I finally made it to Georgia... Hambidge!

Some days you can look at your travel adventures as a blessing or a curse. I choose blessing. Because otherwise midnight with hundreds of other tired travelers at Atlanta International would be a lot more difficult.

I finally made it to Hambidge this week for my artist residency here. I spent about 10 hours longer in the Atlanta airport than was desirable, but who needs sleep?

Hambidge is wonderful as such places are. It is a place devoted to artist residencies. They have 8-9 cabins in the woods and if you can get a spot, you can spend two to six weeks working in the north Georgia woods. I managed to score one of those spots this spring and am so happy to be here.

I have four different projects I want to work on while here and that may be a little ambitious. I'll give you a little run-down of what I may be working on.

Today I struggled with feeling stuck and so what did I do? Take a field trip to the nearest town with some possibility of a few supplies. The studio I'm in unexpectedly has a high wall and I want to see if I can do a full-size cartoon render for a commission I need to weave this year. The longest panel will be 14-15 feet long so I may not quite fit that one on the wall. I am finding that imagining the size of the forms in the design is difficult when the size difference is so huge. And this piece will be viewed from far away, but people will walk very close to the bottom part of it frequently. So it has to read well from a distance and up close. All that is to say that I scoured Clayton, GA for a roll of paper big enough for this cartoon and finally had to settle for brown painters paper. We'll see if it works.

The piece below is a small thing that will be in three stacked panels. I started it yesterday and today had to do some unweaving. These photos indicate the values of the yarns. I'm drastically short of yarns here--so used to having any color I want! But the top example in black and white indicates that the piece will not read well from any distance. The bottom two photos are the second try and are certainly better. I just used a black and white filter on my cell phone to take the value photos.

The little Hokett project below is also coming along. It is both green and brown here in Georgia. The tress are just starting to leaf out and there are many beautiful bushes that are starting to flower. But mostly it has rained buckets and feels quite gray. Perhaps the green piece is to cheer myself up because this is what I expected in Georgia in April.

If you don't hear from me, I'll be weaving!