17 Dec 2025

Reflecting on 2025

12

This has been quite the year, hasn’t it? I started 2025 with a January trip to California, where my father lives, and when I look back at that trip now I feel as though I am peering at it through the wrong end of a telescope. Is that really me?

Reflecting on making

I’ve enjoyed every minute I have spent at the loom this year, but there simply haven’t been enough such minutes. Most of my scarce weaving time has been spent sampling, experimenting, exploring, which I absolutely love. So I am trying not to feel too disappointed that I don’t have any significant new work to show for it, because that will come. But it does sting a bit, no getting away from that.

The new work I have completed has been at the computer, where I have spent hundreds of hours over the last two years. Those hours have delivered one finished manuscript, over five hundred captioned images, four rounds of proofing and now, at last, one forthcoming book Designing and Weaving Double Cloth. It’s been intense! I am grateful to have got this far (there were many, many moments of doubt) and am looking forward to sharing more about it as publication day approaches.

There are two things about this experience which stand out for me. One is that I could not have done it alone, and I am immensely thankful for everyone who has helped me bring this project to its conclusion. That includes people who cheered me on, people who gave me feedback, people who lent me their skills, people who taught me new skills, and many more.

And that brings me to the other notable thing, which is that I have particularly enjoyed extending my skills in areas I had never previously thought about. Writing doesn’t scare me, but vector illustration certainly did! And now I am turning out diagrams and mocking up page layouts as if Adobe Illustrator were my second home. It’s never going to be my strongest suit, but it’s been a pleasant surprise to find that I am holding any cards at all.

Reflecting on changes

I’ve already blogged about the big move, so I don’t have much to add here. The possibility had been bubbling in the back of my mind for the last couple of years, but until I had submitted the book manuscript to the publisher, I didn’t have enough space in my head to turn the idea over and look at it from all sides. I must say that it feels seriously good to reach the end of this year with both of these giant tasks accomplished.

There’s an aspect of this year which I haven’t yet shared beyond family and friends, because it feels rather the wrong size and shape in the context of everything else in the world. But our feline companions have often featured in this blog over the years, so I think I should bring things up to date.

We started 2025 with three lovely cats: our senior cat, Polly (aged seventeen or eighteen), and ‘the kittens’, Pippi and Magnus (who actually turned nine last year). We end the year with none.

Pippi had a lymphoma and died in January. Polly was overtaken by old age and kidney failure and died in April. Magnus had very complex health issues, which he had been an absolute trooper about for over a year, but took a sudden downturn and died in August. We knew that these things were coming, but to have them come so thick and fast has been brutal. We miss them dreadfully.

  • Young Polly
  • Polly and Phoebus
  • Baby kittens
  • Polly and baby Magnus
  • Grown up kittens
  • Polly and adult Magnus
  • Pippi, Queen of Shoes

    • Reflecting on inspiration

    This year has been a peculiar one for inspiration. On the one hand, I have been so intensely absorbed in the things immediately in front of me – three sick cats and one demanding manuscript – that I feel I have hardly raised my head to look around me. On the other, the book project has brought me into places where I am spending a lot more time with writers than I have done before, and it’s been fascinating to get that glimpse of another creative process.

    Here are a few things I’ve been reading, which could be loosely grouped under the theme of inspiration:

    • The Subtle Maneuvers newsletter by Mason Currey
    • Doom and Bloom by Campbell Walker
    • What Art Does by Brian Eno and Bette A.
    • Oliver Burkeman’s newsletter The Imperfectionist

    The energy I’ve met in writerly humans is positively buzzing, and in stark contrast to all the bland drivel being generated by AI, and I love that. I’ve always enjoyed words and reading – and remain defiantly human both in my self-expression and my use of dashes – but I am now very clear in my own mind that while writing is part of my work, writing is not my work.

    Reflecting on teaching

    One of the things that most reliably inspires me is teaching, because I love spending time with other weavers. And I learn so much!

    In the first place, turning a topic into a workshop is a fantastic way to clarify my own thinking about it. It forces me to slow down, to articulate what I know, to unpick what I don’t know, to do more research and experimentation, to identify the underlying principles, to find analogies, to discover how to communicate it all. It’s such a rewarding process.

    And then I get to surround myself with weavers, all bringing their own expertise into the class, and I learn even more, both from their weaving experience and from their response to the workshop. It’s learning all the way down! Honestly, I couldn’t ask for a better job. If you’ve been part of a workshop in 2025, know that weaving with you has been one of the highlights of my year.

    So that’s 2025, or almost. As for 2026, I am going into it with the expectation of spending a great deal less time at the vet and the intention to spend a great deal more time at the loom. How about you?

    Reflecting on 2025 was posted by Cally on 18 December 2025 at https://callybooker.co.uk

    20 Nov 2025

    Moving on

    8

    13 years ago, in the summer of 2012, I moved my looms into a top floor studio in Meadow Mill.

    A photo of Meadow Mill against a blue sky

    I’m old enough now that, in many ways, 13 years doesn’t feel to me like a particularly long time. We’ve lived in the same house for twice as long as that; been married for nearly three times (!) as long. But these particular 13 years have held a great deal of change, both for me personally and in the wider world, and the shape of my life and practice now is very different from the shape of my life and practice then.

    And it is time to move on. Much as I have loved my Meadow Mill studios – and I’ve occupied three different studios over those years – the space is no longer the support to my work that it once was.

  • Studio 412
  • Studio 412
  • Studio 412
  • Studio 412
  • Studio 412
  • Studio 412
  • Studio 211
  • Studio 211
  • Studio 211
  • Studio 405
  • Studio 405
  • Studio 405
  • Studio 405

    • Since the pandemic, a series of eye-watering rent increases have made me look more sternly at my budget and ask hard questions about what I really need. To teach online, for instance, what I need is not a big space, but a fast and reliable internet service. My studio was great at the former, but my home is a whole lot better at the latter. So it’s been on my mind for a while that I should seriously weigh up my options, but while I was working on the manuscript for my book I couldn’t find any space in my head for Big Thoughts About The Future. Now that the publication process is underway (more on that soon!) and I have had a few months to ponder, I found my concerns basically came down to two main themes: the stuff and the people.

    The stuff is quite an easy theme to address in principle, although time consuming in practice. Over the last three months I have done a LOT of pruning. Looms have been sold and given away, yarn and books have been donated, and a great deal of paperwork has been archived or shredded. We’ve carried out a similar exercise at home to make space here: shelves have been emptied, furniture carried off by the recyclers, and so on. There are a few weaving items which I don’t want to part with, but can’t currently accommodate: a small storage locker is taking care of those for now.

    The people theme is a little bit more scary. When I was a new entrant into the creative industries, it was very isolating to work at home alone, and I didn’t like it at all. Moving into the studio meant I joined a community of other artists and makers, where I could learn, participate, collaborate and discover new opportunities that otherwise I would never have known about. There’s a part of me that is very nervous about giving that up.

    But, as I said earlier, a lot has happened in these years. On the one hand, I have been extremely fortunate in the networks of connection I have been able to plug myself into within the city, across Scotland, with weavers around the world. On the other hand – in large part thanks to those rent increases – much of the community I valued in the building has already broken up and moved elsewhere. So if the question is people, Meadow Mill is not necessarily the answer.

    I think the challenge to me here is to be intentional about how I use my time both inside and outside the studio, so that I am continuing to foster connection and not simply retreating into my weaving cave. Mind you, with exhibition deadlines coming up, a bit of intensive loom time might well be in order. What was that I was saying about balance?

    A photo of looms in a bright room with large windows
    Not very cave-like, I admit.

    Moving on was posted by Cally on 20 November 2025 at https://callybooker.co.uk

    12 Jun 2025

    What does balance look like?

    2

    Back in March of this year I was invited to speak to a group of creative and entrepreneurial women about the evolution of my weaving business, and to answer their questions about some of the decisions that I have made. They asked great questions! It really got me thinking about the winding road that I am travelling on, and sparked far more thoughts than I could share at the time, so I thought I’d put some of my musings here on my blog.

    I posted some thoughts on starting out in my business here. This second post is my reflections on the eternal question…

    How do you balance running a business with developing your own creative practice?

    If there is anyone who finds it easy to do this, I have yet to meet them. For most people this is a continual work-in-progress, and inevitably so because nothing is ever stationary for long.

    I know that I have been in the place of thinking “aha, I have this all worked out now, and I have a lovely balance in my life between these diverse interests and pursuits” and five minutes, five days, five months later something in the environment shifts and changes (oh hello, pandemic, fancy meeting you here) and I have had to shift and change in response. And if there’s ever a moment when the universe isn’t changing around me, then it’ll be me doing the changing, as my interests evolve and develop. So my perspective on this is that balance is never achieved, there is only the act of balancing.

    Balance is never achieved, there is only the act of balancing.

    As it happens this is something I have been giving a lot of thought to lately. For the last two and half years I have been working on a big project which has (i) sucked up most of my time and attention, and (ii) given me a way of working that has been fairly stable. It’s been a very creative project, but it has also been a very outward-directed one, and I think this is an important point. Because running a business can in fact be a very creative experience, and I have learned to enjoy all sorts of things that I never imagined could be enjoyable. No, I’m not yet a passionate enthusiast for the filing of tax returns (an area of business where creativity is perhaps regarded less positively). But thinking of ways to present information on my website, streamlining the booking process for workshops, working out how to get yarn and dye information onto labels: these can be quite niggly things, but there is also scope for learning, for fun and for experimentation there.

    So a really important aspect of the balancing act is expanding my ideas of what creative work looks like. It turns out that those three things I mentioned — learning, fun, experimentation — are key elements that help to make work feel creative and energising for me. But it is also the case that the majority of work in running a business is focused on the experiences of others: the experience of people who visit my website, who join a workshop, who purchase something from me. It matters enormously to me that I make those experiences as good as I possibly can, and so my antennae are always tuned to the response that I get to my latest experiments.

    • Making icons, presenting course material, arranging cakes for contextual photos… All part of the job.

    However, I also need space and time just to listen to myself and to explore my own ideas. This is the aspect of creative practice that is perhaps most difficult to incorporate into running a business and yet, for an artist or a maker, it is also the most essential. My intention, not always achieved, has been that 20 per cent of the time I spend working should be spent on my own creative work. And, now that my all-consuming project is moving into a new phase, I’d like to increase that proportion to 40 per cent.

    Because, ultimately, my own ideas are basically all there is here. If I don’t have those to offer, then what is the point?

    When I think about this, the story that always pops into my mind is one told by Grayson Perry when he gave the Reith lectures. His series was entitled Playing to the Gallery and you can still find it on BBC iPlayer or buy it as an audiobook. There’s a section towards the end of the final lecture where he describes the work that goes into putting on an exhibition, and he conjures it up very vividly. He describes the empty white room at a big museum which he has to fill with work, for everyone to look at, and for the press to review and comment on. And this work has to sell, because his income, and potentially the income of several other people, depends on it. But on top of all of that, he notes, there is the expectation that he will go into his studio and create this work “with the carefree joy of a child”. The audience laughs, as well they might, because it sounds like a recipe for insanity.

    And yet, and yet… that is basically the act of balancing we are all trying to pull off in life, isn’t it, whatever we work at? Perhaps the question is less about time constraints and more about the fear that I sometimes hear people express, that “if I had to do it, it wouldn’t be fun any more.” I think that might be a topic for another post.

    What does balance look like? was posted by Cally on 12 June 2025 at https://callybooker.co.uk

    15 May 2025

    Not a leap, but a creep

    2

    Back in March of this year I was invited to speak to a group of creative and entrepreneurial women about the evolution of my weaving business, and to answer their questions about some of the decisions that I have made. They asked great questions! It really got me thinking about the winding road that I am travelling on, and sparked far more thoughts than I could share at the time, so I thought I’d put some of my musings here on my blog.

    Yes, I’ve been slow to act on that thought, but I’m here now with question one. These are not intended to be general principles applicable to all, but just my own experience and reflections.

    Question: How did you take the leap?

    Did I have money saved up? Did I line up lots of commissions? Was I offered one big lucrative commission?

    The answer to this one is simple: I didn’t leap at all. My transformation from full-time employed person to fully self-employed person was essentially a creep rather than a leap. Occasionally I have had to take a bigger step to get from one stage to the next, but I reckon I have always had one foot on the ground somewhere.

    In every decision to do something, there are a host of factors at play. There are many paths we could take — each with its advantages and disadvantages — and there are also paths we may not be able to take, because of wherever it is we are starting from. Since I hadn’t even begun learning to weave until I was in my mid-thirties, I was necessarily starting in a place where I had existing commitments, but I was also in a place where I had support — the commitment and the support being essentially two sides of the same marriage!

    Nor do we all have the same appetite for risk in its various forms. When it comes to finances, I am quite a cautious person. I like to be able to look ahead, be fairly confident about what my expenses are going to be, and know how I am going to pay for them. I don’t always have that security, because life happens — and as a household we have been through all sorts of ups and downs in our circumstances — but again, coming to this business lark a bit later means that I have had plenty of experience of adjusting my costs to suit my means and I know how to live well on onions and lentils.

    Side note

    There’s a fabulous little book called Profit First by Mike Michalowitz, in which he sets out a regime for managing costs within a small business. It’s a regime that forces you to put ‘profit first’ and therefore to manage your costs within what remains, rather than to run up costs and then wonder why your business isn’t making any money.

    He proposes a scheme of many separate bank accounts for different categories of expense (which in the UK banking system might well raise eyebrows), but you don’t need those to make it work. These days many small business accounts offer ‘buckets’ which do the same job, and I now have one of those, but for a long time I just kept my money in notional buckets on a spreadsheet — if you are the conscientious budgeting type, then it works just as well.

    But back to the creep. It may be obvious from some of the themes that appear in my work, but my previous line of work was all about data. I’ve had all sorts of different roles, from building databases to teaching data modelling techniques, but there’s always been data somewhere. And I am absolutely passionate about data literacy, but I will restrain myself from setting off on my hobby horse about that. Anyway, when I left my last full time role, I started teaching part time for the Open University, and mainly taught first and second year undergraduate statistics.

    This was a great job for a maker to have in the background because it could be scaled up one year — teach more modules or more classes, take on extra marking etc — and scaled down the next. It was also seasonal, and a calendar would set out exactly when I would be most busy during the year, so I could plan around it. Most importantly of all, here in Scotland we have a fantastic little band of maths and stats people, who are a delight to work with — and in the end, that was the hardest thing to give up, even when I no longer needed the money!

    Some data-inspired weaving from the archive

    I was down to one class a year, ostensibly a full-time equivalent of 0.11 or about half a day a week, but it was necessarily taking up more of my brain space than that, and finally I needed to let it go so that I could do other things. But I think it is worth pausing to highlight that particular benefit of a job outside one’s own business. There is a lot to be said for having colleagues — peers who are not only doing the same sort of thing as you, but whose interest is embedded in the same organisation or service, whether that’s a local business, a council department, or a small corner of a multi-national corporation. When your business is entirely your own, there is nobody who is invested in it like you are, and that can be lonely. While you are finding your way, your community, your networks, it isn’t daft to hold onto that collegiality in another endeavour and make the most of it.

    I’d also like to add that it is perfectly normal to have a job besides your own business, and I know dozens of established artists and makers who do different kinds of work (we might want to reflect on the economics of this, but that’s another story). Because it isn’t a part of the maker’s life that we typically see on Instagram, it is easy to think that it doesn’t exist, but it is important to remember that we are only seeing what the maker selects for us to see. And the reasons for the omission may not be what we think, either. I’ve never made a secret of my OU teaching, but it also isn’t something I tended to plaster all over my blog or social media — though you’ll find it mentioned here and there if you look back over the years — because I knew that my students were googling me! My discretion was actually driven by the job itself rather than by the desire to appear more self-sufficient as a weaver.

    Not a leap, but a creep was posted by Cally on 15 May 2025 at https://callybooker.co.uk

    22 May 2023

    Gracious Preservations

    2

    Gracious Preservations is the name I have given to this garment.

    The garment

    The back panel, front panels and the neck facing are handwoven in silk and organic cotton, while the side pieces and neckband are a lightweight organic Tencel I purchased from Bawn Textiles. I used the Tibetan panel coat pattern from Folkwear, adapting it somewhat to eke out the small quantity of fabric I had woven – because when I wove it, I had a different garment pattern in mind – but isn’t that the way things go?

    The fabric

    The fabric itself is a close relation of this project – yes, it is the same warp and weft, and the weave is also based on sound recordings of handwashing during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, I used that underlying structure more loosely this time, allowing myself to intervene in the design and introduce marks of my own.

    The name

    The phrase Gracious Preservations comes from a description of a journey taken in Ladakh in 1885 and recorded by my great great grandfather. He wrote, “Passing through rivers, or over them, on swaying bridges made of twigs; crossing glaciers, with dangerous ice hanging from steep, rocky precipices, where one truly carried one’s life in one’s hands; traversing partly snowed-up passes 14,000, 16,000, 17,000 and 18,000 feet in height. There were so many gracious preservations from danger that the recollections of this journey are truly a page of memory which my dear wife would not, on any account, be deprived of.”

    The person

    The fabric and the coat, then, are a reflection on the life of my great great grandmother, Adelheit Schubert, which seems a very extraordinary one from a distance of 150 years and several thousand miles.

    In brief, she travelled from Germany to India in 1876 to marry her sister’s widowed husband and work with him at the Moravian missions along the Indo-Tibetan border. And I must admit I find every part of that sentence is quite startling, before we ever get near the snowed-up passes.

    I only know the barest outline of Adelheit’s life, but I find it striking how profoundly its course was affected by disease. Her older sister had died of a fever, possibly typhoid, in the spring of 1876, which was the catalyst for her journey and her marriage. And in 1891 her husband died of typhus. Adelheit herself, though she became very sick, was again graciously preserved. However, her life in Ladakh was now over and she returned to Europe at the end of that year.

    “Gracious Preservations” was posted by Cally on 22 May at https://callybooker.co.uk

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