BoomerGirl Diary

Steamboat Springs, Colo. — When Jacque Hart tells the story of how she first learned to weave on a loom, it sounds like a training montage from “The Karate Kid.”

“I worked at weaving every day, sometimes all day, for about two years,” Hart said of her first teacher, a Navajo woman interested in preserving her culture and weaving tradition.

“She taught me everything. She taught me how to naturally clean and dye wool, how to spin my own yarn and make all my own tools.”

Hart tells stories about her mentor pointing at a huge tree and telling her student to make tools out of its limbs, or picking out a spot on the ground, indicating that it was a good place to dig for natural dyes.

“She didn’t use a lot of words. We would sit, and she’d show me how to spin, and my lesson for the day was, ‘Go home and see if you can do it,’” Hart said.

Flash forward, and Hart now has more than 30 years of weaving experience, with a designation as a “master weaver” from the Colorado Council on the Arts. She no longer weaves Navajo rugs or patterns — because Hart is not Navajo — and has branched out into intricate drawings and commercial pieces.

Almost every room in Hart’s Phippsburg home has space for yarn or a loom. She’s owned her largest weaving machine, a draw loom from Scandinavia, for more than 20 years.

Hart keeps Angora rabbits in her garage for their soft, threadable bunny fur. Many of her pieces are hand-dyed. She owns a small herd of sheep and some ranch land outside of Alamosa. From raw materials to finished product, Hart takes her craft seriously.

“I have tried to take it past that point and use it more like a painter would use a canvas, and make it more of an expression,” Hart said. She demonstrates that expression by carefully arranging silky threads and pulling handles to embroider a flying bird into a white background. It takes about an hour to do three inches of this kind of weaving.

“If I thought about how long it takes me to do this, I probably wouldn’t do it,” Hart said.

Working with a draw loom, or damask weaving, started with European aristocracies, Hart said. There aren’t many people who still use a draw loom, and there are fewer who use it to make pieces to sell. Most of those people live in Sweden.

“I belong to a weaver’s guild for draw loom weavers. It’s an international guild, but even at that level we have trouble keeping it going,” Hart said.

Not surprisingly, learning how to weave with a draw loom — and figuring out how to put the hundreds of pieces of wood and string together — took patience.

“Of course I got the instruction manual and it was in Swedish with some little line drawings. So I laid all of the pieces out on the floor and put like pieces next to each other, and then I stared at it for a really long time,” Hart said.

“There are only a couple of books that teach it, and all of them are from Sweden,” she said. Luckily, a few of those books had been translated.

With years of practice, Hart said she considers herself a professional weaver and thinks of her whole house as her studio.

“I’ve had a long weaving life. Most of my life is either my children, my animals or my weaving,” she said.