…my friends, my colleagues, my students, my family, my fellow weaving geeks, my dear loved ones and treasured kin. This trans day of remembrance is a rough one. If you are feeling alone today, overwhelmed my the wave of anti-trans legislation on its way in Alberta, Saskatchewan and elsewhere, I hope you see this and know that I love you and will fiercely protect you at every opportunity. To everyone else - how you act, or don’t act matters. Show your trans kin you give a damn. How you speak, or don’t speak matters. So speak up when you hear anti-trans language in your community or family. How you vote, or don’t vote also matters…immeasurably. Silence or ambivalence in the face of the blatantly retrograde politics of Canadian conservatives is not acceptable. Are tax cuts, oil and gas subsidies and climate change denialism so attractive that you would risk harm to my loved ones? I hope not, but if so prepare for a fight. Trans folk have always existed and they - and their kin - aren’t going anywhere.

Bird lunch.

Shapes, parkade, monarch eyes, milkweed thread, after dinner and the last of the long line fibre.

I’ve now spun all the long line milkweed fibre processed since 2022. Here are 112 grams/627 metres (roughly 5.6 m/g). I’ve several hundred stalks remaining to process over the winter and hope to double this yardage for a project warp. There is also a good deal of tow fibre which will also add to this yardage. The technical and experimental aspects of this project have absorbed me for nearly three years and I am now shifting my attention toward the sort of cloth I will make with this thread. As I will use a damask technique there is opportunity for figuration. “What to weave?” Is now echoing in my head. For some reason, I’m starting to think about combining the milkweed with silk… possibly thinking about @velmabolyard‘s explorations with various silk moths.

Blurry milkweed. (A. Speciosa)

Preparing for my @textilesociety symposium presentation as part of the panel Expanding the Frame: Shifting and are weaving Canadian Fibre Arts. The panel is moderated by Yolande Krueger @yoyolli and includes colleagues Michele Hardy, Timothy Long snd Julia Krueger. I am so looking forward to it. (Wish me luck in reducing my word count!)