Tapestry workshop

Yarn adventures in Tacoma: teaching, Clara Parkes, and all the other bright stars here...

Yarn adventures in Tacoma: teaching, Clara Parkes, and all the other bright stars here...

I was thrilled to be able to teach at the first annual Red Alder Fiber Arts Retreat in Tacoma last week. I had a great time and thought you, dear reader, might like to see what happened at this conference.

I’ll start with the workshops I taught. The students were so much fun. I am not sure if this is a Pacific Northwest thing or if this particular show (which was Madrona until this year) just brings in people who are easy-going and eager to learn, but my classes were full of such bright souls. I taught Is Tapestry for Me? which was a 2-day beginning tapestry class. And I taught a one-day color class where we played with optical mixing.

Tapestry retreat: Vermont 2019

Tapestry retreat: Vermont 2019

My Vermont retreat is always a time full of exploration, good food, and the sense of camaraderie that comes with people staying in the same big house for 5 days. This year was no exception and I enjoyed the five days with another exceptional group of people immensely.

The retreat was about color use in tapestry weaving. This is a huge topic so of course we only scratched at it a bit in the course of 5 days. But many great questions were asked and we played with many potential answers.

I like to start these color retreats by having people look at value. It is one of the most important concepts in design and I find that people disregard it so easily.

A conference, a cafeteria, and a lot of humidity... Indy.

A conference, a cafeteria, and a lot of humidity... Indy.

I just got home from Midwest Weaver's Conference which was at Butler University in Indianapolis this year. I have not taught at MWC before but found that it is one of the teacher's favorites. And for good reason. The students were bright, motivated, and self-starters.

(Spoiler alert for ANWG* students next week!) The pre-conference class I taught was Predicting the Unpredictable: Color in Tapestry. This is my color theory class and we start out talking about value. Value is the relative lightness/darkness of a hue when compared to the grayscale. It is incredibly important in art design and I find that many weavers don't understand it well at all. So one of the first things we do is rearrange the yarn table by value. This has an added benefit for me: I don't have to organize the yarn when I pull it out of the suitcase.