slide show software that allows the show to be embedded in a web page. Here are a few pictures from the workshop! Thanks to all of…
Jennie Slick and I have spent the last two days doing a workshop in Harvard, MA at the Friendly Crossways Conference Cetner. Our class of 12 students has done a wonderful job and we’ve had a great time. We are already talking about another workshop next year, so please be sure to check for exact…
Jennie Slick and I will be doing a Navajo Weaving Boot Camp at Friendly Crossways Conference Center in Harvard, Massachusetts starting tomorrow evening. The boot camp is an intensive three day workshop on Navajo weaving that we’ve been doing for the last six years. Jennie always takes her C-Cactusflower loom with her and gets busy…
Jennie Slick and I are in Albuquerque on our way to do a three day workshop in Massachusetts. Just before I left Phoenix, I washed and rinsed some custom yarns for the students to look at. One group of them was dyed with cochineal. There’s a picture of the grouping below. Isn’t it amazing that…
I really enjoy seeing weaving that pushes out the boundaries of design and helps to extend the audience of Navajo weaving. One of the weavers who does this consistently is Mae Clark of the New Lands area near Sanders, AZ. Mae’s work is seen exclusively at R.B. Burnham and Comany and I have the privilege…
I’ve got a meeting to get to tonight, so I’ll just do a brief follow up to the end of yesterday’s post on the Spiderwoman hole and its relationship to the spirit line. There’s a school of thought that runs along the line that most aspects of Navajo weaving, including the use of a spirit…
Building on yesterday’s post on the Storm Pattern variant, the earliest illustration that shows what today we would call a Storm Pattern rug comes from J.B. Moore’s 1911 catalog. The rug is plate XXIII and a reproduction of the color plate appears below. The illustration shows a Storm Pattern that is little different in design…
Everyone says that you shouldn’t send people straight to other websites, but I think that you’ll really enjoy listening to Bruce Burnham tell you a short (1 minute and 13 seconds) story about the development of the Storm Pattern rug. I do the Burnham’s web site and this discussion got started when Bruce said the…
Many people, especially people who read this site, are familiar with the $500,000 Chief Blanket that was featured on the Antiques Roadshow and occasionally I get an email from someone who really, really, really hopes that they own a similar treasure. I haven’t found one so far, but I have gotten to see some really…