My whole raison d’être is to unlock creativity through weave – yours as well as mine – so that we can be the weavers we want to be! It is a means of expression and mindfulness, connectedness, confidence and achievement.
Weaving really is a metaphor for life – it’s encapsulated in every language and is a fundamental part of everyday expressions!
Sharing the expertise that I have gleaned over 30 years of exploring, creating and studying is a deep passion. As you absorb each new technique, pick by pick, knowledge and experience builds up and confidence grows.
Weaving is a craft that is good for everyone’s health, keeping minds active, spirits positive and intensely satisfying from a creative and intellectual standpoint too.
PROBLEM SOLVING & LATERAL THINKING
Weaving helps you think outside the box. If something is not working, what are the different ways you can think of to make it work? That can be as simple as adding a weight to a loose thread, or changing weft yarns to alter the mood of a piece, all the way through to adapting your loom to get the result you want.
The gentle pace of weaving also helps your subconscious mind to work through other problems and issues you may be facing in your life. The mind is focused on the movements and the process of weaving, leaving the subconscious actively working out solutions and strategies.
BRAIN HEALTH AND MENTAL WELL-BEING
Being a whole-brain activity, weaving helps guard against degenerative brain disease. Stimulating both hemispheres of your brain through logic and creativity and keeping the connections between the hemispheres strong and active leads to stronger mental acuity into old age and is believed to delay the onset of such age-related problems as dementia and Alzheimers!! It is no co-incidence that weaving is a useful technique in occupational therapy for body and mind.
To create something from basic materials, to form order out of apparent chaos, is deeply satisfying in itself. The process of weaving leads to self-confidence, self-reliance, absorption in something productive and worthwhile plus a great sense of achievement. Well-being through weave!
Grounding you in the current moment, the gentle rhythm of hands throwing and catching the shuttle, beating the weft in place, the changing pattern, the growing cloth, weaving is a really effective antidote to the insistent demands of our on-screen, digital life.
CREATIVITY & COMMUNITY
Weaving fulfills our human need to be creative as well as an intrinsic need for logic and order. Sharing many different approaches to applying creativity in weave, in design, in expressing who you are and how you feel through weave is my goal in teaching – to unlock your personal creativity through weave. We all have a voice. It is my honour to help you discover yours!
It is also a community thing! Here at The Loom Room France, you can connect with weavers from many different countries who come to study and weave together. And now, through online courses and dedicated communities online, we can connect instantly with weavers worldwide, sharing ideas and inspiration and gaining support and encouragement.
All that creative potential harnessed across the world through weave (the ‘real’ world-wide web :^)) for beauty, art, function, pleasure, expression, mindfulness, connectedness, confidence and achievement. What an amazing thread of connection and creativity!!