. . . a woven path between time and place . . . back again and warp speed ahead . . .
At 17 I packed a suitcase filled with carpet warp thread, hopped the ferry and hitched a ride down to Courtenay, British Columbia to spend a month with Nelmi Salo learning to weave her Finish rag rugs. Her family had recently moved her out of her Sointula home on Malcolm Island down Vancouver Island into a modest apartment where her well worn floor loom occupied the entire living room. Her bedroom held voluminous sorted-by-colour stacks of carefully collected rags piled high. A second bedroom contained a single solitary mountain of colourfully wound balls of weft made from narrow long strips of rags.
The images were shot and posted today revealing the first rag rug I designed and clumsily wove almost 40 years ago on Mrs Salo multi coloured funky jack floor loom that her husband built decades earlier from the jetsam and flotsam wreckages that washed ashore to Sointula the place of harmony.
