A good day

Today is a good day.  First, my friend Sue gave me a dozen guinea eggs.  They are beautiful and I can eat them.  Second, I'm going to eat leftover spring rolls for dinner that my girlfriend made me when she visited last week... they're good and I continue to be impressed that she could make food like this which seems difficult to me, the culinary-impaired one.  

And third, I got a call from Weaving Southwest today saying that they sold one of my pieces.  The piece was called This Time I Dance (it was the second one in the series)... a piece I wove when thinking about how important weaving was to me and was starting to find some determination toward dancing my way through life instead of slogging through it and wishing I could be doing something I loved every day.  It was bought by a dancer.   I hope she loves it and remembers to keep dancing.  First piece ever sold in a gallery...  I'm kinda thrilled.

Piedra Lumbre

I grew up in New Mexico, and have spent many happy years since leaving for college living there and visiting. I now live just north of the Colorado border near Blanca, CO, but the red rocks and the blue skies of New Mexico call me back over and over. Last week I made a trip to Ghost Ranch--a place of many happy childhood memories. Now I go there to hang weaving, mostly through Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center. The Piedra Lumbre (the name for the area around Ghost Ranch which means valley of shining stone) is most certainly one of the most stunning places I have ever had the privelege of spending time. It is really indescribable--the blue sky, multiple colors of red and yellow rocks, the blue reservoir, the sagebrush, Georga O'Keefe's famous Pedernal mountain... and then there is Ghost Ranch, that oasis of green alfalfa and friendly people. Anyway, I went to Ghost Ranch's Piedra Lumbre center to hang a new set of weavings there. One of them was my newest piece, This Time I Dance II. The new piece was a further exploration of ideas from This Time I Dance (see prior post) and used the same colorways.

In my experience, when hanging weaving shows in New Mexico, the weavings all get laid on the floor as they are chosen to put on the walls. This is always difficult for me. After all, I spent many hours making that piece of art which is now in danger of being stepped on and is undoubtedly picking up fuzz and dirt from the old carpet it is lying on. But my friend Conni (www.corneliatheimer.com) convinced me to take a deep breath and let it go, and indeed, the show was hung without incident. If you visit the show (it hangs from now until July 6th), you'll notice the wide variety of art hanging there. They are not pieces I would probably group together, but it is an interesting representation of work being done in northern New Mexico fiber arts. So if you're going through northern NM any time soon, stop and visit. Ghost Ranch is always worth the time, and the weaving shows there are always something to see.

A new way of journaling...

This is my first foray into blogging. It has not been a process that intersted me in the past as I do my journaling on paper with a fountain pen. But a smart woman convinced me that it would be a good addition to my website and a great place to explain in an informal way my weaving process. So here I go!

This week I mailed the last piece I finished (titled This Time I Dance) to a friend who purchased it in Denver. It is always a little sad to see a piece go (especially because this one just came off my loom a couple weeks ago and I like to have a new piece hanging in my studio a little longer to push me along), but it is good to know that it is appreciated by a friend. After all the work of designing the piece, dyeing the yarn (which for this piece was a lengthy process of about 50 colors), weaving the piece, finishing it, photographing it, and looking at it on the studio wall for awhile, putting it in a box and relinquishing it to a postal employee seems a little shocking. But we have to let our art go so it can find its own way in the world and so that we artists can move on and create something new.