Norma Rosier talks about weaving in Bradford, UK, Wales, and the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the inspiration behind her tapestries, and her involvement in KHWS.

Norma Rosier talks about weaving in Bradford, UK, Wales, and the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the inspiration behind her tapestries, and her involvement in KHWS.

June 18, 2021

© Kingston Handloom Weavers and Spinners

Shaelagh Cull

Norma Rosier

Zoom

I saw a demonstration of somebody spinning, was fascinated, she showed me how to spin, sold me her second spinning wheel. And at that time, that would be around 1980, and I was living in Bradford, the center of the British woollen industry. And they had just started a guild of spinners, weavers and dyers. So I went along to that. And of course, you can't be around weavers for very long before you get sucked into that as a fascinating thing to do. So they didn't have the facilities that we have at KHWS, they only had a room that they rented, no equipment of their own and therefore didn't do workshops. So I went along to the local college and learnt to weave on a table loom, loved it, went off to a one week residential course in Wales to do rug weaving. And that changed my life. I just decided I wanted to be a rug weaver. Around that time I met my husband who was a woodworker. I said, could you build me a loom? Well, he said, I suppose I could. Where do I start? So we found somebody who had a 60 inch countermarch loom, took dimensions from that, and he made a wonderful loom. So we then moved to the Outer Hebrides, where I became a full time weaver, initially in rugs, but then it's not easy to sell rugs to make a living so I diversified into tapestry weaving, completely self taught at that point, and developed a technique that worked on my big floor loom. In other words, doing it as a horizontal weaving rather than the vertical tapestry weaving that most people are familiar with here. And then one day, we decided we were coming to Canada. I know that sounds crazy, but my husband was a Canadian citizen, so. We were very keen on finding somewhere where I would meet other fiber artists, because in the Hebrides, although I was surrounded by weavers who were weaving Harris tweed, they were not at all interested in what I was doing. So it was very important to come to an area like this where we had the Guild. I originally joined the Guild in 2008. And we were living about an hour and a half's drive out of Kingston, which was a bit too far. I didn't get involved and coming to winter meetings was just not very easy, so after two or three years I let my membership lapse and joined another organization, which was a bit more local, but that folded. I then rejoined the Kingston Guild, just after they moved to the Tett. And at that point, I decided I was going to get involved more seriously. I was also quite keen at that time in teaching my own workshops. So I offered to teach the tapestry workshop and I've done several workshops since. Because I was earning a living as a tapestry weaver, that's always been my main thing, but I do enjoy weaving yardage and objects like cushion covers, and as I say, the dyeing was a big thing for me. A lot of people, and the Guild itself, have a lot of jack looms. And they're not very good for putting on a warp with the high tension that you need for rugs and tapestries, whereas my loom is very much designed for that. So you need a high tension, because you're packing down the weft very firmly, so that at the end of it, you've got a completely weft faced fabric, you don't see any of the warp. And because the loom was built as a rug loom, and when Ian built it, he looked in Collingwood and it said, a rug loom should look unnecessarily strong. So he might have gone a little bit overboard with that. It has a very heavy beater. So if I'm weaving across the fell, I will use several different colors that meet and then go back again. So that I'm leaving a complete row of weft, leaving lots of slack so that it's able to beat down without pulling in, and then I beat it. Whereas some of the more traditional tapestry techniques will actually build up a separate shape and beat that down with a hand beater and then work on the next shape. Which may, in fact, be faster. But as I say that wouldn't work on my loom because I like to use the beater to beat it firmly. I always use a cotton warp. Some people use linen, but I'm just comfortable using cotton, what you would hear call a rug warp. And the Harris tweed singles for, for the weft. I'll tell you where it started, my style. In a fairly early issue of Handwoven, there was an article about a tapestry done for the Swedish Houses of Parliament. Now that was massive. I think it was done in about three panels. But each panel is big and it was stitched together. And it was basically the sort of style that I do, which is islands and sea, but it was all, I think, although it looks to have a blue cast in the picture, I think it was all done in greys, just a complete monochrome. And it was stunning. And I just thought I want to do something like that. Now, I don't do anything on that scale. And if I do something larger than my loom will allow, I do triptychs with three separate panels. And I don't stitch them together. Because you can see where the join is, it's almost impossible to completely match up the colors from one edge to the next. So I plan the scene to have a two inch gap between the panels. So your eye fills it in. But you don't, you don't get that jarring effect that you get if you try and put them together. So that was my own, well, I didn't see anybody else doing that. but obviously people probably do. But other than that, I mean, I pretty much just developed my style based on photographs I was taking in the Hebridean landscape. The best advice I will give is get involved, because the people who get involved are always the ones that stay. I've saw that with myself and I've seen that with other people. It's easy to just become a member, come to a meeting, maybe not get to know people very well, even do the odd workshop, but until you become a part of a community it can feel a bit isolating because you come to a meeting and you might have five minutes to chat, but then you're just sitting there watching the presentation. And then people drift off home. But the thing that I think a lot of people get a lot out of is Open Studio because every Thursday we have ten till two, people just come in and work on their own projects, but you really form bonds that way and you find out what the Guild needs and how you can help.