The face behind the loom
My name is Cally Booker and I am a handweaver based in Dundee on the east coast of Scotland, drawing inspiration from both the external and internal landscapes of my experience. I am particularly drawn to places at the edge, where land and water meet, and in my work this fascination becomes an exploration of lines and boundaries, positive and negative, randomness and rhythm.
I love to teach the art and craft of weaving and, since the pandemic, I have mainly been doing so online. It’s my privilege and delight to meet weavers from around the world and support them in developing their skills and growing their creative confidence. In my Warp Space blog I offer resources with the same intention: to help you achieve the results you want at the loom.
Over the twenty years I have been weaving, I have exhibited my work nationally and internationally and become known for my colourful weaving style and my lively enthusiasm for the structure of woven cloth. I am a member of the Society of Designer Craftsmen and a Past President of Complex Weavers, an international organisation with a mission to educate and encourage innovation in handweaving.
Why Weaving Space?
Let’s go a bit deeper.
I want to help build a world where diverse ways of thinking and making are valued, nurtured and celebrated, and I believe that a fundamental part of this is our relationship to the material environment. I believe it is fundamental because what we see and smell and touch and how we handle it underpins our health and wellbeing as humans, informs our thinking and inspires our creativity. In a world which is increasingly digital and virtual, I believe that textiles have a special role in our lives from the moment we are born until we return to the earth, and I honour the generations of weavers who have used their gifts not only to clothe and sustain us but to develop the richness of the craft which has been passed down to us. The processes by which we turn yarn into cloth fill me with amazement and delight!
You may now be thinking that I take my craft and its role in the world very seriously, and you’d be right. I am an enthusiastic interlacement geek with a passion for handling yarn, and I feel immensely privileged that I get to share my enthusiasm through making and teaching. My practice is centered on the idea that textiles are treasures, to be thoughtfully made, carefully chosen and kept for a lifetime. I have expressly chosen to make things slowly and by hand, and to resist the calls to scale up, make more, sell more. But while all this sounds very worthy, I do also take myself and my high flown romantic ideas quite unseriously. I love to laugh, and especially at my own mistakes (at least after a brief interval of weeping).
By hosting this Weaving Space I aim to hold a space for you to explore your craft and to support you in following your own creative path. And in this practice, too, I choose to work on a small scale, because I want all of my workshops to offer space for genuine creative conversation. I like to think that I have a fierce intellect which takes no prisoners, but the things I hear most often about myself as a teacher are that I am clear, encouraging, patient, and enthusiastic.
Clear, because the secret sauce in my teaching style is to break everything down and take nothing for granted; encouraging, because I can always find something positive to say, and if you’re not feeling it, I can help you to identify what’s not working and turn it around; patient, because if you need to go through it again or approach it another way, we’ll do that as many times as you need, and that’s fine with me; and enthusiastic, because I have more energy for a discussion of weave structure than is reasonable. You have been warned!
So there you have it: my manifesto for slow and small.
This is how I think about the role I can play in nurturing handweaving as a sustainable part of our material culture. And with that, welcome to the Weaving Space.
In case you need a nudge to get started, here are a couple of randomly selected posts from my Warp Space blog:
