Izah Tahir walked into the Mount Pleasant branch of the Community Libraries of Providence carrying a large black plastic bag. She set it down on a big table, unzipped it, and pulled out a loom. After propping it up on the table, she contemplated how to proceed with the nature scene she’d been working on for several weeks. The most pressing question was how to render the leaves of a large tree at the center of the composition in yarn.
“I could just do Ghiordes knots and unravel the yarn,” Tahir said, referring to a particular weaving technique. “I wonder if that’ll give me something nice.”
Earlier this year, Tahir signed up for a weaving class at the Mount Pleasant library. It was supposed to be four weeks long, but she’s been coming back almost every Monday night for months. Her enthusiasm for the class, and the craft, is not unique.
“Every time I put out a call for registration, I get like 10 emails from people being like ‘Oh, I would like to register for this class,’” said Kristen Haines, the weaving class instructor and arts educator at the library. The weaving class is part of a broader effort at the community libraries in Providence to provide free arts education, and access to tools and materials. The library teaches patrons how to sew, how to tuft rugs, and how to use 3-D printers. But the weaving class has been especially popular.
“People are really excited about and eager to learn processes with their hands,” Haines said. The class offers time away from the digital world and requires being present and focused. The library provides all the materials — from yarn to loom — for free.
Haines teaches weaving on simple frame looms for making small tapestries, not the intricate machines used for weaving yards and yards of fabric. In the year since the library purchased 10 table-top frame looms using grant funding, they have circulated more than 90 times, according to a library analysis of circulation numbers.
The class grows progressively more hands-off as students get the hang of weaving. When a new student joins, Haines makes sure to set up the loom in advance. That requires wrapping sturdy cotton yarn around pegs on the top and bottom of the loom, forming the “warp,” which is the underlying structure of the weaving. It’s important to maintain even tension throughout that process, something Haines helps students do once they’ve learned the basics.
“It’s kind of guitar string-esque,” she said, plucking the yarn as she pulls it taut.
Cheryl Noll was one of the first people to sign up for the four-week introduction to weaving course last fall. She’s retired and working on a novel where one of the characters is a weaver, so she signed up for the class to get a sense of how the mechanics of weaving work. Noll has been coming to the weaving class more or less every week for almost a year now.
Noll has made several small tapestries since she first started coming to the class, including one that served as the roof of a small fairy house she made for the Pixie Festival in Medway, Massachusetts. Noll used various shades of green to create a moss-like effect. Certain knotting techniques allowed her to build a third dimension, as though the roof itself were growing.
“It seems like it would be tedious, in out, in out, in out,” she said, describing the process of weaving. “It actually pulls me in … I just find that as soon as I’m doing it, it’s an hour later.”
The six or seven people who regularly come to weave at the library consult on one another’s projects, thinking through how to make yarn look like falling water or mimic the motion of falling leaves. They come to weave, but they’ve also formed a community. Haines, the instructor, called it “a third space,” somewhere that isn’t work or home to interact with people who you might not encounter otherwise.
“It’s just been really lovely to see, to build this community,” Haines said. “Everything’s free and you’re able to enjoy conversation while you work on your projects.
Some regulars have come to love weaving, the class, and the community so much that they’ve invested in their own supplies. Michele Barthelemy bought a loom just like the ones the library lends out after just a few weeks in the weaving class. Most Monday nights she comes back to share the space and community with her fellow weavers.
“Now I am able to do my own work and not worry about taking up a loom for somebody else who might want to learn,” she said.
Barthelemy is at work on a tapestry weaving of a tree with falling leaves — inspired by some of the Native American tapestries she saw hanging in her grandmother’s house as a kid.
“I just love the patterns,” Barthelemy said. “But I didn’t think I could actually do it or figure it out.”
In October, Catherine Trinh joined the class for the first time. She picked two yarns, one deep turquoise, the other tan, to use as the “weft” of the weaving, the yarn that is visible when the tapestry is finished. By the end of class, Trinh had woven a few inches of her first tapestry.
It wasn’t the first time Trinh had turned to the library for creative inspiration.
“My friends are always like, why do you have seven hobbies?” she said. “My hobbies are just whatever is offered by the library.”
