A Weaving Workshop in France

Time to dust this poor, neglected blog off and post some new photos. There’s been a bit happening but the most exciting is our trip to France and London in June. I mentioned in a post way back in September last year that I had been awarded the Creative Fibre Mason Charitable Trust scholarship for 2023, and that I was putting the funds towards a weaving workshop with Stacey Harvey-Brown. The beginning of June saw me and my husband flying to Paris where we spent a fabulous few days sightseeing before heading to the Loom Room France located in the beautiful SW French countryside near Nérac.

The Loom Room is a purpose-built studio integrated into a renovated barn, attached to La Tuilerie, a ‘maison de maitre’ which is Stacey and her husband Graham’s house and where we stayed. There were 2 other weaving students staying for the week and we were each had our own weaving programme tailored to what we wanted to learn. While I was off weaving, Dale explored the neighbouring countryside on foot and just generally relaxed.

We were all staying on site, which meant we shared meals together. Graham cooked us delicious lunches and dinners, and Stacey went into town each morning to get fresh bread and pastries for our breakfast. We also were treated to local wines with our meals and Graham’s own beer from his micro-brewery. When we weren’t weaving Stacey showed us around the neighbouring area including a woad-dyeing business, the Saturday market at Nérac, a couple of bastides (fortified towns), some amazing churches, local artists and several meals out.

But back to the weaving, I was interested in learning about sculptural weaving so Stacey had a 8-shaft table loom ready for me warped up with 4 layers, 2 cotton and 2 wool. My samples didn’t look too exciting on the loom as they were flat plain weave layers. I explored swapping layers, weaving tubes, using different yarns including paper and linen and lastly removing some of the edge warp threads from the woollen layers. The magic all happened on our last weaving day when I took the samples off the loom and wet finished them, with all sorts of ruffling, gathering and shrinking going on. We also discovered during finishing one of the wool layers was probably machine-washable as it didn’t shrink as expected but that just added even more interest to the results . It was so exciting seeing my transformed samples.

I had such an amazing time at this workshop, Stacey is such an enthusiastic and inspiring teacher. Since returning home I have been continuing to explore the techniques that I learnt and having fun seeing what I can create.