Blog
I’m teaching in Taos this week at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. This is a group of alumni to my retreats and most have been to Taos before. We have become a great group of friends over the years and it is a marvelous way to share about tapestry weaving, coming together in a beautiful and quiet setting. There is a fire going in the house at all times, the food is beyond marvelous, and the thick adobe walls ensure quiet rest.
THE LIFE OF A FIBER ARTS TEACHER
As most of us return to teaching workshops in person, I’ve seen several musings on some of my colleagues’ blogs about their feelings and experiences of going back to teaching post-covid, not that I believe we are actually “post-covid”! I have been reticent to return to classrooms full of people due to health concerns, but this October the covid numbers were low, I was able to get the omicron booster, and it was time to face my fears and return to the classroom.
It turned out beautifully. Spin Off Autumn Retreat (SOAR) was a wonderful conference. I wrote about it last week including a run-in with a 12-foot skeleton and some beautiful fall weather in Wisconsin. This week I’ve been thinking more about returning to teaching in person as I’m preparing to teach a retreat I run myself in Taos, NM.*
Last week I had the joy of teaching at SOAR. That stands for Spin Off Autumn Retreat. This is a small conference that has been running for something like 30 years albeit with a hiatus during one of the times Interweave had been sold to another company. Spin Off magazine is now owned by Longthread Media. One of the co-owners is Linda Ligon who is the person who started Interweave magazine (soon to become Handwoven) in the 70s. Linda was there along with mastermind Anne Merrow and they pulled off a beautiful event (along with Spin Off editor Kate Larson and a fantastic team of organizers).
There might not be anything better than turning a really dirty fleece into a white fluffy cloud of fiber. It never crossed my mind when I became interested in spinning that I’d actually purchase raw fleece. That is until I met Maggie Casey. I learned to spin from her in her shop in Boulder and she loves using fleece so she teaches her students to use fleece as a fiber source. Of course I still learned to spin using roving and top and whatever other commercially prepared fiber is available, but getting your hands into actual fleece sure taught me a lot about the material I weave my tapestries with: wool.
It only takes one time of seeing that pile of often grubby, sticky fiber turn into a fluffy cloud of curls and crimp to get you hooked. Apparently Maggie knew this when she brought fleece to her spinning classes at Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins.
I took a trip to New Mexico on the spur of the moment last weekend. It is unusual for me to decide to take a trip that involves 6-7 hours of driving each way at the last minute, but the stars aligned, and off we went. We had some friends who we wanted to see who were there visiting from Europe and the first weekend of October is Taos Wool Festival weekend. Yes, I know that this festival left Taos and was held in Santa Fe. I didn’t go to the renamed Mountain and Valley Wool Festival partly in disappointment at it leaving Taos, but also because I was tired of driving and didn’t want to go all the way to Santa Fe when Taos was so beautiful.
Instead, I haunted Taos Wool’s pop-up shop and gallery show. One of the highlights of the weekend for me was hearing Connie Taylor speak about churro sheep, wool, and uses for their fleece. Connie is someone I met in 2005 when I was a student at Northern New Mexico Community College in the fibers department. At that time she had a big flock of churro sheep and was making 14 different colors of natural wool. (That fact still astounds me, but I saw it for myself and know it to be true.) I purchased her wool for my saltillo project. In Taos, she had her shade card with her, pictured below, along with a wide range of natural churro yarns.
Missy Graff Ballone’s new book, Wellness for Makers: A Movement Guide for Artists is a book I’ve been waiting awhile for. It is finally out from Schiffer Publishing.
Many of you know I worked as an occupational therapist for 17 years in a wide variety of settings including adult inpatient and outpatient rehab, work rehab/pain clinic, SNF, home health, and I worked for many years in pediatrics in outpatient and schools. Ergonomics was not my specialty, but any OT has to know quite a bit about how to to adapt environments and habits for health and to adapt after injury or disease.
I hear many stories on social media about weavers who give up weaving because they have too much pain with the practice. I think a lot of times that is because they do not know how to adapt their practice and equipment for pain-free use as well as long-term health. It is sad when people give up activities they love because they think they’re too old or have too much pain due to other factors than age rather than learn to adapt the way they approach that activity so they can keep engaging in it. Before you give up weaving, please get a referral to an occupational therapist who can help you figure out ways to continue!
For many years when I first started weaving tapestry I used the yarn that my teacher used. After all, it was a great yarn, dyed well, and I was able to get most of the effects I wanted in my work using it.
When I started teaching tapestry, I began experimenting with other tapestry yarns and then with some yarns that are not specifically designed for tapestry weaving. It became a bit of an obsession and over the years of teaching tapestry weaving, I’ve collected and used something like 30 different yarns. Some were difficult and not suited to tapestry and I’ll never use them again for weaving. Others were yarns I loved because they suited the effects I wanted to achieve in my work.
I have a small set of favorites that I use myself, but there are many yarns made in the world that can be used for tapestry weaving. The question is, how do you know which ones those are?
If you’ve taken any of my online classes, you probably have some version of my Yarn Sources handout. As my list of yarns got longer and longer, I realized I might have a problem. I like to collect things and yarn is one of those things. In the name of research I have more tapestry yarns than I can possibly ever use. But the upside of that is that my students get to benefit from my hoarding collecting nature.
