Rebecca Mezoff Blog — Rebecca Mezoff

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Wishes, self-care, and a new year

Wishes, self-care, and a new year

Intention setting for the new year is a healthy practice. In my own life I am working to increase the amount of time I spend in a special kind of self-care. Making art is something that feeds the core of who I am and makes me a better person. Finding time to create something every day is the trick in a busy life and for the coming year it is at the top of my list of private intentions.

The short video below talks about setting intentions around tapestry weaving for the coming year. I am not going to tell you to put it on your calendar (though that might be helpful for some of you) or to beat yourself up if you don't touch your art supplies/weaving tools for a month. What I am going to tell you is to consider making an intention for the new year around taking care of yourself in this special way. As humans we are creative beings, so please make sure to make time as often as you can to let your creativity fly. 

Running a small business while having an art practice: fun or folly?

Running a small business while having an art practice: fun or folly?

I started this new phase of my life which I like to call Full Time Tapestry Person almost four years ago now. Before that I was mostly Part Time Tapestry Artist and Whatever I do to Pay the Bills Person.

Of course once I quit that job with the benefit of a paycheck every two weeks and health insurance*, I had to figure out how to pay all the bills with income from something related to tapestry. Because no matter how crazy-pants it sounds, I was determined to focus all my time on tapestry.

Fortunately for me, I love teaching. Therapists, at least the good ones, are natural teachers. And before I became an occupational therapist, I got an undergraduate degree in music focusing on piano pedagogy. I wrote a preschool piano method as my undergraduate thesis and ran my own piano studio to help pay for graduate school. I suppose that was my first business.

I realized I loved teaching and so it was fairly obvious that I could try to support myself by teaching tapestry. After all, many sorts of fiber people make a living by teaching their craft. Workshops, conferences, private students: they all help keep the lights on.

The thing is, I'm an introvert.

Holiday weaving!

Holiday weaving!

I have seen some wonderful holiday projects this year. Thank you to everyone for participating in this holiday challenge. You can still get the instructions in THIS blog post if you have some holiday time to weave your own project. If you use social media, tag it with #holidaytapestry17. Email me your photo and I'll add it to this post. 

It is really fun to see the variety of weavings happening even with the same subject. Different yarns, different approaches, different weavers all mean the results vary widely. Isn't that reassuring for art-making? Your particular talents will result in something different from everyone else on the planet (it is true of life too I think).

Below is an example of the real reason I do these weave-alongs. I get to see the wonderful things people make, and sometimes people tell me what they were thinking and what materials they used.

A holiday obsession

A holiday obsession

I have a little holiday obsession going. I've been doing this for years now. One year I knitted endless elf stockings. And one of these years they're coming back. But this year it is still these little trees which sit on wine corks.

I'm not entirely sure where this comes from or why I haven't been able to stop. I only do this at Christmas time but I just keep knitting them even though Emily gives them away any chance she gets and really who needs this many little trees? I might need an intervention. I think somewhere in my head I think I'm going to make a whole forest. Hopefully I'm not ignoring the real forest outside my door.

Continuous warping for tapestry: the Mirrix example

Continuous warping for tapestry: the Mirrix example

I've been teaching people to warp a Mirrix and other pipe-like looms with a continuous warp for years now. There are people who immediately understand how it works and don't have a problem with the pattern the warp must follow as you warp. There are other people who struggle with this a lot.

I believe this stems from a particular spatial ability some of us have and some of us don't. (Don't worry, if this isn't your skill, you can still learn to warp a loom. You undoubtedly have many skills the rest of us don't.) I have particularly good spatial abilities. In fact I'd say that my memory is very spatially oriented. I am especially good at remembering places and paths. I hiked the 500-mile Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango in 2003 and can still tell you details about all parts of the trail just by positioning myself there in my memory. When I have re-hiked hundreds of miles of the trail recently, I realized my memory from 2003 was quite accurate. But I most likely can't tell you the plot of a movie or TV show I watched last week and I'll never be able to tell you the name of the actors. I remember books that put me someplace in my imagination and I won't remember much about a book that doesn't--even if I really enjoyed reading it... unless I hold the book in my hands again and can somehow dredge up the sensory experience of the place I was while reading it or can flip through it as an object and see comments I wrote in it.

When it comes to warping, I think this ability to imagine things in space is very helpful. But there are many people who don't have this sort of brain.

What do you need to get started with tapestry weaving?

What do you need to get started with tapestry weaving?

I get a lot of pretty great email, but this one really made me smile. 

" My 10-year-old grandson was given a loom for Christmas last year and there it stood on the piano as they couldn't fathom how a large ball of wool was supposed to go through narrow slots...."

It goes on from there. In this post I talk about what you need to get started with tapestry weaving. And it isn't much!