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This time of year, with the leaves turning and the days cool, Evelyn McQuaid has a disincentive to do the weaving she loves: the view across the fields to the water is upstairs, out the living room window of her Tea Hill home, while her looms and fibres are downstairs, in her windowless basement. On days like the sunny October day I interviewed her, Evelyn has to carry the autumn colours she sees woven into vines on her patio trellis in her mind's eye downstairs, to match them to the array of wools and cottons and silks she works with, to weave them into fine scarves, table linens, linens, drapes, coverlets, and clothing.
Evelyn McQuaid has been weaving for over twenty years, ever since she took a six-week extension course offered through Holland College. "At that time," she says, "everyone was doing macrame and crochet and knitting." But Evelyn wanted to take on something a little different. She knew from the earliest days that weaving was what she wanted to do. Through the years, she continued to develop her skills, and while her three children were growing up, her time at her loom was her time to herself.
What's most exciting on Evelyn's horizons these days is weaving new fibres. She is currently working with Mini Mills/International Spinners in Melville, PEI, to develop uses for the new fibres they are spinning. Mini Mills has developed machinery and a process for removing the coarse guard hairs from wools that were traditionally unworkable as spun fibre. As a result, they are now able to create weavable fibre from animals such as musk ox. Their newspun, guard-hair-free musk ox fibre, called qiviut, is fine-textured and soft and is reportedly ten times warmer than a sheep's wool. It is also slippery to work with. "It likes to pack in," Evelyn explains. "It's so soft, it's hard to keep even. It wants to grab itself." She excitedly shows me a lusciously soft and warm piece of clothing she has recently woven with the qiviut. "Whatever has wool will become fibre, now-llama, alpaca, bison," Evelyn says. "It's an exciting time to be a weaver."
While it's an exciting time to be a weaver, Evelyn and her colleagues from the PEI Spinners and Weavers Guild have seen "peaks and valleys" in local interest in weaving. They try to offer opportunities for apprenticing weavers to be paired with experienced weavers on the large loom at the Macphail Homestead in Orwell, where, among other projects, the Guild is recreating the 19th century draperies that once graced the Homestead's windows. But even apart from that, Evelyn says she is always on the lookout for people who might be interested in taking up weaving. At Christmas, the Guild intends to set up a loom at the Christmas Craft Fair to allow passersby (and especially children) to try their hands at weaving. "Kids love it," she says, "and boys especially love the machinery."
Before I leave, she insists that I "try my hand at it,"and I do, awkwardly. As my feet search for the right treadles and I tenuously pull the beater towards me to press the fibres into place, I don't feel much like I'm emulating the smooth movements I have just seen Evelyn cast her body into while she was weaving a piece of a soft cream placemat. Evelyn looked like a skilled cathedral organist playing at multiple keyboards, her arms and hands and feet and back all moving to a rhythm as certain as a Bach fugue. It's easy to believe that as she was weaving, her mind was casting itself across the fields out her picture window to enjoy a meditation on colour and texture and warmth, all of which undoubtedly find their way to her loom and into her woven fabric.