One world, many threads: Weaving project aims to bring a planet together

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

By ELIZABETH WENDT, Staff Writer, Marco Island Eagle

Terry Helwig is warm and outgoing, but when she talks she can give goosebumps.

Draped across the couch in her Marco Island condominium is a wide panel of weaving. It's lovely to look at, colorful and intricate; it would liven any room.

In some parts, its threads are knobby and knotty, made of mysterious materials. Other parts are smooth and flat, shiny ribbons and patterned strips of everyday fabrics.

Helwig can run her fingertips down the panel and tell where many of the threads originated.

It is then that the chills begin.

"Every thread has a story," she said. "Every thread is a person and a wish for the healing."

There is a strip of a silk World War II parachute, and a piece from a pair of antique lace gloves a favorite aunt wore to her wedding. A grieving parent added a ribbon that had been around the neck of a stuffed animal once loved by their lost child.

"For me, it's just such a blessing to be a keeper of this," she said, "because I get to hear all the stories."

Helwig is the founder of The Thread Project, which invites people from around the world to send a thread — one with personal meaning, or one simply to show their support — that will then be woven into a 5 1/2-foot panel.

The first panel was completed in December in a weaving ceremony in Atlanta, and the next is slated to be finished by the end of February.

"People have been so excited about it," Helwig said. "They take it back and start it in their community."

The idea of a weaving project occurred to her on a trip to New York City a year before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She promptly dismissed the thought, unsure how to make it happen. After the attacks, however, Helwig resurrected the idea.

More than before, there was a need for the kind of project she was imagining, she decided.

Helwig went to work, asking friends to donate thread and to ask others to do the same. She wrote about the fledgling project for an international textile magazine, and a women's magazine. More and more threads started arriving, and Helwig found professional weavers willing to donate their efforts.

Judith Krone, a professional weaver who lives in Tucker, Ga., wove the first few inches of the first panel. Over three days, about 30 other women also helped to weave it, including Helwig.

It was an experience unlike any other, Krone said, overwhelming and magical.

"To watch all of those colors sort of web and ebb and flow in this design," she said, "there was a divine plan in it that we had nothing to do with."

Something about the project appeals to people, Helwig said.

Maybe it is the symbolism of the product, she said, the way the threads, wrapped together and tightly tied, can seem like clasped hands.

"I think people are seeing it as a way to connect to one another," Helwig said.

She plans to continue the project for five years or 49 panels, whichever comes first.

Where the weaving will ultimately be displayed, Helwig doesn't know. Her pick would be in the United Nations or at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., someplace where plenty of people can see it, she said.

For now, Helwig holds not just the weaving that binds all these threads, but the stories as well. When people send her the pieces they wish to add to the project, they often include letters of what their contribution means.

Helwig keeps the letters together in a binder, each protected in plastic.

They are family and personal histories. In one, a mother included a scrap from the native garment worn by the daughter she adopted from Vietnam in 1973; another note is from a granddaughter, who sent a piece from the blanket her Polish grandfather carried with him when he immigrated to the United States.

Each tale is different, but almost all end the same, with a thank-you from the writer.

"This is about diversity, unity through diversity, that's how I see it," Helwig said. "It's about hope materializing."