A Challenge for 2023 Part 1

 This is both a story about a weaving challenge and a little bit of history.  I'm writing this in first person, because as you will see in this post, much of it had to do with a challenge to myself 19 years ago, the mileage I've gotten from that challenge and how it all played out at the Nevada County Fair in 2023.

In 2004, the Nevada County Fair was somewhat the same as it is today, but also different.  The Wool show was held in Sugar Pine Lodge - open on both ends so that people could walk through and look at the various exhibits.  There was noise, and dust - a lot of it, but it also encouraged a lot of people that hadn't thought about looking at our handwoven and handspun entries.  We had a ton of kids coming in to try their hand at weaving on inkle looms and hands on spinning done with a hook that created little bracelets that they themselves had spun.  

Since demonstrations were a big part of what we were doing, I wanted to have a lot of different weavers, weaving something that was a bit flashy for the public.  The problem was that these weavers needed to have a simple treadling sequence so that they could manage to keep track of what they were doing with all the surrounding chaos.  I wrote about my solution in a blog post several years later.  https://bannermountaintextiles.blogspot.com/2009/05/designing-interesting-warps-for-public.html

Fast forward to 2023.  The Not 2 Square Weavers (of which there are currently thirteen members) wanted a challenge to do something with a draft that I had designed.  Very few of the current membership were involved in the fair of 2004, so I thought it would be fun to weave the draft again and have each person who wanted to participate put their very own spin on it. The idea was that we would put up a display with some of the history and include all of the projects we created in 2023 along with a couple of the original woven towels from 2004.

Jeanne Doty agreed to do the display and asked for written descriptions from all of us who participated to give the public a sense of what we were trying to do.

Here is a photo of the display from 2023.  Wouldn't it have been fun to see a photo of the original weavers from 2004?  

And, for those of you who are weavers - here is the draft with the same threading as was on the demonstration loom.  It has been uploaded to Handweaving.net and is #80180. 

Since this will be a very long post, I'll put the details about the newly woven pieces in the next blog post so stay tuned!