PORTRA I T • PROF I LE
Weaver works colourful magic
GREGG CHAMBERLAIN gregg.chamberlain@eap.on.ca
interesting form of fabric art. “From a distance, felt works look like paintings,” she said. “Close up, you can see the individual felts, mohairs, and other fabrics.” Over the years, Browsky has explored and experimented in all the ways that fabrics are used, both practical and artistic, in many types of culture. “I just like working withmy hands,” she said. “I have to havemy hand on something tactile. For my part, it was going from farmyard to fashion.” Through her website at www.shirley- browskyfibredesigner.com, Browsky serves clients fromas far south as the state of Texas or across the Pacific Ocean in Japan, who order whole suits of clothing handwoven on her loom and dyed in patterns and colours she creates herself. “I’m getting more and more involved in
technical weaving,” she said, adding that she has created a line of baby wraps for mothers of newborns to carry their infant charges around in, safe and warm. She’s also become involved in providing original and unique handwoven prayer shawls for clients of the Jewish faith. It is all part of challenging herself to find something new, to push herself and her skills. “You look around and you say, ‘Hey, I could figure out a way to work that into my cloth,’” she said. “It’s also a nice thing to be doing something that women have done for more than 5000 years. You sort of have a sisterhood with all those women from cen- turies before you, some of whomhad to spin to survive and make a livelihood.” The Hammond weaver smiles as she works a modern pedal spinning wheel. “It’s a nice connection with the past.”
Buying an old farmhouse helped introduce Shirley Browsky to the wonderful world of weaving. More than three decades have passed since Browsky, 68, acquired as her new home, a one-and-a-half-storey log house in the Hammond area, which dated back to the 1850s. She also purchased the original log post office building in Alexandria which was built in 1837, took it apart log by log and reassembled it log by log as an addition to the new/old house. “I started weaving because, when I bought the house, there was an antique loom in one of the rooms,” she said. “I was intrigued.” Intrigued enough to learn how to work that loom, rather than just leave it sit as a large house ornament. She soon discove- red that learning how to weave was just the beginning for her of exploring the craft of handmade cloth. “After I started weaving, I learned that I liked texture,” she said, “so I started spinning. So then I got some sheep too.” She spent some time on an Australian sheep station, where the hands there raised Marino sheep, native to Australia. She lear- ned all she could about sheep-breeding then returned home to Hammond and applied that knowledge to raising and cross-breeding her own flock of sheep. Now she had her own wool to spin into thread to weave into cloth. Next step seemed obvious to her. “There weren’t enough colours available to me,” she said, with a grin, “so I learned how to dye.” Later on she began to sell off some of her flock of 40 sheep to other spinners and weavers throughout Ontario who liked to have the natural feel of wool for their own work. Now, she jokes, she has a nine-year- old unemployed Border collie with nothing to do now that his flock is gone. For more than a decade, Browsky wove her works on that 175-year-old handmade antique loom that originated in Québec. Af- ter mastering spinning, weaving and dyeing to her own satisfaction, she decided she needed another challenge. “And if you’re involved in fibre,” she said, “then you tend to try different areas.” So she began working with felt, which proved an
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