[soft music]
[bouncy music]
- Randall Darwall: What I'm doing is really the final bit of a warp,
even though these yarns,
which are silk ribbons and chenilles,
even though they have color, that's my starting point.
And what I'll do is take out some of this color,
add some other color in the dye pot.
It's one of the many things I can do as a hand weaver
to make my cloth as different as possible.
This is the beginning of the process,
but all of this is a 17-yard warp
that will go right into the dye pot.
[bouncy music]
I can buy a really great yarn
in the most God-awful color you ever saw.
And I can take color out in places
and I can add it in other places in the dye pot.
I'm moving one skein from here over to here,
and this can go a little in here,
and this can go over to this pot.
These are our warp skeins that I dyed earlier this morning,
and I got really excited as I took them out of the dye pots
and saw what the color remover had done,
over-color, and how the warms were shifting into the cools,
and how there was a little bit of surprise
all the way along each thread.
I came here just on a leave of absence from teaching.
And I realized halfway through that winter
that I wasn't going to go back because my work did change.
Instead of being paid to talk all the time,
I was paying myself to shut up and be productive.
[bouncy music]
I am taking the warp that I wound,
and that I dyed, and I am now tying it
one thread at the time
to the preexisting threading in this loom.
This loom has a memory, a lot like a computer,
and it's all set up with a structure.
This is the architecture of the cloth.
I don't count, I can't measure,
but I can tie threads faster than anybody I know.
And simply lifting one of these frames,
I'm able to bring up different threads
in different combinations to create this kind of shawl,
which is called a quill damask.
I'm taking a thick bright thread,
and I'm tying it on to a dark thread.
Having done a dark warp, I gotta do something brighter.
Much of the designing happens
as I tie these threads individually
onto
the knots that are here.
And now, those knots have been pulled through.
This is actually the thread
that I was winding on the warping board.
It's that chenille and silk ribbon,
and it's bright, it's light.
It's a lot of texture,
and it's in there to really provide the foreground.
So when this warp goes on, I will have done my job,
and whoever says I don't do any weaving
doesn't think of setup, which is at least 50%
of the work as weaving,
and I think that weaving is a whole lot more
than throwing a shuttle.
So,
This is what I-- it's where I get to say my piece.
- Fayette Watkis: Randy dyes the beautiful silks and dresses the looms,
and that's when I come in and take them home
to my studio space and work on them there
and then, you know, shuttle back and forth
between his house and mine.
Randy's really the master of the warp,
this element here, and I'm using the weft
and with the little boat shuttle,
that's the horizontal element.
He pretty much leaves it up to me
as far as the colors and, you know,
how they interplay with what he has done,
using my feet to raise and lower the harnesses,
which create the pattern.
So I'm twisting the fringes, I'm taking a small group
of the threads and twisting them to the right
and taking another equal group and twist it to the right.
And then, I put the two together
and twist them to the left.
So, that's really how rope is plied.
And that creates a nice little finish
on the scarves and the shawls.
[spray can hisses]
I think Brian's input is probably the final word
before each piece goes to a show or to a customer
as far as critiquing and the color
and the presentation of it.
- Brian Murphy: We met at a 12-step meeting.
And it was a time in both of our lives
where big changes were happening.
- Mid-eighties - Mid-eighties.
When I first set up the booth
with Randy in Baltimore,
I looked over and I said, wow, this is beautiful.
You've made a beautiful fortress.
And he said, what?
I said, how can people get in here to see the work?
I said we have to move this around.
And he looked at me like, wow, what an unusual concept.
- Where am I going to hide?
- We got married the minute we could,
which in Massachusetts was May of 2004.
So it's been a while and we're really not celebrating
until everybody else gets that chance.
It's, it's coming slowly.
And, but I never thought it would come in my lifetime.
- Do you remember this series?
- Deconstructed. - Deconstructed.
So it was actually weaving a double weave in,
this is a wool and silk from JaggerSpun.
- I went into Randy's studio,
and when he tried on a new weave structure,
what he would do is weave off about a foot or a yard
just to test the coloration for that weave structure.
Basically, it was an anthology
of what he's been doing for 35 years.
And so, that was my original idea was to do
a quilt,
which really covered a complete career.
This is a piece probably from the eighties.
And this is a piece
that was finished probably two months ago.
I love the fact that we still have a turquoise
kind of blending in with that.
When I lay it out like this,
I can see kind of where I started.
We have a piece 35 years old, one of the earlier pieces,
and I'm really going to build around that.
So Randy just dyed this silk for me,
this will be the backing of the quilt.
So I know what my backing is already gonna look like.
I try and balance it out.
If it pleases me, I go with it.
I'll actually put a whole section together,
look at it and say, you know what?
It's not working.
I'll take it apart, reconfigure it until I get it.
And then that's it. I leave it.
- I use color because it's just around me so much
and I drink it in. I don't think about it.
It just kind of,
it's the easiest part of the process for me.
It's not the struggle.
It's the, all of the other things that I get tangled up in,
but never color.
Color is the first thing you see.
And it's the last thing you think about
before you adopt this piece into your life.
My overused phrase is,
"Why use five colors when fifty will do nicely?"
This one was woven and washed,
and it looked a little plaid, a little boring,
a little high contrast.
So I took color out, added other colors in.
And what I got was exciting because all of a sudden,
all of the blacks which ran throughout the piece
just appear sporadically, and there are hills and valleys,
and this whole series of cloth is inspired
by Ireland and the hills and valleys
and the barks and the mosses and everything is soft
because it's always about terrain in Ireland.
I think it's important to understand
that process is a means to a way to discover
what's most important in the end product
and how can you adapt the process
to really reflect your own point of view
and your own unique personality.
So I'm always looking at each step of the process
as a way to answer the question,
why would I bother going through these extra steps?
Whether it's tying it on, whether it's winding the warp on,
whether it's choosing the wefts,
whether it's throwing the shuttle,
and they're answers that only human beings can discover
in the act of doing it.
Hand weavers tend to be looked upon as dinosaurs
who are doing something that really doesn't need to be done.
Why would you bother?
And I think that we have something to offer the world
that is best expressed through interlacing threads.
This is not busy work.
This is not happy hands and happy faces.
This is very essential stuff.
I'm a hermit, you know,
I like to hide in the studio
and play with yarns and colors all day long.
But going to a show,
I can kind of put on enough armor to get through it,
but Brian is there as the front man.
And he's, my job is to really stand back and look artistic
and let him do his magic,
but there's a lot more work to be done.
Let's keep at it.
- Challenge.
[lively music]