I got the weaving bug in my late teens, when I rigged a 4 shaft floor loom. When the loom returned to the fire wood pile, I started to knit instead of weave.
Some 40+ years later, in 2019, I returned to my first love when I landed Nestor, an 8-shaft Macomber loom and started weaving in earnest—at last!
A lot of what I learned as a serious knitter translated into my weaving practice, somewhat to my surprise. Knitting is a lot of fun and interesting, but weaving has deeper and more numerous rabbit holes to explore…
I weave mostly functional textiles (kitchen towels, scarves, blankets, etc.), and mostly with cotton, cottolin and linen, with occasional forays into purely decorative wall hangings, and into wool.
In 2021 I started collaborating with Elisabeth Hill (www.plainweave.net, @plaineweave), meeting regularly, mostly over Zoom, to discuss weaving, colors, structures, fibers, patterns, etc.
A lot of my work revolves around color. I set up each warp as a color playground. Weaving such warps means playing in it / with it, either over the course of a large piece (e.g., a baby blanket), or weaving a series of items like kitchen towels, each different from the others.
I don’t use these color playgrounds as gamps, whose goal would be to figure out the right color combination of warp and weft, akin to picking colors from color chips. Rather, I see each warp as a (not so) blank canvas, and each woven piece as an end in itself and its own entity.
Why the strange name?
First, “petit chêne” means “little oak.” Then my first name is Véronique, which is French for Veronica. It is also the common name for plants in the genus Veronica in French, whose common name in English is speedwell. One such plant is Veronica chamaedrys, known as the germander speedwell in English, and la Véronique petit-chêne in French. So my business name is a convoluted nod to my French roots and my taste for natural history.