A Day Off

It was great to not be in the studio the whole day today.  After my morning errands, grocery shopping for the week, I got the placemat exchange warp tied onto the front beam, and Bri crawled under the loom and redid the tie-up.  I wound bobbins and got her weaving, checking for crossed threads, (there was one) and making sure everything worked.  There were some initial issues with added heddles catching on some of the warp threads, and a couple broke.  Bri was having trouble getting everything to weave smoothly, so I sat down and got it started.  We are now ready to start weaving placemats!

This afternoon, Bri and I accompanied some of the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild members to a private tour of the convent of The Community of St. John Baptist. www.csjb.org The Community was founded in Windsor, England in 1852, began work in NYC in 1874, and built the convent in Morris County, NJ around 1915.  The building is beautiful, stark, vaulted, peaceful, full of spectacular religious furnishings, iconography, and art.  I thought I was on a tour of the Cloisters in Manhattan.

The reason for the trip, was to have a private showing of the priceless collection of late 19th and early 20th century vestments and paraments, beautifully embroidered, with gold, silver, and silk, by the sisters of St. John Baptist.   Mary Wagner is the textile conservator of the collection, and she carefully showed us how everything is stored, and repaired, and conserved.  One of our guild members took photographs, and I’m hoping to obtain a couple and add them to this post.  Who knew this treasure was only on the other side of the county where I live.

Mary and I had a lovely time chatting about Montclair State University, where we both got our art degrees, about 10 years apart, both having studied under Carol Westfall.  It is a small world in the textile community indeed.