Momentous Event

What a momentous weekend we have ahead.  We will be celebrating my father-in-law’s 90^th birthday!  All the “kids” will be in attendance with spouses in tow.  And our daughter and her husband will be there with our grand-daughter. We can not wait to see the look on Ted’s parents’ faces when they meet their great-granddaughter for the first time!  We will, of course, be taking the traditional, multi-generational picture.  4 generations! 

As with most family get-togethers there will be angst leading up to it, and this week we have it in spades.  First the east coast earthquake, and now Hurricane Irene!  We have 2 siblings attending from the hurricane’s path.  We just keep our fingers crossed that we will all be able to attend. 

It’s a difficult thing to get family together these days!  My husband and I have been traveling for years for family events.  Our “community” today is so very different from when I was growing up…and even more so for our parents.  We always want that touch of “home”. 

For me home is a multitude of places.  I live in GA.  I lived in TX.  Yet I still refer to where I grew up and got married in PA as “up home”. I feel “at home” at our property in VA.  While home CAN be a place, it is most CERTAINLY a feeling. It is a feeling that connects you to your past and that points you to your future.  So this weekend “home” will be at my in-laws with my husband’s family. 

We will share memories, discuss world events, laugh, maybe cry a little, embrace the newest family member, remember departed family and enjoy the company and warmth that you can only get from being together.

So do what you will Irene….but we intend to celebrate the patriarch’s birthday with a chocolate cake and a good time, as we keep it……Traditionally Twisted! 

Weaving: Warp & Weft

Weaving is a methodical and rhythmic craft.  The back and forth movement of the shuttle as you pass it through the warp is almost hypnotizing.  You can get into a rhythm and glide along.  Ted would call it “repetitive”, which is accurate as well.  It’s all in how you look at it and in your personality type!  

In weaving you have a Warp and a Weft.  Warp is the constant.  The constant, that once its set, can’t be changed till you are finished.  It is the fibers you thread to weave through.  You can raise or lower the warp threads to achieve a very large variety of patterns.  The more harnesses your loom has (4 or 8), the more options you have.  

Weft is made up of the tangibles, those many things that can be changed if we need to or have to.  Weft we can do one way now with one thing….and another thing later with a twist.  You can use fine threads, heavy yarns, fabric strips, or any combination there of for your weft to achieve the pattern and design that you desire.

I’ve had a loom from my mother-in-law sitting here for over a decade, begging me to use it, chastising me for letting it sit there un-used, and scaring me with it’s heddles, raddle, harnesses, shuttle, etc.  It is very intimidating; but I finally took a class.  It’s a little clearer now but so much more to still learn and a few things are still a little fuzzy.  Was I out of my comfort zone?  YES!  Am I still?  ABSOLUTLEY!  But I will keep plugging away at the process. I will definately not want to let this get the better of me.

I am working on just a very basic weave, a tabby, I believe it’s called. The loom is a 4 harness table top variety, although in the tabby I use only two of the harnesses.  You can do a lot with it, but at only 24-30 inches wide you are limited in items that can be made without sewing them together.  Ted has a plan for building a floor loom.  I believe it is an eight harness version and is about 4-5 feet wide.  Coverlets may be in the future if we get to the building of that loom. 

You could call the Warp your life, and you would use the weft to weave into it.  In weaving it’s the colors, patterns and fibers that you weave through your warp. In life it’s the attitudes, blessings, people, directions, paths, decisions, choices, heart break, joy, love, among others, that we weave in throughout our lives.

It is still amazing to me the similarities I continue to see in the traditional arts when compared to “life”.  Needed for both are patience (in abundance), love, determination (in spades), dexterity, practice, forethought, knowledge, planning.  Nurture those and you’re well on your way.  

As are the fibers we use to weave our lives, we remain always ….. Traditionally Twisted.

Creative & Durable

We all start out with family traditions.  Heritage.  A familiar way of doing things, but then as each generation grows up and ages, they put their own slant on those “old” ways.  Some generations will make only slight adjustments that are barely discernable.  Other generations will totally re-vamp them or dismiss them as “old-fashioned” and not carry them forward.  Some generations will even make up their own new traditions to carry on.

Traditions or “our heritage” is affected also by the times, be they economic, political, medical, religious or just plain geographic.  We move about so much these days that it’s difficult sometimes to carry on those family ways.  Sometimes the moving and changing of their environment even causes some to reach back to those days of doing things as they were meant to be done for some connectivity to their roots.  They try to recapture the lost feeling of family and perceived “better” times.

In our own journey we have touched all those variations.  We have brought many of those traditional ways into our lives over the years.  Some were always trusted and comforting.  Some became so after trying what we perceived as a “better alternative” and finding out that they weren’t.  Sometimes we found out that the new and the different  didn’t always mean that it was better, or easier, or even the same. 

With our own subtle variations we become “Traditionally Twisted”!  I found an article this week while going through the Mother Earth News website that I wanted to share with you.  It shows that even if we are uprooted and even under the penalty of the law, we will always keep the best and/or the necessary to provide for our families and their welfare.

“A Creative and Resourceful Grandmother During the Industrial Revolution

7/27/2011 3:07:25 PM

By the MOTHER EARTH NEWS editors

This story is from Ann Harlan, submitted as part of our Wisdom From Our Elders collection of self-sufficient tales from yesteryear.

My maternal grandmother and grandfather grew up in Kentucky on farms. They came North during the Industrial Revolution and my grandfather took a job near Detroit driving a bulldozer. This was around the 1930s. My grandmother was a busy mother of seven.

She maintained a garden in her city lot while Papaw worked long hours. When pheasants would come to eat from the garden, she would raise up the window (just a bit) and shoot them from inside the house (because it was illegal to fire a gun in the city limits). Then, in a little while, she would take a basket out to the garden and carefully collect the pheasants and put produce on top so no one would see her.

She was a very creative and durable woman, despite having heart damage from rheumatic fever. As a transplanted Choctaw and Southerner, she coped with the tremendous cultural changes in very creative ways – maintaining her knowledge of good use of the land and its resources.”

I like to think of my self under those terms…Creative and Durable.  I guess time and perception will be the judge on that.  But I think I’ll take that title for myself and for my husband.  It could be our mantra and our inspiration. It could be the top rung on our ladder that we are always striving for. 

Enjoy your day everyone and don’t forget to keep it….Traditionally Twisted!