This enormously busy summer left little time for me to weave. I taught rewarding workshops, first at the Michigan League of Handweavers Conference in June, and then two back-to-back workshops at the Damascus Fiber Art School in August. When I teach in a room full of diligent and enthusiastic weavers, I have such an urge to push everyone away and say, “No, let me weave for a while.”
But I did finish my pheasant couple, standing in summer grass.
During a wonderful workshop with Mary Zicafoose in 2017, I indigo-dyed several skeins of wool to weave a rug. The balls of yarn, stored away in a box for many years, varied in shade. They reminded me of Frida Hansen’s transparent tapestries, in which the exposed warp yarn often has beautiful variegation. So I interspersed strands from the different balls when I warped my standing pipe loom.
At first I thought I would design a border that included foods in a pheasant’s diet. Then I ran across an abstract print online whose shapes reminded me of earth—perhaps the land beneath the grass. I snapped a photo of my computer screen, but unfortunately did not record where I had found the image.
I started weaving the pheasants during the World Cup, because there is a lot happening on the television screen during a soccer game that doesn’t really require my attention—like 8,000 Kalshi ads.
I think pheasants are particularly beautiful. People have asked why I wanted to weave them. Part of the answer is my childhood memory of seeing these exotic birds. When I was told that they weren’t native to Minnesota, but had been brought here from China, that completely blew my eight-year-old mind.
Also, so many people who see this tell me of their memories of pheasants, mostly of their fathers hunting them. The most fun comment came from tapestry weaver Katie Russell, who wrote on Facebook:
This reminds me of the pheasants who used to come to the back garden when we were children and they could be hand fed. We would sit on tree stumps and they would walk up close to us and my brother and sister would watch them looking at us, shaking their feathers, making chucking noises. Both females and males had incredibly beautiful feathers. There was a male that had a damaged leg, my brother called him peg-leg Percy and his partner Pricilla and he became almost a pet as one day the pair wandered into the kitchen looking round curiously. This is a beautiful weaving a suddenly brought back memories of the pheasants and the names we gave them.