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Happy Holidays. Wishing all of you peace and new adventures for 2019.
The video below is a time lapse of this year’s holiday weaving. The idea came from the twinkle lights that I stapled under the latilla on our back porch. The bright mass of lights is cheering to me during this dark time of year. Solstice is tomorrow and the sun will return.
When I was a kid, my father had an ongoing joke every. single. year. He threatened to paint a Christmas tree on a white window shade* To decorate the tree, all you had to do was grasp the bar at the bottom of the shade firmly and pull down. At the end of the season, grasp the same bar, give a sharp downward tug and let go and the shade would roll up.
Needless to say neither me or my sister thought this was funny. And every year Dad stuck a real tree in a stand. In later years they were trees in pots from the nursery which were planted after Christmas in the back yard and all died about two months later.
Maybe this suggestion that real trees were a lot of work when brought inside the house has stuck with me. Or maybe I’m just fundamentally lazy. But a real tree has not found its way inside my house since I left home.**
I’ve done various holiday tapestry projects over the years. And I’m not nearly done with this year’s holiday messing-about. In fact I’ve hardly gotten started. I have two holiday-themed four selvedge tapestries in the works and another wild idea for a decoration using four selvedge tapestry which came from Sarah Swett’s tapestry bracelets. But I wanted to share the links from past holidays just in case you are anything like me and wanted to join in the fun but just never found the time.
In 2017 I decided to experiment with weaving with sock yarn. A whole fleet of little holiday trees emerged. There was an instruction sheet that went along with this post and you can still download it.
Bootsy is a penguin. She has a friend who is aptly named Penguin. They are the heroines of a (slightly modified) book distributed by Chick-fil-A called Penguin in Love, written by Salina Yoon.*
This little board book was given to Emily and I for our anniversary last summer by good friends. Surprisingly, there were only two pronouns that had to be changed in the whole book to make all characters female. The story features two penguins, Bootsy and Penguin who were both missing their yarn. They set off to find their it, knitting for warmth until inclement weather separates them. The story does not address the apparent paradox that they set off on a journey to find their missing yarn but had enough yarn to knit and keep warm. They both keep knitting while floating on ice floes and climbing snowy mountains and eventually they knit themselves back together.
As part of my tapestry diary, I wove a sketch inspired by Bootsy.** I think there may be two more little tapestries in the Penguin series.
