Cowls : tangible warmth and tangible love

I mainly weave baby wraps, and I love the merging of engineering (weight bearing needs, wrapping quality preferences) and artistic expression that baby wraps as a product line requires of me.  However, we all know that eventually babes become children and our wearing days wind down to a close.  When that inevitably happens, I'd be sad to entirely lose the textile-based connections and friendships I'm forming with my customers.  Additionally, there are many people in my life outside of babywearing who have asked how they can get a piece of what I make.  

And so, I have been experimenting with scarf designs.  This cowl/hood is a full wrap width deep and nearly a meter in circumference.  I love the generous way it drapes around neck, covering the heart or warming tense shoulders depending on how it is placed.  

I think I'll add this to the smaller (more affordable) tube cowls that I have been offering as a regular product line here at 14 Mile.  As makers must, I'm already thinking ahead to the holiday season: is this something you'd be interested in gifting to someone special this year?  Keep an eye out here and on the 14 Mile Farm Facebook page for listings! 

P.S. I'm excessively smitten with the way that my new hair matches the tones that I dyed into Unconditional.  

Take your heart to the mountains

Wombsight

This is a tapestry piece that I began many many moons ago.  It was begun with one person in mind, intended as a gift of love and energy to help navigate a very specific time in her life.  As is the way with time and life, things changed and this piece was still unfinished on my tapestry frame.  It is an interesting thing when weaving with energy, creating talismans of power and medicine: they always find the right home.  It may (or in this case, it may not) be whom we think it is going to be, but it is always right.  In finishing this piece, releasing its energy from the state of suspension in which such energies are held whilst on the loom, I realized that this particular way of working with yarn and spirit is something of which I need to do more.  

It is the stylized representation of the lower half of a divine feminine figure. The womb is pictured as a seed form, representing the seed of new life we carry within. It was not designed as a fertility tapestry, but it definitely carries some of that energy. 

The womb resides in the same space, is the physical equivalent of the energy of the svadisthana chakra - the second chakra, seat of emotion, creativity, relationality, and fertility. 
After we had decided to invite Avery's soul to come into the world through our family, but before I became pregnant (there was an approximate 6 month gap here); I really worked to cultivate what I termed 'wombsight' : a way of perceiving the world from this generative energy center rather than from the compassionate seat of the heart or the intuitive seat of the third eye. It is a way of viewing the world that is difficult to put into words : seeing the world as your child, with all the precious love and fragile incredulity which that entails.
I hope that I captured some small aspect of the Mother Goddess archetype in this piece.

It is a cotton warp with mixed wools/synthetics/cottons for weft. Tapestry is a weft faced weave structure, so you don't see the warp at all except at top and bottom. This was woven with a definite right and wrong side: all the "bobbin changes" hang out of the back, so it is definitely designed as a wall hanging.
It is finished with plaiting of the warp threads - the plaits or braid being another centuries old evocation of the feminine and feminine magic. 
It is mounted on river driftwood, one of which is in the shape of a dowsing rod and adorned with turquoise, tiger's eye, bone, and resin bead the colors of earth and amber. All the beads are reclaimed/recycled from secondhand jewelry and were energetically cleansed before use.