Connections

For someone with no social life, I have had a surprisingly social week. On Monday morning I had a visit from Jill Altmann, a designer from Reno, Nevada who is taking a holiday in Scotland – see her lovely website here (but note that it needs Flash, so may not work if you are reading this on a phone) – and so I was pleased that we had put on our sunniest October weather for the day, to make a good impression! We had much to say about yarns and sources of yarns, naturally. It is fortunate that there is a museum and café just across the road, so that her husband and friends had somewhere to wait out the discussion…

And then on Monday afternoon I met Andrew Kieran of weave4fun. I have been reading Andrew’s blog for years, but this was the first time we had met in person and, guess what, we had plenty to talk about too. Looms, mainly, in this case: what works, what doesn’t, what could be better. Andrew has spent several years in the weave shed at Heriot-Watt, first as student and latterly as weave technician, so he has met quite a bit of loomage.

Andrew’s floor loom now lives in Dundee MakerSpace, which is not a long walk from my house, and I have been meaning to get along to one of the Make/Share nights that they have started hosting once a month. And last night I finally did that. The theme was ‘collaboration’ and there were four speakers who introduced a very eclectic range of projects. I enjoyed hearing about them, but especially appreciated the question and answer session afterwards. There were some really searching and pertinent questions, such as: how do you collaborate effectively across disciplines that have very different expectations with respect to pay scales? Anyone got an answer to that?

Meanwhile, preparations are afoot for Open Studios next weekend (24/25 October) and this weekend new weavers will be warping up their first projects. I sneaked a few pictures of the design and sampling exercises last weekend, so here’s a taste of Jane’s colour explorations.

Should be fun, eh?

Oh, and while I was tying up skeins of yarn for more dyeing, I also caught the first part of this on iPlayer: The Story of Scottish Art. Looking forward to episode 2.

“Connections” was posted by Cally on 15 Oct 2015 at http://callybooker.co.uk