Rebecca Mezoff Blog — Rebecca Mezoff

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Weaving from the colors around me: the Mirrix Challenge 2022

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Weaving from the colors around me: the Mirrix Challenge 2022

This week I am leading the Mirrix Summer Weaving Challenge. You can find my challenge on Mirrix’s website HERE. Those of you who have taken my Summer of Tapestry course probably recognize this challenge because I used a similar idea as the beginning of that class.

In the Mirrix challenge, I encouraged you to go for a wander somewhere and to take some time to enjoy really looking at what is around you. When you find something that grabs your attention, focus on the colors of that object or place. You can see the rest of the suggested instructions in the challenge write-up.

I wanted to weave another tapestry for my own challenge response beyond the one I show as an example. This month I was able to go camping with my family for several days in southern Colorado. It had been raining a lot and there were mushrooms growing everywhere. It seemed like every day there were new ones we hadn’t seen before. My nieces are budding mycologists and they took us on mushroom hunts where we identified many of the mushrooms we found.

Dippers

Dippers

Driving down the Poudre Canyon on my way home from a backpacking trip this month, I wondered out loud what the word “Ouzel” meant as I passed a popular picnic area in the canyon. A few days later after posting the video below, someone told me. Water ouzel is the old name for American Dippers. These are fascinating birds that I had just spent a half hour watching on the hike out from a 3-day backpacking trip.

The first time I saw these birds was in 2020 in a stream perhaps 20 miles away from this month’s sighting. We were again backpacking along a branch of the Poudre River and noticed these small gray birds throwing themselves violently into rushing rapids again and again. They’d come up many feet from where they disappeared and astonishingly we concluded they must be swimming underwater.

Researching what we had seen when I got home, I realized they were American Dippers. As Cornell says at that link, they are the only truly aquatic songbird in North America.

We saw them again along another tributary to the Poudre that same year and then this year we found them on Fall Creek just above CSU Mountain Campus in Pingree Park. They are recognizable from their funny dipping dance that never seems to stop until they dive into the water. I took some video and you can see both the dance and the swimming.

Take a few minutes to watch these fascinating creatures play in this rushing stream.

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Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

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Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

Making circles is a tricky thing in tapestry weaving. To weave a circle we believe is round, you have to trick the eye or make it really big. Tapestry is woven on a grid and to make a form perfectly circular means you basically take a square and cut the corners off. If your tapestry is huge, then this illusion is not as hard to make, though it IS still quite difficult to make a perfectly round circle given fiber’s propensity to squish and move about.

If your circles are small, it is all the harder because you don’t have very many warps to convince us that what is a shape with steps is really round.

Relying on ritual: The Year of Rosie

Relying on ritual: The Year of Rosie

I definitely notice how much I rely on familiar rituals when things change in my life. Emily and I have been taking care of a little dog named Rosie for the last year. Her family went overseas on a research fellowship and they couldn’t take her along. We haven’t had a dog since Cassy died in 2013 and after taking care of her for a few days and being completely charmed by her adorableness, we agreed to take her for the year. She needed a house without other pets or kids and we definitely qualified.

Rosie’s family came home last weekend and she went home to them this week. It was so hard to let her go, but seeing her absolute overwhelming joy at seeing them again made it worth it. She was beside herself when she realized who was in front of her. I do wonder what dogs think when their lives change. She took a few months to really blossom with us but I hope she goes right back to her old life now that she is home again.