The hallmark of master weaver Sharon Alderman '63 are her color studies which are based on her observations of nature.

The young seamstress looked around the fabric store in her hometown of Tulare, Calif. Colors and textures surrounded her, but there was something missing. She finally settled on material that came close to what she was looking for, but left imagining the fabric that she would have preferred. It wasn’t until she arrived at HMC that this young woman discovered that the fabrics of her imagination were possible.

Sharon (Davis) Alderman ’63 was one of only three women in HMC’s class of 1963 and, at that time, female students lived at Scripps College. A woman in her dorm showed Alderman fabric from a Scripps hand-weaving course, and it was then that she realized anyone could make fabric. But with a rigorous HMC schedule that included labs five afternoons a week plus two part- time jobs, Alderman says she never even found where the looms were on the Scripps campus. She filed weaving away as something to do later and graduated with a degree in chemistry.

She married her classmate, physics major Donald Alderman (they are now divorced), and after their daughter, Susan, was born, she began to think again about learning how to weave. Soon after, she took her first weaving class and was taught how to dress a loom, install the warp (the strong vertical thread in
fabric. The weft is the horizontal thread.), read a draft (a notation that describes what every thread is doing, which ones act in concert and which ones are raised by which treadle), and to look at a cloth and work backward to figure out how it was constructed.

Armed with this knowledge, she ordered her first loom. It arrived March 18, 1970, she says, “and I’ve been weaving virtually every day since.”

Today, with three looms (two of which are PC-interfaced), Alderman makes her own patterns and plans new cloth by deciding how she wants it to look, handle, drape and feel, how thick or sheer she wants it to be and whether she wants it to be insulating or non-insulating. She also teaches others—in nearly every state of the United States and in Canada, England, Scotland and Wales—what she has learned and continues to learn. “The teaching reveals to me what it is people want to know and what they probably need to know,” says Alderman, who is not only the most prolific contributor to Handwoven magazine, but also the author of three books: “Handwoven, Tailormade,” “Handweaver’s Notebook,” and “Mastering Weave Structures,” which showcases fabrics that she designed and wove.

In Salt Lake City, Utah, where she has lived now for almost 37 years, she is known for her double-woven pieces—two layers of plain-weave cloth—that contain the colors that she sees in nature. During her frequent travels, including a recent trip to Bryce Canyon, she consults a pair of sewing thread color charts to create new color combinations. “I take notes on where I am, the colors that I’m seeing and sometimes make sketches to indicate relative amounts of each. I also note the time of the year and the time of day because the colors change dramatically depending on conditions of light and latitude.”

Alderman does mainly custom work, including reproduction fabrics, upholstery fabrics and art pieces. Her work has been shown in competitions and invitational exhibitions all over North America. In 1993, she was represented in the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington, D.C., and her work is in private, corporate, city, county, state and federal collections. She received the Utah Governor’s Award in the Arts in 1996 and just last year was named one of Utah’s “100 Most Honored Artists of Utah” by the Springville Museum of Art. She is the only artist among them that works with fiber.

The type of fiber Alderman is willing to work with sets her apart from most weavers. She has used her technical background to weave prototype fabrics for engineers who need examples to decide if an idea can be commercially produced. She’s woven fabric made of tiny nickel-plated carbon fibers with the tensile strength of one million pounds per square inch to be used to conduct electricity along the surface of specialized aircraft and racing yacht masts. She’s woven a stretchy metal alloy for butcher’s gloves and a slippery, transparent nylon monofilament for protective military uniforms and for heavy-duty parachutes. Alderman, likely the first to have woven these materials, says that these projects challenged her because she had to learn how to handle each new material and seek out compatible materials to complete the jobs.

“It was so much fun to figure out how to make happen what they wanted to have happen,” Alderman says of the work for her engineering clients. “The nice thing for them was that I understood their language so that they didn’t have to stop and explain what, say, shear strength or tensile strength meant.”

Her current project is reproducing a 1937 Wurlitzer grill cloth for a local man who buys and restores antique jukeboxes. “It’s going to require me to measure out something in the neighborhood of 1,200 threads to make a yard-wide fabric, which will accommodate two of these little jukeboxes.”

She says her favorite piece is always the one she’s working on at the moment, and the Wurlitzer is no exception. “It’s not that I don’t care about the ones that are done, but I’m most avidly interested in what’s right in front of me.”

On average she spends about 60 hours a week writing, weaving or teaching, and while her work is not highly profitable, she does manage to make a living.

“I’m very interested in what I’m doing and engaged in it, so that’s a significant reward,” she says. “If you love and are passionately engaged in what it is you’re doing everyday, your life is sort of like playing. That can be a very joyful way to be.”