Blog
I received the following message from Elaine this week via my website.
(See full post for message!)
I feel duty-bound to respond to this need, thus the following gallery. The dapple is Salsicha (Sal) and the cream is Beaumont (Beau). They are both miniature longhaired dachsunds. Sal has been “helping me” weave this week by stealing tubes of yarn and running away with them. Beau has been “helping me” by insisting he sit on my lap even when this is highly impractical.
As of today, the days start getting longer again. We’re at the darkest point of the year in the northern hemisphere. In my new home I can see the stars shining brightly most nights and it has been fascinating to watch their position each evening. Locating constellations was hard at first because there are so many visible stars, but of course as I re-learn where the winter constellations are, I can find them again.
The Milky Way turns a bit each night and before we know it the summer stars will be visible. But while the darkness of winter is upon us, being able to watch the sky rotate above me is a good reminder of the rhythm of the natural world and perhaps of our own lives.
Put things in boxes. Keep them from getting broken… they said.
Okay, that is what my brain said when I was packing. But let me tell you, when you take apart four different large looms with wooden parts and then put them in boxes that match the size/length of the parts instead of by loom, it can make it mighty difficult to find the parts when you want to put just one of those looms back together again on the other end! Sure, it was efficient in terms of packing and the number of long boxes I had, but not so great on this side of things.
Putting the rug loom back together with my dad…
The week before last I was back in Taos teaching at Mabel Dodge Luhan House. We had a lovely week of tapestry weaving with a group of alumni, most of whom come back every year.
This retreat focuses on the design questions of the participants. This year I added another component and some of us looked at how to make vertical forms or lines in tapestry. Some of the participants used these ideas in their tapestries or samples for tapestries.
Making vertical forms in tapestry weaving is a challenge because we’re working on a grid and all vertically-oriented shapes have to go against that grid to build upward. That means that tapestry has a very stepped appearance. This is the nature of this art form and in a lot of cases I encourage students to embrace that.
But most of the time we want to make a stable textile and so all the regular factors of technique and materials come into play when weaving vertically oriented forms. During the retreat we talked about using techniques like double weft interlock, various other joins, sewing slits, using slits to suggest vertical lines, and other means of making marks that read as vertical lines.
It seems like most of 2023 has been devoted to looking for a new place to live and at long last, moving. My hope is to feel all settled in by the end of the year and feel some stability again. Moving is a royal pain. Our realtor said it best. “Moving sucks no matter what.” But it will eventually be done and we have new views and ideas to embrace.
I am most interested to see how this new perspective influences my art-making. This place is rural and very quiet. It is near Mesa Verde National Park which is a dark skies park and the skies are indeed very dark. Sometimes the Milky Way is so bright I have difficulty picking out the constellations at all. I am grateful to have landed in such a beautiful place with such plentiful access to the outdoors and far fewer people than the Front Range of Colorado.
Some of you will be surprised that tapestry weavers weave a line at a time at all! There are reasons to weave this way and I spend a fair amount of my own weaving time using this method.
How do you know whether you should weave a shape at a time or line by line? There are reasons for both and the truth is that you’re probably going to use both methods depending on your design and the equipment you’re using.
This is the topic of the Tapestry Discovery Box which opened on October 15th. The box is a collaboration between myself and Gist Yarn. Gist produces a lovely tapestry yarn called Array and every quarter they’ll send you 7 new colors of this yarn chosen by me along with access to an online course which uses the yarns to address a few tapestry techniques.
Moving is no picnic. Granted, if I owned fewer things it would be easier at least physically. But beyond the packing and unpacking there is the reorientation. All the things I got used to over 9 years in Fort Collins have to be figured out in a new rural environment.
Every box that had space in it got filled with yarn. This seemed like a brilliant idea when I was packing, but when unpacking I’ve ended up with boxes of yarn used for packing which belongs in a handful of different places, all of which are already full of yarn. I opened the box containing the video head for my tripod when setting up for Change the Shed this week, and like all the other boxes, there was yarn inside. Look at that! Who puts an overdyed churro in with Shetland and what looks like a mini-skein of Highland plus there is a ball of Harrisville Koehler singles tucked in there as well? Yarn does make a good packing material and so far I’ve found nothing broken, so there is that.
Read on for puppy updates!
