Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Woven in the Woods
Colorful rugs pay tribute to our state's natural beauty

CAROL GUENSBURG Journal Sentinel staff
Published: May 16, 1999

Interspersed among the snowshoes and canoe paddles in Mary Burns' sunny, knotty-pine studio in Manitowish hang almost a dozen handsome woven rugs. One shows a row of pines silhouetted against a sunset, its fiery pinks and oranges calming to a midnight blue. Another choreographs a line of turtles swimming up toward stick-straight green reeds and plump brown cattails. Such weavings state, as obviously as the outdoor gear, a deep appreciation of the natural world.

Especially the surrounding North Woods.

"The beauty of the area inspires me," the fiber artist explains.

The sun intensifies the soft greens of hemlock, white pine and sugar maple visible from her windows. It deepens the cerulean hue of the sky, dotted with cottony clouds, and the silvery blue of the Manitowish River just a stone's throw away.

"With all the water and the changing sky, I have to have at least 18 shades of blue," Burns says. Skeins of wool yarn, dyed to her specifications, nest in shelves covering most of one wall.

Burns has, with husband John Bates, pieced together a livelihood that allows maximum enjoyment of the outdoors with their 12-year-old daughter Callie, his grown daughter Eowyn, and the family's two pooches.

The couple share the 26-by-32-foot studio fronting their home, a 1907 farmhouse once owned by the weaver's maternal grandparents. There, they operate Manitowish River Press, publisher of Bates' two seasonal North Woods almanacs. They sell canoes and kayaks, and Bates guides fellow nature lovers on field trips along local trails and waterways. Bates also works part time with special-needs students at Nicolet College in Rhinelander.

Burns, an avid hiker and paddler herself, absorbs wilderness images that she interprets for many of her weavings. For example, a series of six rugs she wove for Moon Beach Camp's new lodge in St. Germain casts northern fauna in pictographic form. On one, a frog crouches on a lily pad; on another, a stag parades its hefty rack of antlers. The creatures -- including a dragonfly, turtle, black bear and loon -- appear in red wool on an oatmeal backdrop, underscored by four uniform pines.

In "Northern Lights," she has captured the electric feel of the aurora borealis glinting in faint green tones from the night sky onto water, says Rich Gilman. He bought the 5-by-6-foot hanging for a conference room of his luxurious Timberline Inn in Manitowish Waters. "It's a soothing piece. She's an artist who understands northern Wisconsin and the North Woods."

Nature has been a favorite subject for most of Burns' 44 years. A Wausau native, she majored in natural history at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She met Bates in that city.

Burns began weaving in a high school art class and got caught up in the craft. In college, she took design classes and bought an antique Swedish floor loom. Weaving was merely a hobby until Callie arrived.

"I wanted to be with her at home," Burns says. "I decided to do this professionally."
She got rid of the temperamental Swedish loom, replacing it with a sturdy, wooden countermarche loom with a shaft-switching platform. It allows her to create rugs and hangings -- her focus for the past decade -- up to 8 feet wide.

At the countermarche loom, Burns moves with athletic grace, throwing the shuttle -- a ski-shaped, 2-foot piece of polished blond wood to which yarn is attached -- between warp threads stretched tight as piano wire. She hooks her fingers into the newly thrown yarn, guiding it into a loose M shape; were it a simple straight line, the elasticity of the wool would distort the finished weaving. Then Burns extends her arms, grabs a weighted wooden bar called a beater and yanks it toward her. The big loom shudders as the beater thuds against the rug forming at hip level.

This repeated motion packs the yarn from each shuttle throw into the weaving -- and gives great definition to Burns' biceps.

"When I weave, it's really a beating process. Plus, I paddle," she adds, referring to water activities.

While the countermarche loom can weave in various color combinations, its shaft-switching platform limits any given horizontal row to two colors. Up to three colors can be used simultaneously on a nearby 10-foot loom, powered by an air compressor that lifts and lowers 12 harnesses holding the warp threads. ("I still have to throw the shuttle and beat it, just as I do on the other loom," Burns says.) It can be connected to a Macintosh computer, on which Burns uses a "Stitch Painter" knitting program for designing and another program to actually operate the loom. Programming the computer can be tedious work: "I have to transcribe those color blocks into all those different shuttle throws."

A third loom, the smallest, produces most of her wearable art pieces. Burns began making mohair shawls and cloaks about a year ago.
"It's so nice to have something I can weave and have the finished product in a short amount of time," she reasons.

Burns stays on her feet at the countermarche loom, using its long bench to hold yarns and other material. Its movable seat has long since been removed. "At one point, John said we should have put a little counter on the seat and priced the rugs by the mileage," she jokes.

Instead, Burns uses more conventional measures. She charges $40 a square foot, so a 2.5-by-5-foot rug costs $500.

Almost all her work is customized. Burns charges her clients -- concentrated in the North Woods, Milwaukee, Madison and the Twin Cities -- a standard $100 to work up designs, deducting that amount from the cost of any weaving.

She's influenced by American Indian designs and also by seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright, rendering geometric designs in earth tones from rust to loden green. But she doesn't stop there.

"I'm in a Celtic phase right now," Burns says. Two tours of Ireland -- one on bikes with Bates in 1980, another last year with her daughter and sister -- fueled her imagination. Taking shape on the countermarche loom is a representation of the Emerald Isle's County Kerry, its hills rendered in heathery purples and blues.

Burns has other weavings with Celtic knot and high cross patterns, also highly geometric.

Her artistry in these and other weavings led to her selection as one of six artisans demonstrating last summer at Irish Fest.

"She's an extremely talented woman. We were impressed with her work and how she explained it," says Mary Otto, area coordinator for the Milwaukee festival's cultural village.

Burns limits herself to very few such exhibitions, choosing instead to display weavings in her studio (the mailing address is 4245N Highway 47, Mercer, WI 54574). She keeps daytime hours in the summer to accommodate crafts lovers as well as outdoors enthusiasts. The rest of the year, her work can be viewed by appointment, (715) 476-2828 or e-mail at manitowish@centuryinter.net.

No matter what the season, Burns immerses herself in the out of doors -- a veritable idea bank.

"Last summer, we were invited up to Lake Gogebic in the Upper Peninsula. The sunset over the lake was absolutely stunning," she says, raving about shifting colors in the Porcupine Mountains' foothills. "I just sat and watched and wanted to weave the whole thing."

Copyright 1999 Journal Sentinel Inc.