Museum Opportunity for us!

As LouAnn mentioned yesterday, we are involved as weavers in the exhibit that just opened at the Knoxville Museum of Art!
What an opportunity for us!

This exhibit has several sections and all are quite fascinating for us. As fiber people we're not really into glass. However, Ann Wilson had an opportunity to do an artist residency in glass. The result is part of the exhibit. Glass bobbins that appear to be wound with fiber, only it's all glass is a major part of the exhibit. To hear her talk about the experience..........hot molten liquid glass that hardened into a solid form connected with her. The liquid....flexible, pliable, spinning, winding, binding. All those are words we relate to as fiber artists. That's what they were doing with that glass. We do the same with our fibers. That part is called rewinds because they represent small links of fiber that we often call thrumbs, to be saved and used later in sampling, tieing on warps, etc.

The main part of the exhibit, the room we'll be in the most, is in 2 parts. The first is the book room. I can't wait to get into there, look at the books they've got on the table, see if there are any that I need to find to add to my collection. I love books. Fiber books that include history are fascinating. When I work, I'm taking a notebook and pen so that when I get a break, I'm going to check those books out!

We will mostly be in the area they refer to as the factory. This is the participatory part of the project. People coming to the museum are invited to sit down at a station and wind bobbins. They have quills sitting waiting for someone to fill them with yarn. There's a big table full of cones to choose from. About 20 mills donated cones of yarn for the exhibit. About once a week, Nick, LouAnn's son and the Knoxville manager of the exhibit, will hang them from the wall to add to the pile of bobbins that are already there! We will pick a bobbin, cut it from the exhibit, and then take it to the loom to weave. I think we've kind of been dreading the weaving but it's forcing us to expand again. That's great for us and as we do this, we'll become comfortable with another aspect of weaving that we haven't done before. I haven't used a temple before and I don't think any of the tuesday weavers have. We're also not that comfortable with fine threads. The thickest will be about 10/2. The warp is put on so that we weave bands of weft faced fabric. That means we won't see any of the warp as it is completely covered with the thread. That's something we haven't done before. As we had the meeting yesterday morning and then listened to the lecture in the afternoon, it became apparent that, yes, we can do this and it'll all be good! I'm looking forward to

We've agreed, as a group, to weave every other Thursday starting this week. Everyone that weaves will be part of the catalogue of the show. We are already part of it because we were asked to talk about ourselves as weavers and the notebook with what we said is there for anyone to read that comes to see the exhibit. Anyone that winds a bobbin can sign their name to the list and they will be included in the show catalogue. We've got 50 yards to weave. There are about 50 weavers that have signed up to weave in the 3 months of the exhibit. The museum will get the fabric. No one has decided yet what will become of it, but whatever they decide, it's going to be neat to see. We can point to the parts we wove. We are weaving in bands of color. I can't wait to see the whole piece spread out with all the different colors. I, for one, will take my camera each time I weave, to take a picture of my small part of it.

Yesterday afternoon, just before the lecture, I went around the exhibit and took pictures for this blog so that you could see what it's all about. I just spent almost 2 hours trying to get the pictures to move. Instead, the prose just doubled, tripled, quadrupled, all mixed up.

To figure out how it should be, look at the last picture, read a bit, then the next picture up, etc. In other words, the pictures are backwards. The first picture shows a family winding bobbins, the second, the book room. The third picture is Nancy whose day it was to weave on Saturday. Then the wall of bobbins with their ends tied to a rod at the ceiling. The last two pictures are of the glass bobbins. They're actually very fascinating when you look at them!

If you're in the Knoxville area before April 25, let us know and we'll be sure to help you get to the exhibit! It's going to be worth your time! Carol