ANN MEERKERK
What most Whidbey Islanders associate with “Meerkerk” is The Rhododendron Gardens. For elder WWG members, however, “Meerkerk” follows “Ann” who was an inspiration and a challenge to many Island Weavers, as well as the benefactor who opened the Gardens to the public.
As an artist Ann was not a specialist, but a talented, creative explorer who, it seemed could understand and master anything. When Doris Macomber first met her in a Greenbank laundromat, Ann was working a very intricate piece of crochet. What did she plan to do with it? “Oh, nothing in particular. I just wanted to see if I could do it.” She was a weaver who could build looms. She learned to spin and raised her own sheep. She was a collector of spinning wheels, and many other kinds of art and artifacts, not to mention books. She was an enthusiastic dyer, and was known for keeping a couple of good indigo pots at the ready.
Ikat was one of the forms of weaving she favored. She was a painter in oils and watercolor and shared many painting outings with Mildred Sherwood. According to her friend Sylvia Tacker she had “the eye of an artist, the mind of an engineer and a soul borrowed from Leonardo”.
In New York she met her future husband Max, a descendant of Prussian nobility, a man of ranging interests and some 30 years her senior. They raised Weimaraners. They moved to Idaho with 55 dogs but in 1961 Max bought 13 acres on Whidbey Island, the beginning of their “Secret Garden”. The rhododendrons were one of Max’s passions and the first varieties he ordered were Chinese. Ann put her artistic talents to work in developing groupings and color schemes and continued to develop and complete the garden after Max’s death in 1969.
On Whidbey, Ann’s interest in weaving was reawakened by Helen Munn’s supply shop in Langley and the local weavers she met there. She joined the Seattle Weavers Guild in the mid ‘60s and a few years later, helped Doris Macomber start the Whidbey Weavers Guild. Ann flung herself into fiber work, including spinning, macrame’, tatting, dying, tie-dying, and ikat. She kept sheep, especially black sheep, saw them sheared, worked with wool, spun it and knitted or wove it.
Considering the influence she had on so many, it is surprising to realize that, according to Lynn Murphy she was quite shy and somewhat self-effacing. Her creative energy and spirit of exploration and sharing made a memorable legacy to weavers. Her generosity left a great gift of natural beauty to the public.
LUCETTA WALKER
Lucetta joined Whidbey Weavers Guild in 1977 when moving from from Yakima to retire in La Conner. She was a member of the Yakima Guild where she learned to weave from Clara Chapman in the ‘50s to early ‘60s. She also to took classes from Mary Meigs Atwater (1952) and Marguerite Davidson (1953). Lucetta took a 6-month study of block weaves from Virginia Harvey.
Lucetta learned to spin on a drop spindle and made enough yarn to knit a cardigan. She sewed all her four daughters’ clothes, wove yardage for clothing, towels, upholstery fabrics, aprons, skirts, even baby bibs. She especially loved the loom-manipulated lace weaves. It was satisfying to her to produce textiles that would do their job well, would last, as well as have aesthetic value. Lucetta was President of Whidbey Weavers Guild 1991-93.
DORIS MACOMBER
Before there was ever a guild president, there was a “Queen Bee,” as Ann Meerkerk dubbed her. All her fellow weavers point to Doris Macomber as the engineer and organizing force of the future Whidbey Weavers Guild. Doris acknowledged the title with a chuckle, and wanted today’s members to know “how proud” she was “of what ‘my’ guild became”.
The future Guild first met in Doris’ living room in early December 1969. She was firmly at the helm for the group’s first five years. Many of the Guild’s characteristic activities took root in those early days. At all meetings, Doris insisted on having an educational component — “not just tea and crumpets”. Our favorite program segment, Show and Tell, also dates back to those times.
In Doris’ day, however, members were required to tell in detail what they did with the materials, and why, and what problems were solved, what alternative solutions were considered, etc. Our booth at the Island County Fair had it origins in the educational displays the group put on at the Coupeville Arts Festival — ambitious demonstrations of weaving, spinning and dyeing, and all without the incentive of ribbons and awards. What did Doris enjoy weaving? Almost anything. She especially loved pattern weaving and playing with color. The finished piece seemed less important to her than the enjoyment of the structure and the colors. Several years ago she figured that she had woven over 600 placemats, usually with over-all pattern, and many shawls both of which were in demand at craft sales in the ‘60s and ‘70s. She loved working with fine threads and wove earrings of sewing silk (though she had the customer assemble them herself!) She did wall hangings, yardage, towels, upholstery fabric — some of everything. She did them all well and said, “I can’t stand sloppy weaving”!
At first, Doris didn’t want to learn to spin, “because it would take too much time away from weaving.” But, eventually Mildred Sherwood started her spinning on a drop spindle, then a supported spindle, and that led to a spinning wheel of the box variety, in which the wheel revolved inside a square frame. Again, she was fascinated by the process. She wound up spinning four-ply, seduced by her love of fine yarns. She also did enough work with natural dyes to make her husband suspicious of anything that came out of her kitchen in a pot: “Is that dye, or is it dinner?”
Her sense of humor was lively: “If you lose your sense of humor you’re out of luck!” In that spirit, she sends guild members the following thoughts from her refrigerator door:
Five Good Reasons for Buying Yarn
I – It keeps without refrigeration, you don’t have to cook it to enjoy it, you never have to feed it, change it or walk it.
II – It is less expensive and more fun than psychiatric care.
III – It insulates the closet where it is kept.
IV – It provides extra weight in the trunk of the car for traction on icy roads.
V – It is our patriotic duty to support cotton farmers, textile mills and fabric stores.
ANITA LUVERA MAYER
Weavers across the U.S. know Anita Mayer’s name from her writing: books, monographs, and many articles in magazines such as Handwoven and Weaver’s. During her many years of teaching, thousands have taken her workshops, seen her striking garments on display, or heard her lecture at conferences and seminars. As Anita has been a WWG member since 1969, most of us have met her at a first-Thursday meeting, and have been heartened by her warm encouragement and her appreciation of other’s work.
One thing Anita says forthrightly: “I have been privileged in that I have never had to earn a living while pursuing my artistic goals. That has given me great freedom”. Perhaps from that freedom her style has evolved uniquely, not only in designing clothing, but in such areas as non-woven fabrics – notably her “sandwich” cloth that captures snippets of multi-colored silks between layers of Georgette, offering an enormous range of color effects along with soft and elegant drape. With little formal training, she has learned from workshops and other artists, from extensive reading and experimentation, and from travels to India, China, Yugoslavia and elsewhere — always gathering ideas and samples. Many years into her career, she is still a student.
Given her views on weaving and women’s lives, it seems appropriate that Anita came to this career through her mother-in-law, Marcella Mayer, a noted Seattle weaving teacher. For a wedding present in 1955, Marcella gave her new daughter-in-law a 36” loom and weaving lessons.
LAURA VANDERBEEK
Laura joined the Guild in 1974, and the organization and its members became a vital part of her life. She insisted on regarding herself as a staunch and appreciative member, not particularly as a leader. However, she served the Guild with vigor, good humor, and patience on numerous committees and for many years she was the Guild’s Treasurer. She especially valued the Guild’s tradition of members helping one another and sharing their skills rather than competing. Laura was a knitter first, though she became an excellent spinner and dyer, as well as weaver. Like our booth at the county fair, she was dedicated to “fiber arts”. We saw some of her favorite garments at Guild meetings, including a tabard, knit from lichen dyed yarn spun entirely on a drop spindle. A cardigan sweater knitted from several exotic fibers was a special achievement.
During the 1980s Laura regularly taught advanced knitting and beginning spinning at the Coupeville Spinning and Weaving Shop.
The inspiration for her to learn both weaving and spinning was a handsome antique coverlet. The yarn had been spun and dyed with madder by her great-grandmother. It had then been sent to a weaver, as was the custom at the time. Laura found her coverlet pictured and documented in “Keep Me Warm One Night” (Burnham, University of Toronto Press). The coverlet first made her want to weave, but later she decided with characteristic thoroughness to begin at the beginning and learn to spin. She began to spin about 1974, using the fleece from her own sheep.
This lady drew energy and inspiration from others who shared her passions. Some of the people who inspired her own work included Ann Meerkerk, the Guild’s first leader who (with other early Guild Members) taught Laura to weave; and Mildred Sherwood, our second leader who taught her to spin. She learned dyeing with fermented lichens from Michelle Whipplinger in a trade for knitting lessons. She greatly admired Sharon Alderman’s color work and also her excitement and pleasure in her work, but like the rest of us Laura was overwhelmed by Sharon’s prolific output.
LUISE ZIEGLER
The Ziegler family had a tradition of excellence, which Luise learned most directly from her German immigrant father Otto, a woodworker by avocation, whose craft was so thoughtfully and meticulously practiced it ranked as art.
Luise came to weaving the hard way; by buying a book and a loom (a LeClerc) and teaching herself. She completed her very first project in 1953; it was 45” wide and in 20/2 linen! She struggled basically alone for several years, learning from books by Mary Black and Mary Meigs Atwater; and later from members of the Seattle Weavers Guild, which she joined after moving from Indiana in 1956. In 1959 a visit to the Williamsburg spinning house moved her to add spinning to her skills, on a wheel made by Otto.
In the early 1960s she went to Pendleton, North Carolina to study with the niece of Lucy Morgan, and found inspiration and support, as well as good teaching in the Penland school environment. At this time her dad, Otto, designed a unique and beautiful 45”, 12 harness loom, made of clear-finished curly maple, with solid brass in many of the places one normally expects steel. The castle is decorated with two inlay pictures, one showing his Washington cabin and the other the home they left behind in Indiana. In 1964, she wove on her own personal loom, a linen tablecloth as a family piece, in a 13 shaft pattern (she had to pick up the13th shaft). She acquired and enjoyed a draw loom, as well as 8 and 16 shaft table looms. She documented her work carefully over the years and had a 40-year record of her projects, starting on art paper and ending on computer disks. Her weaving projects were mostly done for herself, family, friends, church and organizations she supported.
Luise joined WWG in 1973, served the Guild as Treasurer and Membership Chair of the Association of Northwest Weavers Guilds (ANWG). She worked the Guild’s booth at the Island County Fair. She produced and distributed the guild’s yearbook/directory and handled newsletter mailing.
She was a long time member of the WWG’s Crazy Eights Study Group, preferred to work with fine linens (50/2 and 40/1) using complex weaves based on traditional weave structures. Her specialty was fine household linens. She produced upholstery fabrics, yardage for clothes and at least two sets of rag rugs from her mother’s stockpile. She also produced a set of church linens; altar cloth, pulpit fall, minister’s stole and baptism christening cloths.
Luise identified herself as “a treadle weaver, not at all a finger weaver.” However, she greatly appreciated those who worked in other styles. She had special praise for Suzanne Ramsey’s tapestry work for the church.
She gave much time and effort in helping to document the work of earlier weavers. For Virginia Harvey’s 40-odd-volume documentation of the Bateman weaves, Luise did the original keyboarding of text. For Sigrid Sample Piroch’s book documenting the work of Elmer Wallace Hickman, she found or wove samples to prove his direction.
SUZANNE RAMSEY
‘’HELP WANTED: Seeking enthusiastic and talented new member for our team. Must be self-starter, independent thinker, but work well with others. Good organizational and leadership skills required. High energy and positive attitude a must”.
Versions of the above ad can be found in the employment section of any newspaper, as personnel managers dream about their ideal worker. The person they are all looking for is Suzanne Ramsey. And if they want the worker to perform without accolades, Suzanne did that!
Several of Suzanne’s contemporaries in the Guild pointed to her as the person mainly responsible for giving the Guild its organizational form. In the mid ‘70s the Guild existed only as an informal group that ran on common interests and goodwill, meeting in members’ houses.
In 1983 Suzanne became the group’s third leader, when membership was at about 40. She led the group through the decision to organize formally and the subsequent writing of the by-laws, which were accepted early in 1987. The new Whidbey Weavers Guild elected its first officers and obtained non-profit status in spring of 1987.
Suzanne was Treasurer and also actively involved in guild projects, even serving at the drop of a hat as substitute auctioneer at our yearly auction. She involved the members in workshops regularly – learning new techniques and challenges. She believed strongly in the guild as a fellowship or community, where members have equal acceptance no matter what their level of technical skill and where all benefit from free exchange of ideas and knowledge.
Suzanne’s loft studio always had several works in progress; a tapestry, a four-block weave on 7-shafts, a piece of upholstery fabric in swivel to mention a few. She was an avid member of Crazy Eights study group. Her particular interest was hand-manipulated weaves. She had no ambition to sit at a computer loom and watch the shuttle go back and forth.
Suzanne was a devoted friend to almost all who came to know her. She proudly earned a title and wore it well – WEAVER!
MARY BLACK
Our Mary Black — “the other Mary Black, not the author Mary Black,” as she often pointed out — looked back over nearly four decades of investigating, experimenting, learning, crafting, teaching, and sharing, and summed it all up “Weaving is the thread of my life”.
I’m a generalist, she said. If pressed, she called herself “a spinner who weaves”. Pressed further, she ranked her passions and accomplishment in the fiber arts as: 1. spinning, 2. temari, 3. weaving, 4. everything else – which seemed to include just about everything one can do with fiber.
Among her abiding interests, making temari balls had a special fascination. Each ball gives the artist a new experience in the interplay of colors. And the finished work does nothing but exist in beauty and give aesthetic pleasure — perhaps beauty in its purest form. As Mary pointed out, giving such a gift of beauty is a feature of Japanese culture, but is rare and hardly understood in Western culture. A large, beautiful temari by Mary is in the permanent collection of the Coupeville Art Center.
Mary’s spinning and weaving repertoire included many different techniques, and she taught both arts in New York, California, Arizona and Washington. She had an unusual connection to Navajo spinning and weaving – another instance of her outreach to non-European cultures – which began when she was living in Arizona. After one of her spinning demonstrations at the Desert Museum, a Navajo woman came up and asked how she could obtain a spinning wheel, which would give her much better production than her traditional Navajo spindle. The upshot of this meeting was that Mary sweet-talked her husband Grant (an enthusiastic woodworker) into making a wheel, one with a quill instead of a flyer assembly, so it would work the wool like a traditional spindle. After that several more requests came including one from Sarah Natani, whom Mary brought to teach at the Coupeville Arts Center’s annual Fiber Forum.
Mary was our Auctioneer for many years at the Guild’s yearly event.
Mary’s Words to live by:
JUST FOR TODAY, I will live through this day only. I will not brood about yesterday or obsess about tomorrow. I will not set far-reaching goals or try to overcome all my problems at once.
JUST FOR TODAY, I will be happy. I will not dwell on thoughts that depress me. If my mind fills with clouds, I will close them away and fill with sunshine.
JUST FOR TODAY, I will improve my mind. I will read something that requires effort, thought and concentration. I will not be a mental loafer.
JUST FOR TODAY, I will gather the courage to do what is right and take responsibility for my own actions.
VIRGINIA I. HARVEY
“There is only one place to go, and that’s forward”. That was Virginia’s comment, delivered calmly with a lift of the shoulders and an ironic half-smile, on the 1974 fire that destroyed her home and publishing business. At that time, she and her late husband Bill (one of her publishing partners) also owned an extra mobile home. Into it they put a table, some pencils and pads, and a borrowed typewriter. They were back in business.
A white-haired lady of upright posture, poise and dignity, she spoke in the same measured tones we heard from her in Guild meetings, making her point with thoughtful clarity and often a gleam of humor. In 1996 when the American Crafts Council elected her an Honorary Fellow, Jack Lenor Larsen introduced her as “this weaver’s weaver,” and today’s “doyenne of serious handweavers.” She joined Seattle Weavers Guild and accepted commissions for pieces such as altar cloths. She began exhibiting in 1955 and went back to study again, this time at the Cornish School.
In 1958, an offer came through some museum research for three months’ part-time work at the University of Washington’s Henry Gallery. The job was mainly to catalog a recently donated collection of 1,000 Indian saris. That three month contract turned into a 20 year association with the University and its collection of textiles, in a role which became the Curator of the University of Washington Textile Study Center.
Over nearly 40 years she shared her knowledge generously. She participated in nearly 50 exhibitions and juried many other shows. She lectured on macrame’ and basketry, taught classes in diverse subjects from fabric design and drafting to special basketry techniques. She donated to the Coupeville Art Center a series of opportunities for groups of up to 8 people to spend “A Day with Virginia Harvey” at her home. She recorded some of her knowledge in 19 periodical articles and in 10 monographs, including several presenting the encyclopedic collection of fabric structures of Professor William G. Bateman. The original woven samples for at least one of these monographs resides in our Guild Library and several in The Seattle Weavers Guild Library. She published hardbound and paper books: “Macrame’: The art of Creative Knotting”, “Color and Design in Macrame” and “The Techniques of Basketry”.
In her compact, highly organized workroom she wove exquisite miniature soumac mounted for display on their own working frames of bound twigs. Her invention of “silk wraps” — a triangle wrapped with fine silk threads in complex patterns, then assembled, point inward like the sections of a kaleidoscope image, into a circular medallion — sing with lustrous colors and are breathtaking.
Virginia was always going where else? – Forward!
MILDRED SHERWOOD
Every apartment door at Bayview Manor, where Mildred lived in Seattle, had some personal decoration. Mildred’s had a bald eagle, spun and woven in wood. But this was not the lordly American eagle; he dangled by his neck, like a dead goose in a farm wife’s kitchen. Mildred, whose attitude to her own work was pragmatic and in no way egotistical, explained: “He was originally on a branch, but how do you fasten that to a door?”
Mildred did not start out as a tapestry weaver, but a girl who learned a range of needle arts at home. It was her future mother-in-law who introduced her and her future sister-in-law to weaving and spinning. Mildred spun “hundreds and hundreds” of yards of yarn and used it to weave a great variety of fabric: for upholstery, clothing, household linens and many rugs.
Most of her tapestries started out, she said, as “a little drawing of some kind, “ but developed into a “terribly demanding” experience. They were, she admits, “addictive”. Her biggest and best tapestry, she felt, was a rendering of Yggdrasil, the prodigious ash tree of Norse mythology, whose roots penetrate the underworld and its branches the heavens, harboring heroes and villains human, superhuman, and non-human.
Mildred cheerfully admitted to being born in 1911, spun her own yarns on a Norwegian wheel, one of three she imported through a Scandinavian cousin, for early members of the Guild. She became a member of the Seattle Weavers Guild, and grew well acquainted with Virginia Harvey, who inspired her to move to Whidbey Island in 1969, to join Luise Ziegler and others. She recalled that the WWG in the early years had close connections to the Seattle Guild, because so many of its members had belonged to the Seattle Guild before or, in some cases, after. She served the WWG as its third leader — or “Queen Bee”.
VIRGINIA DUSENBURY
Virginia joined the Guild in 1983. She was our first elected President under the newly formed By-Laws in 1987.
She was an artist in watercolor and oil, and portraits were her favorite. Virginia put an artist’s pallet of color into her many weavings. She wove yardage for garments, towels, placemats and when she participated in the guild lunch bag exchange she included a napkin in her reversible bag. She was a firm believer of sharing ideas and techniques.
WIN ANDERSON
According to Win Anderson, “If you’ve read Jack Lenor Larsen’s autobiography ‘A Weaver’s Memoir’, you’ve read my biography!”. That’s not far from the truth. The two shared an almost symbiotic working association for twenty-five years, from the formation of the first Larsen company in 1952 until rheumatoid arthritis forced Win’s retirement in 1977.
Together, they established a position as the leading edge of New York’s highly competitive fabric design market. It was an exciting and challenging time to be a designer in New York.
Win took up life on Whidbey Island in 1986. Even though she couldn’t manage finger-controlled techniques due to her arthritis she managed a knitting machine, a serger and a sewing machine. She made many garments from her antique wardrobe packed with interesting materials from New York.