Back after a long hiatus

The family situation that pulled my attention away from weaving for so long has improved, and I am finding I have space in my life again for challenging yet inessential activities.  Since I last posted here I have acquired the reference article I needed to read, learned a lot more about pre-Roman tapestry weaves, and mentally solved the last questions I had about how to weave this project.  More on these issues as I get closer to the parts of the project where they become relevant; suffice it to say, there has been a lot of string-related squeeing around here in the past month or so.

Today I mended six broken warp threads—again, all from the center of the warp.  Then I checked the whole warp to make sure it's all in good weaving order.  I will spend some time this afternoon reviewing my posts and notes to help me re-learn the dance.  I'm glad I left myself those breadcrumbs!

Tomorrow I hope to resume weaving after I go pick up the book the library has on hold for me.

Feeding my head

As I wove the header band, I found that it went faster if I listened to music. The music I kept coming back to again and again was "Mythologem" by Isirion (my favorite indie band). Several of the songs on that album have ancient Greek subject matter. I found the instrumental "Song of the Seven Sirens" put me in a very appropriate ancient Greek frame of mind. But I don't have a lot of other music that's relevant. Hmmm. I think it's finally time to acquire a copy of Eleni Karaindrou's music for The Trojan Women, which I hear is very good.

I've also been doing some reading this last week. My patron lent me The Last Voyage of Odysseus (Karen L. Carey, Ohio University Press, 1983) and Odysseus: A Life (Charles Rowan Beye, Hyperion, 2004). After I finished those I started rereading Phillip Parotti's The Greek Generals Talk: Memoirs of the Trojan War (University of Illinois Press, 1986), after which I'll probably take on his The Trojan Generals Talk: Memoirs of the Greek War (University of Illinois Press, 1988).

I've also found two non-fiction books I want to read. One is The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric by John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro. The other is Ann Bergren's Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought.

All this is in addition to the hard research I'm doing. And of course, there is always my red-headed traveler; I'm cherry-picking both the Odyssey and the Iliad as I go about this, just for the sheer pleasure of tracing his path. The fact that his path leads past so many looms is, well, part of the point of it for me.

How did I get here?

In 1966, the Summer of Love, I fell in love. He was much older than me, a crafty red-headed traveler, perpetually stymied in his attempts to get back home. His story fascinated me, not least because so many of the women in his life, including his guardian divinity, were weavers: Athene, Penelope, Kalypso, Kirke. Coincidentally, I had just learned to weave myself, on a tiny loom made of wood and nails. Tapestry weaving seemed so exotic, and I didn't know any weavers. Little did I know then that my introduction to tapestry weaving and the ancient Greeks would converge again so many years later, as I found myself contemplating the weaving of a textile inspired by historical Greek ones.

In the long stretch of years between the Summer of Love and now, I enjoyed a liberal arts education that included exposure to a robust Classics program. Although I didn't wind up majoring in Classics, I took classes with James H. Day, Robert Pounder, Walter Moskalew, and visiting professors John Barron, Sterling Dow, and William Bedell Stanford (with whom I was privileged to study the Odyssey for an entire semester). I also fed my interest in archaeology with classes in Biblical and Near Eastern archaeology with Robert Fortna and Walter Fairservis.

My love for archaeology never left me. Many years later, I used archaeological sources to find my way back to weaving, discovering and taking up a variety of ancient techniques. Although I focused on another historic time and location for many years, my early love for the classics also never left me. Always in the back of my head was that ancient Greek loom, thrumming and clinking to me like a siren.

When my friend said he wanted a garment properly made in the style of the ancient Greeks, it seemed impossible at first. But then I realized that I have working knowledge of every skill and tool that would be required; I simply had never put them all together before. Even if I failed utterly, I'd get to try something I've wanted to try for most of my life. Why not?

So now my friend is my patron, and I am exploring one of my most ancient creative interests. There is a significant research component as well, which just makes the project all the more exciting. The purpose of this blog is to help me keep track of how this project works out. If it works out well, my patron will have a garment special to him, while I hope to get a paper out of it somewhere down the line.