The Studio
A small loom,
and a slow practice.
Mara Okonjo — weaver, dyer, founder. Working from a converted mill since 2014.
I learned to weave on a borrowed four-shaft loom in a cold room above a hardware shop. Everything since has been an argument with that first cloth — too tight, too even, too eager to be finished.
The studio works only in natural fibre — linen, hemp, wool from a single flock in the next valley. Dye comes from the garden and the dye pot: indigo fermented in a vat that takes a week to wake, weld and madder for the warm range, walnut hull for the browns. Nothing is rushed because the vat will not be rushed.
A selvedge edge is the cloth's own boundary — the place where the weft turns and the weave declares itself finished. I leave it honest. No hem, no facing, no hiding the turn. The edge is the most truthful part of any woven thing, and I would rather a viewer read the cloth than be flattered by it.
How a cloth comes to be
Every warp is wound and sleyed by hand. Tension is set across the whole sheet at once, then checked thread by thread before the first pick.
The weft is the line that makes meaning. Beat too hard and the cloth goes dead; beat too soft and it sags. The hand learns this; no gauge teaches it.
When the cloth is off the loom it is washed, fulled, and finished — and the selvedge edge is left exactly as the weave made it.
“Cloth remembers the hand that made it. The loom is only honest about how patient that hand was.”