about caroline

About half my weaving time is spent on good, useful, practical fabric for good, useful, practical clothes and household linens. The rest belongs to runners and wall hangings made of stripes, bands, and tapestry, with added textures from wildly handspun yarns, soumak, needlelace, and needle wrapping. 

Each of these pieces starts from a memory or feeling — a longed-for rainfall, a fire on a winter’s day, the joy that makes you jump up and dance. Most express my deep love for Northern New Mexico, for a special landscape, or for the interplay of land and water, silver and turquoise. 

Often the inspirations are abstracted into color and design, so fire and snow and wood become stripes and motifs that repeat in a formal structure. Every now and then I go a little nuts instead, making highly textured eccentric tapestries where all the rules are broken,  warp may peek out and be seen, and weft doesn’t stay politely parallel or perpendicular to the edges. These works grow spontaneously on the loom, as I run off to my yarn cupboard for a little piece of irregular art yarn, or to the spinning wheel to make a bit of something new, or into the ceramics closet for micaceous beads, then out to the garden for vines and branches. Among the wool yarns, you might find cordage hand-twisted from milkweed, daylilies, or iris. 

In all my weaving I love natural colors, natural fibers (especially wools from Navajo Churro, Shetland, and various longwool sheep), and natural dyes. Many dyes now come from my own garden in Ranchos de Taos: Japanese indigo, dyers chamomile, madder, dyers coreopsis, yarrow, marigolds, cosmos, chamisa, feverfew, applewood… It’s magic just to say the names.