I planned to have a dozen shawls/scarves woven by this past December. But stuck at home, I began weaving and sometimes went on from dawn to darkness. The results are lovely, soft, and variously hued. Not to mention numerous.

Here are a few. They are each about 23″ wide, 65-75″ long plus fringe, and after weaving and fringing, they are washed in cold water with shampoo, hung to dry overnight without blocking, and then labels sewn on. Others like them are owned and worn by both men and women.

Some lengths are woven entirely of hand-painted Canadian merino wool, some incorporate handspun yarns from the U.S. and Canada. These yarns are soft, and sometimes with silk or alpaca or wool from another breed of sheep spun into the mix of handspun skeins. Like my quilts, I like using many colors, twenty or thirty skeins of different colors so that the fabric shifts in color under your hand. Three lengths are woven on a warp, with dramatically different colors used in the weft from one shawl to the next. Sometimes after pulling them out of a bin, I am surprised myself to recall that two dissimilar shawls/scarves came from the same warp.

The images below show ten shawls with a closeup of each.

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Clicking on an image should open it to a larger slide. They are priced from $240-280. I can also create a ruana from a shawl. Please contact me for further information.

This morning my brief essay “Bread Making” appeared on Complete Sentence, a magazine of single-sentence prose. My story of baking bread with my mother speaks to the same impulse behind all this handwork—valuing traditional making. Find it HERE.

Bread Making

My work celebrates color, comfort, and the skills that have served human beings throughout our time on earth: a dozen or more handwoven wool and silk shawls, four to six large quilted pieces of 80 to 90 inches square, and four to six smaller works. Each of these art pieces is unique and involves the handwork of many women dyers and spinners before reaching my studio. My work is intended to be touched and used daily in honor of traditional techniques, especially as they are handwork in a time of mass-production, collaborative in a culture overly focused on the individual, and women's work in an atmosphere that marginalizes women’s cultural contributions. 
 
In this covid year where we are all so separate, so held apart, the tactile appeal of fabric has been a great comfort to me as an artist, as a woman and mother and teacher and human starved for contact.
 
My work has been exhibited for decades in galleries such as Henry Gallery in Seattle and the Tacoma and Bellevue Art Museums. Weaving and quilting have been my focus for over thirty years. As a published writer, perhaps it is not surprising that my work is in the collections of authors such as memoirist Temple Grandin, novelist Molly Gloss, and poet Judith Barrington. 
 
My undergraduate studio degrees are from the University of Washington, and my MFA was completed at Pacific University in 2007. Born in Corvallis, I have lived and worked in Arch Cape since 1979. 

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