Learning to card weave from fieldwork
with Russian Old Believers in Oregon, USA
I already knew how to card weave when I started work with the Old Believers. However, I had learned from books, not from a live teacher. The very process of learning from a woman who practiced card weaving as an active part of her life, from a living, unbroken tradition, taught me a lot about myself and the way in which contemporary American weavers learn and transmit weaving technology. It also taught me some very ingenious solutions to card weaving problems.
When I took my first card weaving lesson, I was terrified that the time I had would not be enough for me to truly abosorb the technique. Also, I worried about the language barrier, although I had my friend Margaret McKibben with me who was helping me with translation, contacts, and general insights. Language turned out to be relatively unnecessary, teaching was done by example. My teacher hooked the warp into her belt, wove a motif in front of me, and then put it into my belt and essentially said, "OK, now you do it."
I could not, immediately, just imitate all her movements to recreate the motif. So, she wove it once again, for me to see. This time, I was frantically calling out to Margaret the order in which a given number of cards turn forward, how many back, etc., all the way across one shed of the belt, asking her to simply record these numbers so that I could later reproduce the motif from written instructions.
Boy, was that pathetic. I was thinking American, thinking I needed to learn by following rote instructions. What I was actually being taught was much more valuable; the relationship between motions of one's hands and the woven result. I regret that I wasn't able to relax at the time and just absorb the process, but I did not have the luxury of hanging out and learning to intuit how the patterns form. I was eventually able to weave the motif during the lesson, using the paper with the recorded number of cards turning forward and back. Once accomplished, my teacher wove me a second motif as an example. I didn't record the number of cards for that one. She then said that I should go home and practice both motifs. Which I did. I had had time to reflect on what I had actually been taught, and realized how to look at a woven motif and figure out how to weave it from the example itself.
When I next came to visit my teacher, I showed her my efforts. She approved, and wove me my name so that I could then weave it for myself. Later (a few months?) she asked Margaret how I was coming along. Was I making up my own patterns yet? She felt that once I could improvise, I would have mastered the technique.
I was interested at the time in the belts which were woven with text. I decided to try weaving a text belt. For my first effort, I copied the text of an original Old Believer belt. Margaret told me that although some belts had prayers on them, the community frowned on giving such belts to outsiders. So, the text I copied was a piece of folk poetry, maybe from a song. Weaving this belt made me think of all sorts of interesting issues associated with wearing a belt with text. I decided to try to weave a text belt every even year, for as many years of my life as I could.
The belt project
Click on the years in the left-hand links to see individual belts.