Molly Fitzpatrick

Name: Molly Fitzpatrick

Pronouns: she/her

Studio location: Cleveland, Ohio

Website / social links: dittohouse.com, @dittohouse

Loom type or tool preference: 4 harness floor loom, TC2

Years weaving: on and off for 20 years

Fiber inclination: cotton

Current favorite weaving book: Hella Jongerius Interlace, Woven Research

Contact information for commissions and collaborations: email address

 

 

1. How did you discover weaving and was what your greatest resource as a beginner?

I majored in Fiber and Material Studies at the Cleveland Institute of Art where I learned weaving. My classmates were so helpful in learning to weave and we spent many long hours in the loom room warping and threading our looms while chatting and exchanging weaving advice and knowledge.

2. How do you define your practice – do you consider yourself an artist / craftsperson / weaver / designer / general creative or a combination of those? Is this definition important to you?

I consider myself a designer who weaves to understand. In order to be the most efficient and effective designer I can be, I need to work ideas out on the loom.

3. Describe your first experience with weaving.

First learning to weave in art school in the early 2000’s was magical. I found a way to create pattern through woven textiles in the most poetically perfect way — the textile was the pattern, the pattern was the textile. The two were one in the same. The most direct way to create pattern was to weave it. I went from a 4 to an 8 harness floor loom to a 24 harness semi-computerized AVL loom, adding more complexity to my designs and finally taking a workshop which gained me access to a jacquard mill in North Carolina. 

Once I had the opportunity to design for jacquard, I couldn’t see any use for a simple loom again. I remember thinking I’d never weave by hand again for the rest of my life! Why submit to the tedious process of warping yards of yarn, threading hundreds of heddles, being locked into a format with no flexibility when I could tell a computer exactly how to control every fine thread across 52” of textile? The outcome of my designs went from low-res pixelated graphics made with chunky yarns to fine yarns I commanded to create a bevy of geometric shapes in complex combinations. My designs have always been inspired by what I could do with the technology I had.⁠ I have recently resurrected my weaving practice and am happily and slowly winding warps, threading and dressing the loom. I recently read that Hella Jongerius says that renewed interest in weaving techniques is a reaction to the digital age. I agree with this observation, especially in my own career. I moved quickly away from handweaving after my formative years, learning to weave in art school, and into digital designing and production and stayed there for the past 15 years. Now I am renewed again to learn more about handweaving and I am seeing it with new, more informed eyes- I am actually understanding the construction of material and how to manipulate individual threads into fully formed fabric.

4. What is your creative process, from the initial idea to the finished piece? Are there specific weave structures, looms, or fibers that are important to your process?

I often start on my computer, either in photoshop or illustrator. I like that I can lay out ideas here and design for the specific production method. So if something is going to be woven I create a very low resolution document to design pixel by pixel so that it closely resembles what I would weave. If I have a stripe warp set up, I make a document with the dimensions of the stripe and play around with a variety of layouts for designs. Once I arrive on something I like, I move to my loom and use my graphic as a guide. Inevitably, more ideas come about when I am on the loom and things snowball into many yards of ideas. I consider the things that I weave as sketches for my other work with industrially manufactured textiles or collaborative projects. 

My loom is a small 4 harness floor loom. I often use a black and white warp, either stripes or end and end. I use pretty basic weaves and enjoy doing a supplementary weft style to create very graphic designs and patterns. I collaborate with a brilliant cooperative of backstrap weavers in Guatemala, Trama Textiles, and since they use a bordado brocade method, I try to do something similar when working out concepts for possible development and future products.

I usually use cotton and have recently ordered yarns from the same supplier in Guatemala that Trama uses so that I can work with the same exact yarns..

 5. Does your work have a conceptual purpose or greater meaning? If so, do you center your making around these concepts?

One of the things that I always strive for in my textile designs is great visual activity. I love when an intentional secondary pattern emerges, color combinations pulsate, or lines cause my eyes to cross! I feel like if I achieve this activity, this visual response, I am celebrating the rhythms of life and hopefully giving that gift to whoever looks at my textiles- the opportunity to celebrate being alive!

 

6. What is your favorite part of the weaving process and why? What’s your least favorite?

I love when I get to the end of a long warp and release the gears to unroll all the material I created! I am a slow weaver and work on my loom when I get time in between other client work and projects so entire seasons go by in between starting and finishing a warp. There are always surprise experiments that were forgotten that get pinned up to consider for further exploration on my next projects. My least favorite is winding the warp on to the loom. I create a huge mess and my warp is always tangled and in knots. I am super impatient to get to the weaving and don’t take the time to get my warp organized correctly, even though every time I think it will somehow be different and neater… but it’s not!

7. Do you sell your work or make a living from weaving? If so, what does that look like and how has that affected your studio practice?

My weavings and studio practice inform my design work. I’ve run my own textile design consulting business for over 10 years where I work with textile manufacturers on special projects, I license my designs to companies like CB2 and I have a home textile brand, DittoHouse.

8. Where do you find inspiration?

Textiles! I love everything about textiles and am endlessly inspired by the woven structure. I love seeing how textiles are made and learning about the history of textile production. I am also very inspired by the pioneers of the Op-Art movement, especially Julian Stanczak, who was also from Cleveland.

9. What other creatives do you admire – weavers, artists, entrepreneurs – and why?

I am endlessly inspired by the work Oralia Chopen and Amparo de León de Rubio do at Trama Textiles. They are dedicated preservationists of their craft and culture. The organization is founded and run by Indigenous women and 100% worker owned — they are a model of “what could be” in American business — an organized, empowering, sustainable cooperative. The group is incredibly community-minded and they take care of their members and are intent on improving the outlook of the next generations. All members of the cooperative are such incredible artists and weavers and create textiles like no one else in the world.

10. If you could no longer weave, what would you do instead?

Sequin. I love hand sequinning and creating dazzley sparkling designs. For a few years I did a lot of sequin work and even embellished the bottom of my wedding dress with pink sequins and crystals in the shape of hearts — it was so cute!

Do you have any upcoming exhibits, talks, or events the community should know about?

I am very excited to do a 2 week residency at Praxis Fiber Workshop in Cleveland this winter. It will be such a gift to have dedicated weaving time not interrupted by my other work. I am very lucky that such a special place is only 15 minutes from home!

Trama Textiles x DittoHouse