The Black Sheep Handweavers Guild decided to create a weaving dedicated to the memory of one of our long-time and much beloved members, Glory Dail Koehler, who died in January 2002.
Glory was a founding member of Black Sheep, and active on the local and national level in the textile arts.
She served tirelessly on the Advisory Board for CNCH, as well as being a representative to HGA and several Convergence committees.
Glory is survived by her daughter, Dail, who is also a Black Sheep member.
Glory was instrumental in helping Black Sheep locate their monthly meeting space at the First United Methodist Church in Palo Alto, as she was an active member of the congregation. We felt it would be a fitting tribute to Glory and to her place of worship if we created a weaving for the church she loved. After consulting with the pastor, we agreed to weave a communion cloth. As luck would have it, we were able to use yarn that Glory herself had spun for the weft, a beautiful, fine, tussah silk/linen singles. We purchased some 3-ply bombyx silk for warp, and set to work designing the communion cloth.
Cyrena Wilson and Ulla de Larios served as principal designers for the 9-foot long by 32-inch wide piece.
The main pattern is an Atwater-Bronson lace dogwood pattern, contributed by Margaret Gaynes, a Black Sheep member.
Ulla added plain weave motifs of hearts and birds on each end of the piece.
Cyrena designed the lettering: "In Memory of Glory Koehler 1924-2002"
that ran along one edge of the cloth.
The rest of the body of the cloth was filled in with the delicate dogwood blossom and lace pattern.
The cloth was set at 22 epi in a 12-dent reed. Weaving was at approximately 22 ppi. The weave structure is Atwater-Bronson lace with 14 pattern blocks woven with the help of a 16-shaft computer-interface Cyrefco dobby loom. Twenty five weavers assisted with winding, beaming, threading, sleying, and finally, weaving and finishing the cloth.
We miss Glory so deeply. She was such a beloved, helpful, and very important part of our group. You could ask Glory just about anything regarding textiles, and she knew the answer! She nurtured and encouraged many of the fine spinners and weavers in our guild, and always recognized and praised the work of others. Although we were saddened by her death, just being able to hold the yarns she created in our hands as we passed the shuttle through the shed helped bring her closer and make her loss a little easier to bear.
The cloth was finished in time to be put on the altar at her memorial service, in March 2002, at her beloved church. It was entered in the CNCH show the same month, where it won a gold ribbon for group projects.
The members of our guild who worked on the cloth are: Mary Anderson, Sandra Baker, Rosemary Brock, Kaaren Brommer, Karolyn Burkhart-Schultz, Ulla deLarios, Alfred Eberle Jessa Foot, Margaret Gaynes, Kathy Hattori, Donna Jeffrey, Marguerite Kaufman, Carole Kazanjian, Rosemarie Lewis, Marie-Christine Mahe, Min Moore, Cathie Nichols, Nola Phagen, Gudrun Polak, Jean Thompson, Kitty Thoresen, Kathy Watts, Nancy Weber, Cyrena Wilson, and Jeff Wilson,
By Kathy Hattori, March 2002
Scan of fabric detail by Margaret Gaynes
Last updated: 4/2/06