Marcy Daley earns a blue ribbon for her work at the loom.
Marcy Daley jokes that it’s usually her husband Wayne, oft-consulted fish biologist, who gets all the local press.
For years, the weaver has gone about her craft without fanfare.
Until now.
“An honest-to-God blue ribbon,” she said.
Earlier this summer, on a whim, Daley entered a set of her woven bookmarks into the annual competition held by the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in Decorah, Iowa.
Lo and behold, her “Pastel Trio” and “Jewel-tone Trio” took home the blue ribbon and an honorable mention, respectively.
Daley has been weaving steadily but not prolifically since the 1960s, since she was just out of college. The craft remained an occasional hobby as real life ensued; she told herself, “Oh well, it’ll be there when I’m old.”
“And all of a sudden I realized, ‘oh my God, I’m old,’” she said. “I’ve got to get going on this.”
While Daley has a floor loom in her upstairs studio for large weaving projects, she does most of her work in the form of one-inch-wide bookmarks, woven on a table-top inkle loom.
She holds one up and demos a short course in Weaving 101.
There’s the loom itself, which she can take to meetings and work with on the ferry and in front of the television, much like knitters carry around their wool and needles.
Daley simply describes the device as a frame, “something to hold a set of threads under tension.”
The multicolored array of 100 threads that is ordered lengthwise and subjected to tension are collectively called the warp, and for Daley, choosing the right combination of color and thread weight to achieve her intended design is half the work.
The weft is the filler, or the thread woven through the warp using a shuttle.
Patterns can be balanced, showing equal parts warp and weft; weft-facing, with the weft facing out and no warp visible; or warp-facing, where the warp creates the visible pattern and the weft retreats to create support.
Within these basic parameters on the unassuming inkle loom lie infinite possibilities borne out of color combinations, pattern choices, thread and color proportions and the weave’s “pick-up” and “drop-back” – that is, which threads Daley pulls to the forefront and which threads she pushes back.
“It’s very exciting, because you vary one thing, and it changes a lot,” she said.
Using graph paper to start from, Daley has created her own patterns that resemble ropes, medallions, garlands, mountains and what she calls “crazy hearts,” her most popular pattern.
In addition to their portability, Daley loves the small-format bookmarks because they offer what are essentially studies for her larger work.
She can experiment with pattern and color and in some cases, fail – “and believe me, I have created some real bones” – without having to scrap a huge quantity of fiber or undo hours of painstaking setup.
One of the qualities of weaving that continually surprises her is the way in which fiber colors interact, much like paint, when they’re combined.
“With weaving, color is more complex…I can take two bright colors, and they sizzle because they’re complementary. But when you combine them using very fine threads, you get what they call ‘mud.’”
She sees one of her primary challenges to be the exploration of subtlety. In the Vesterheim competition, one of the judges commented that her colors were almost too vibrant.
Once her loom is set up, Daley can weave up to two yards of fabric without thinking too hard about it.
She’ll divide the strip and package the bookmarks, some of which she sells at Eagle Harbor Book Co. She also takes special orders and offers quantity discounts to book clubs and others, with the stipulation that buyers donate the difference to the charities of their choice.
“These are quite labor intensive little hummers,” she said. “But when PBS news is on, what’s to watch?”
But Daley’s real joy remains in using her “right-brain” activity, that is, plotting her designs, anticipating color combinations and seeing what emerges.
“If you’re creating anything, it puts you in the right brain,” she said. “Which is the mode my brain is most comfortable in anyway.”
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Weave to go
Marcy Daley’s hand-woven bookmarks are available at Eagle Harbor Book Co. and by special order. For information, contact Daley at mhdaley@bainbridge.net.
