A couple of weeks ago I made the interesting discovery that Yuma-kun's great-aunt is a weaver and a teacher of weaving. I had shown Yuma-kun the weaving I had done in March and he pooh-poohed me and said he did weaving all the time and that if I liked weaving he would take me to meet his great-aunt. He was stretching the truth a bit when he said he does weaving all the time... He has the opportunity to do weaving any time he likes but he only gets to his great-aunt's a couple times of year. But Yuma-kun and his grandmother arranged for me to go visit yesterday and the two of us spent about 4 hours playing on his great-aunt's looms.
Okay... Well the weaving was fun... It was different from the type I'd done a couple of months ago because this weaving was basically using cotton thread whereas before the weaving was incorporating torn kimono strips. I don't have anything spectacular to show for my efforts though I had a great time. What was exciting about our visit was seeing the house that Yuma-kun's great-aunt lives in and to have a chance to see her work. She is not just a weaving teacher, she is an artist!!!
First the house. I had driven past the road leading to a wonderful thatch-roofed farm house many times in the past 20 years never thinking that I'd ever meet the person who lives there. Yuma-kun and I pulled up to the huge wooden gate and entered a completely different world surrounded by cliffs and forest and a small pond cut into the rock. The house itself is about 200 years old and is drafty and surrounded on all sides by farming paraphernalia. Yuma-kun's great-aunt is in her late 70's, small and bent, and she lives alone in the farmhouse using only a bit of it for living quarters and leaving the rest for her weaving work, display and as a concert location. There is also an old stone storehouse that is being used as a gallery and a barn-like building where she teaches weaving.
Even before entering the farmhouse I was enthralled with the thatched room and stood under the eaves looking at the many layers of thatching. The lighter brown thatching is considered the "dressing" and it has to be replaced every twenty or thirty years. The gray layers are the remains of generations of repair and added protection. Think of the weight!
The rooms that the great-aunt showed me are long and dark with the traditional alcove at the head of the room. And there was displayed the most amazing piece of weaving work! My preconceived notion of Yuma-kun's great-aunt who had a nice hobby and taught on the side dissolved instantly seeing the pieces of art she had created/is creating. The pieces are large, much taller than the aunt herself, and all sorts of textiles are used.
Here were two more pieces that were just set up at the side of the long dark room. Yuma-kun's great-aunt's artwork depicts trees and forests and she has layers and layers of woven sections giving each piece a three dimensional feel. She seems to like working in whites and blues the most but there was an interesting piece hanging in front of the window which was all in yellow.
Here was another piece in another dark alcove displayed where no one can really see it. I wonder if she is commissioned to make her pieces for offices or hotels or places with large lobbies, but she seemed so humble and grandmotherly that I never did find out if she is famous or what.
This is a closeup of the above piece. Can you see how the woven threads are loose and separate to make tree branches and then how the leafy part of tree is depicted with different weights of threads and groupings? It really was amazing.
This was another 3 dimensional forest that the aunt had spent over a year making for some event... The piece is much too tall for the corner that it is in now and it is rolled up and dragging at the bottom.
Some of the aunt's students had their pieces displayed in another alcove. The house has a lot of alcoves!
Finally Yuma-kun and I settled down to try out hand at weaving. The aunt had set up two looms for us, one with a partially completed work that Yuma-kun had started months ago. I was directed to another loom and told to chose whatever color threads I liked, mixing two or three colors at a time. All the walls were stacked high with cubbies of different shades of threads... and they have all been hand dyed by the aunt over the years. She says she spends a lot of time dying too though she'd much rather be weaving. I chose yellows and oranges and greens and for the next three hours played with my loom. Yuma-kun kept his great-aunt busy because he wanted to change threads every couple of inches.
"I want to use something sparkly. Do you have any silver thread? How about gold?"
Pretty soon he wanted to try fabric weaving and he had his aunt rummaging around for her stock of fabric strips.
"It's a good chance for me to check what all I have back here in my storage room."
By the end of the afternoon Yuma-kun had pulled out so much stuff that there was hardly any place to step. And when he left the room for a few minutes the great-aunt bowed deeply to me and said,
"Thank you for taking Yuma-kun under your wing. He certainly is a handful."
"But I love Yuma-kun and his curiosity in everything. He is very special."
Yuma-kun's creation taken off the loom.
And mine.
As I tried to tidy things up a bit, Yuma-kun kept his great-aunt running around for him.
"Let's get a fire going in the
irori."
An
irori is a low fire-pit in the center of a traditional room where stews are made, water boiled, fish grilled etc. Sort of like a hibachi on a much larger scale. Yuma-kun's great-aunt didn't want to get the
irori going at this late hour of the afternoon (she prefers to having it going from morning to night) but by the time I got back to the main house I found that Yuma-kun had won the argument and the
irori was going strong making the house smoke up.
I learned that thatched houses have to have their
irori burning for a few hours each month to keep insects and varmints from setting up house in the straw. Even in the summer the
irori has to burn once a month but it does need keeping an eye on thus the reason the great-aunt didn't want to light it up just before evening. Yuma-kun very professionally kept the fire burning and extracted pieces of charcoal as I was told the history of the old house.
"Is it cold in the winter?"
That was probably a stupid question because there were gaps between the roof and the walls letting the outside in. And the ceiling was only a lot of bamboo poles stretched across beams which allowed the smoke from the
irori to go up into the thatching high above. If hot air rises, I guess that's where it all goes. That's the ceiling and the underside of the roof in that above picture.
I had a marvelous time at the weaving loom again and Yuma-kun's great-aunt does take students. But is this really another handcraft that I want to get involved with? Knowing myself, I'm pretty sure I'd have to go out and buy a loom and then I'd start collecting threads and yarns and combing the recycle shops for old kimonos to tear up. And then I'd never get back to my patchwork and quilting and I'd start having a guilt complex because of a new craft stash and all the other stuff just sitting there and the woven pieces would just pile up with no idea of how to use them and I'd have to take over another room in our house... It is so tempting...
Unless a loom drops in my lap I guess I'll stay with my sewing machine and fabric...
