‘Therapy’ and ‘Outlet’ Becomes a Calling for Weaver

By Lisa O. Monroe

A bargain with a college roommate may have brought Karen Clancy to Williamsburg. But it was her mother’s love of history and the creative spark she ignited in her daughter that started Clancy on a path to become the Revolutionary City’s head weaver, dyer and spinner.

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Karen Clancy explored rural western New York where the family lived on a small farm in Canaseraga with her mother Faye Clancy, a self-taught historian. Together they gathered rubbings from tombstones in old cemeteries and searched for long-forgotten community landmarks.

They would also have fossil hunting contests in areas where there’d been a lot of glacier movement to see who could find the biggest one, and sometimes they’d find Mesolithic stone tools, Karen Clancy said.

“It was important to mom to find out where we’ve been. She was the town historian. She was a big influence, but I didn’t realize it until later,” she said.

Crafty and inventive, her mother “could make something out of nothing.”

In general, life on a small farm when she grew up was comparable in a lot of ways to life in 18^th-century Virginia. Her family planted a garden and raised animals for meat, establishing a certain level of self-sufficiency. Her father ran the farm and also worked in a factory.

Clancy came to Williamsburg for the first time in 1987, after Lisa Mohr made her sign a contract following a night of partying. Clancy had agreed to come work with Moore for the summer.

Mohr, her roommate at Keuka College, then an all-women’s school in New York, had previously worked in the Historic Area during the summer. For Clancy, a sociology major, it turned out to be “the best summer ever.”

Compared to the rural area where she grew up, where there were 28 students in her high school graduating class, Williamsburg was exciting. “It was big time,” she said, “because it had more than one McDonald’s in town.”

While working in the Historic Foodways department that summer, she enjoyed the richness of the history and meeting new people.

Clancy is now in her 27^th year at Colonial Williamsburg, and after holding numerous jobs in the Revolutionary City, she believes she has found her niche.

Her work at the Foundation ranged from financial analyst to human resources manager to being in charge of evening programming. She also worked for five years in costume design. That was just long enough to realize she didn’t really like sewing, she said.

What she liked were the textiles and intricate trims, right down to the buttons and buckles.

She was introduced to spinning and weaving by Elaine Shirley, a fellow employee who manages the Rare Breeds Program. Some 15 years ago, Shirley talked her in to going to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, an annual gathering that’s one of the largest of its kind in the world.

“I went up and fell in love with fiber arts,” said Clancy, who saw demonstrations on everything from sheep to wool processing to yarn construction. “It was this mecca of cool people doing cool stuff.”

When she returned from the festival, Clancy bought a spinning wheel and a loom, making a hobby of spinning, weaving and rug making. She’d tried other outlets for her creativity — painting, gardening, and scrapbooking — but none ever stuck.

“It was my therapy and my outlet,” she said of her newfound hobbies, which provided a diversion from the physical pain and debilitation of an acute form of arthritis that left her unable to walk or use her hands for a time.

Her love of fiber arts stuck. Clancy believes it’s because of the “tactile gratification” she gets from touching and handling the fibers. “There’s something comforting with sense of touch for me,” she explained, “Comforting … relaxing … a Zen-ness.”

Since then, Clancy has attended lots of classes and workshops, and saved her money to go to the sheep and wool festivals, where she could learn and stock up on materials all in one place.

She eventually became adept at spinning, plying, dying and weaving, but it continued to be a hobby. She was working in Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Human Resources Department when she saw the weaving, dying and spinning position advertised twice within a short period of time.

She applied, but wasn’t sure she’d get the job, because she wasn’t experienced in doing the crafts as they’d been done in the 18^th century.

Her skills and passion for the work landed her the job as an apprentice and she became a journeyman in 2013. In January 2014, she became the shop’s journeyman supervisor after Max Hamrick Jr., the shop’s long-time supervisor, retired.

“It’s the best job in the whole world because I love what I do,” she says, even though she did wonder at first whether doing the job all day would curb the interest and pleasure she got from doing them as a hobby to please herself.

“If anything, it’s fueled more interest,” she says now. She’s not only collaborated with textile experts from other museums, but she’s gotten to travel to some special events. She went to England last March and to Scotland in November through the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Clancy said she thinks of the weaving, spinning and dying shop as a “laboratory” and likes to experiment with all aspects of the crafts. Recently, for example, the shop used the leaves of a plant raised in the colonial garden to dye yarn a sea-glass blue.

“We had a lot of success with it,” she said. “It’s all about continuing to learn. And if you’re not failing at some of your experiments, you’re not pushing hard enough.”

In the shop, she has two apprentices, Annie Goode and Gretchen Johnson, and the cloth the three women weave is used by the costume shop or other tradesmen. It typically takes a little more than an hour to weave a square yard.

Working in front of the public isn’t hard for Clancy. “It’s a conversation and I’m a screaming extrovert so that’s where my energy is. If you’re passionate about something, it rubs off.”

She can even find a connection to the math she loves in the weaving job.

“Working on the loom is like working on a binary computer. … You program it to give you different results.”