Tapestry Weaving

How to start over without rewarping

How to start over without rewarping

Have you ever been several inches into a tapestry and had an overwhelming feeling that it just wasn’t working out? Maybe the colors are wrong or the forms just aren’t weaving well or you’ve chosen the wrong weft materials.

What do you do if you reach a point in a tapestry where you know you just have to start over?

On one of my recent pieces for the Pandemic Diaries series, I got about 3 inches into the weaving and realized I really hated what was happening with both the forms and the colors. I am weaving this piece as a way of cheering myself up at the end of a very long year and in the middle of a difficult election season in the USA. (WHY do our election “seasons” last so long? It feels like it has been an eon since this started.) To me, the piece is funny, though in a sarcastic, wry way, being a riff on the saying, “Going to hell in a handbasket.” The border of the tapestry is supposed to represent flames and though I did cartoon the forms I would weave I did not plan the colors beyond picking out a pile of warm colors and choosing them as I went. I hated the result.

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Reckoning with Myself: Part 2

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Reckoning with Myself: Part 2

“Reckoning with myself” is just my way of saying that I’m working on stuff. In Part 1 I was musing about space to work and a few tapestry designs I’m still working on. I still don’t have an answer about the big tapestries, but I can say that I spent a fun weekend enlarging the cartoon for one of them using my projector and a roll of paper my grandmother had labeled like this:

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Weaving in the wilderness (nearby)

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Weaving in the wilderness (nearby)

With the possibility of travel largely gone for the foreseeable future, exploring the places where we live seems like something to settle into. I’ve become more interested in details. In watching and understanding what is happening in my back yard. And in spending the time to watch what happens overnight on the trails I have loved for decades. I’ll keep weaving and spinning while outside and that will prompt me to weave more while I’m in my own studio.

It was so much fun, I might do it again!

It was so much fun, I might do it again!

I talked about the Hot Flash tapestry I was working on last month HERE. I have now finished it as those of you who are watching my YouTube broadcasts have seen. This tapestry surprised me. It was so much fun. I definitely giggled my way through it. It turns out that a silly subject, bright colors, and playing with a challenging technique makes for a lot of fun.

When last you saw it, it looked something like this.

Shifting sands and weaving together

Shifting sands and weaving together

I’ve been reading the writing of Amy Irvine lately. She lives in Utah and her experience of the four-corners region where she now lives and where I grew up is familiar on a deep level.

Perhaps my enjoyment of this writing and the memory it brings up is simple. Irvine’s writing about the shifting sands of Utah, particularly of places that I have hiked and camped, and in Desert Cabal, her imagined discussion with Edward Abbey and her thoughts on environmentalism, all place me back in my own memories of sand in my shoes. I haven’t left my house except for walks in the neighborhood in what seems like forever. My summer thru-hike has become mostly a dream, and I’m asking myself what it is I want my life to look like inside our new coronavirus reality and then in the future. Because I don’t think we as humans will get to the other side of this quite the same as we were before. And I’m not sure that is entirely a bad thing.

Being forced to observe the birds in my back yard closely instead of pretending I’m observing them while pushing through a 12-mile hike means that I have to slow down and see the magic that is right outside my very own office window. That seems like a good thing.

One day at a time...

One day at a time...

The world sure feels different.

I feel different. I am lucky that I have a job that I can continue to do and that gives some focus to my days, because I definitely feel distracted. I am generally able to focus on a project fairly consistently, but the last few weeks, I have struggled with sticking with pretty much anything.

I’m guessing some of you know what I’m talking about. So I’m just going to say it again, it is okay to be rudderless for a bit. I’ve been struggling particularly with what to weave in my daily Change the Shed broadcasts.*

This should not be hard for me. I have been teaching tapestry for almost a decade now, I have a personal artistic practice, and I have scores of ideas of what to weave. But still, nothing seems to have quite the interest that it did a few months ago. So maybe I’ll weave about that. Or maybe I’ll just weave back and forth with some handspun. The color changes are fun and it takes away the stress of making any decisions.