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Everyone
has a dream....Crazy as a Loom Weaving Studio is mine. In a historic 1790 home
located in the little hamlet of Kingsbury,NY, I have found my passion. I originally purchased the house for a place to set
up all my antique looms. At some point, bringing the house back to life and the dream to weave became so entangled, I couldn't
tell them apart. I no longer knew where one ended and the other began...they became inseparable,interwoven..
Now the entire downstairs and some of the upstairs
is creative space for weaving and fiber arts. Here I pursue the art of weaving rag rugs and other hand wovens. My mission
is to handcraft my work in the spirit of recycling. I utilize leftover products of the textile industry, old blue jeans, and millends to make functional,
durable, and beautiful floor coverings. Fabric remnants are used to make fashionable rag bags.. There is no mystery, no secret pattern.....just
the rhythmic sound of old looms doing their jobs, treadles to the floor, harnesses raised, beaters packing the weft. In the
words of Thoreau, I have met with success unexpected in common hours. Hilary Cooper-Kenny
I was the attendant or page of Queequeg, while busy at the mat.
As I kept passing and repassing the filling or woof of marline between the long yarns of the warp, using my own hand for the
shuttle, and as Queequeg, standing sideways, ever and anon slid his heavy oaken sword between the threads, and idly
looking off upon the water, carelessly and unthinkingly drove home every yarn; I say so strange a dreamliness did there then
reign all over the ship and all over the sea only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if
this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates. There lay
the fixed threads of the warp subject to but one single, ever returning, unchanging vibration, and that vibration merely enough
to admit of the crosswise interblending of other threads with its own. This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought
I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads. Meantime, Queequeg's
impulsive, indifferent sword, sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, or strongly, or weakly, as the case might
be; and by this difference in the concluding blow producing a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the completed
fabric; this savage's sword, thought I, which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and woof; this easy, indifferent
sword must be chance-aye, chance, free will, and necessity- no wise compatible- all interweavingly working together.
The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course- its every alternating vibration, indeed, only
tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play
within the lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance
by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.
from Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
For the nicest yarn you will ever knit with, hand dyed by my friend, Sheila, who treats her flock like children, click here.
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