Weaving a Community

Last week we dropped off our rug yarn at Hartford Artisans Weaving Center so they can start weaving custom-made rugs for us. The Center teaches hand-weaving to Hartford area seniors and to people of all ages who are blind or visually impaired. Their goal is to create a welcoming and supportive place for the artisans to escape the isolation that plagues so many. They utilize a large group of volunteers to provide support, as needed, to the weavers. For each woven piece produced, at least 5 support people will have taken part in the process. While we were there, several volunteers were working on various tasks. One was setting up a loom, while another was winding yarn. In another room, two women sat side by side tying off the ends of a shawl for fringe, while another was busy at a sewing machine, sewing seams on a piece of just-woven fabric.  The Center should be extremely proud of its human infrastructure – to have so many hands incorporated into each piece is a weaving unto itself. Indeed, it’s not just the fiber that gets woven into the finished product but a sense of humanity and community as well.

 Our rug yarn is wound into “bumps” and each bump is segregated by the color of our sheep. It occurred to me, as we handed over the wool, that the Weaving Center’s community just expanded yet again. Instead of anonymous (albeit beautiful) yarn to work with, the Center now has:

· several bumps from our brown sheep; “Rhubarb”, “Queenie” and “Rascal”

· a couple bumps from our grey sheep “Otter” and “Quibble”

· and some white bumps from “Ruth-Ellen,” “Ms. Porter” and “Ulysses”

The wool in those bumps represents 6 months of fiber growth, which is ultimately the culmination of care that Anne and I give them every day. Our stubborn commitment to small-scale farming will, therefore, be woven into these rugs as well. Most of our sheep graze on the grounds of Hill-Stead, so that collaboration and the museum’s rich agrarian history also becomes part of the story.

Spun as well into the DNA of our wool are;

· our shearers Siri and Colin, who come down from Vermont twice a year to shear the sheep.

· my nephew Dave, who has grown up with the sheep, spends winters working on the farm and who prepped all the fleeces for spinning.

· Sixpaca farm and fiber mill in Bozrah who ultimately spun the wool into those bumps of rug yarn that we handed off last week to the Center’s design team.

The Hartford Artisans Weaving Center’s “vision for the future” states,

“We will be widely known as a bustling and thriving community hub.”

But it seems to me they already are - and one that now happily includes our sheep!

For more information check out Hartford Artisans Weaving Center