Collection: Off the Grid

Off the Grid began last fall, shortly after I moved back to Wisconsin. After many years away, there was something both strange and familiar about living back in a place I'd always called home, but had spent most of my adult life only visiting a couple of times a year. Surrounded by the Northwoods and the colors of my favorite season, I found myself settling into a slower pace and enjoying the comforts of being home.

Around the same time, I splurged on a Pendleton blanket I'd wanted for years. I was completely taken with its gorgeous colors, and before long, they were showing up in everything I was making as I started playing with different materials, techniques, and textures.

I didn't set out to make a collection about disconnecting. I was simply enjoying the colors, trying new things, and following wherever those colors and feelings took me. There's a little nostalgia in these pieces, too. Not necessarily for specific memories, but for something harder to put my finger on.

There's certainly a little humor in calling a collection of weavings Off the Grid, considering weaving is literally built on a grid. But the name has come to mean something even more to me. In a world that seems to demand more and more of our attention, I've found myself drawn to the things that ask so little of it. The changing seasons, the familiarity of home, the quiet reassurance of knowing the woods are never far away. There's something comforting about a world that continues at its own pace, indifferent to the noise and urgency we create around ourselves. And there's something especially freeing about remembering that we can choose, at least sometimes, to step away from it.