Weaving a Castle

While we were in Switzerland, Kim made me a lovely frame loom, so I could weave a tapestry for Enchanted Pathways, ATA’s upcoming small tapestry unjuried exhibit.  It will be at the William and Joseph Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, July 10 - 31, 2010, during Convergence.

After I finished weaving my entry, “Mille Fleurs Minus 978,” I had the whole back side of the loom left, and really did not want to waste all that warp, so started weaving a tapestry from a photo I had taken.

This is the photo. It’s taken at the top of Castelgrande in Bellinzona, in the Swiss canton of Ticino, near the Italian border.

We were walking along the street and saw a huge rock down an narrow alley. Inside the rock was an elevator, which took us to the top of the rock, which has an ancient castle on it. What an amazing surprise!

Now I have to finish it so I can cut off Mille Fleurs Minus 978 in time to mail it to New Mexico in a few weeks.

I remember the musical “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown,” in which my daughter played the role of Schroeder, and her pal Cait played Charlie Brown, who sings a song about a book report:

 

“I work best under pressure,
And there'll be lots of pressure
If I wait till tomorrow…”

That’s me……here I am in a hurry again!

Weaving the Days

I am really excited about weaving the Tapestry Diary that I described in the last post.  Every day I can’t wait to get into the studio and do my shape of the day, but I try to wait until I have a few hours free.

That’s because after I’m done with the daily entry, which only takes 5 or 10 minutes, I always feel like weaving some more. In this photo you can see an area where I wove 3 days simultaneously, because they have to be interconnected. I wove that section over 3 days, but the middle day (red and white stripes) is formed by hatching the red with the white.

On January 10 I sat down and casually wove a plain, solid colored parallelogram without thinking of the date.

The next day I realized that January 10 is my daughter’s birthday, but since she was far away on vacation, we were not celebrating until the next week.

So I unwove (Penelope-ed) it, and rewove it with her name. I am experimenting with fun ways of weaving text so I hope it’s readable.

On January 20 I had the first meeting of my new tapestry class. This is also the first time I have held a class in my own studio, so after class I did a “loom tour,” and when I explained the Tapestry Diary, one student asked what I intended to include to remember them, my new students! So I wove the letter T for tapestry, and the number 1.

Here’s what it looks like after 3 weeks. January 1st is on the bottom left. Then right above it is January 8. Each row is a week. I have a different color scheme for each month, and February will be pretty dismal looking, in keeping with the month itself.

Meanwhile I’m trying to finish up a bunch of UFOs…UnFinished Objects. Maybe this time I’ll actually make some progress……?

Happy Tapestry New Year

It’s been very snowy the past week, and since our daughter Zoe, and her husband Jason were visiting from California, I’ve hardly been out of the house. 

There were cookies of course, including the Mint Chocolate Chip Cookies featured on Zoe and Jason’s “Milk and Cookies” blog. YUM! Also muffins.

Also, our traditional Canasta tournaments but this time, alas, I was NOT the Master of the Universe.

Inspired by Tommye Scanlin, I had decided to begin a Tapestry Diary for 2010.

The loom I wanted to use was occupied by a less than half finished tapestry, the 4th in the Chaotic Fragments series. So I knew I would have to finish it and put a new warp on the loom by January 1.

Chaotic Fragments Part 4 is about 9x9”. For some reason I decided not to include my signature (a triangle representing a capital A) in the tapestry, because there didn’t seem to be a good place for it. So instead, I wove it into the border, upside down so it will be right side up after it’s hemmed. As long as I was at it, I thought, why not weave the year too? Brilliant idea, except now I realize I should have waited until the end. Kind of embarrassing to have 08 on it, when I didn’t finish it until  2010!

What with all my Canasta responsibilities I didn’t finish the tapestry until January 1. I hate showing a tapestry before it’s been in an exhibit, but I’m so happy it’s done that I can’t resist. Here it is, but not hemmed yet. 

I actually got the new warp mostly onto the loom the same day.

On January 2 we drove to Cape Cod for my Mom’s Memorial Service. Mom passed away in September and we had planned this so that her grandkids and other far flung family could attend. It was a beautiful ceremony and so very healing. I loved one thing that the minister said, that the loss is never more important than the gift. So true. We realized today that yesterday’s date was a palindrome! 01 02 2010! Mom would have loved that.

So today, January 3, was the first time I had a chance to finish preparing the new warp and start weaving the tapestry diary.  

My plan is to weave a parallelogram every day, about 2 inches wide and 1 inch high. I got into weaving this shape years ago, because it’s essentially a lazy line with color changes. I have woven a couple of tapestry exercises like this.

There will be 7 across, so every inch will be a week. Every month will have a color theme. On the first day of the month I will weave a stylized letter to indicate the month, for example J for January, seen here on the left side of the tapestry.

If I miss a day, I’ll just weave it the next day. I had not intended to include any imagery, but then I decided I had to include something special in the January 2nd entry, to note my Mom’s Memorial Service. So I wove the letter M for her name, Marian. 

For January 3, I wove a silver wing because both of my daughters were flying away on airplanes; one home to California, and the other to Florida for a vacation.

Since most days are uneventful, then most entries will be much simpler, and all will be woven from my large bag of left-over wefts.

Knowing me, I could spend a lot of time agonizing over the exact colors! I’m really excited about this project.  Happy New Year!

Mille Fleurs Minus 978

Once we were settled in the house in Switzerland, we looked around for some hand tools, and found a hardware store, then bought a nice piece of wood. Kim spent a few hours making me a very simple frame loom, 24” x 15”, just the size I wanted to weave a 9x9” tapestry for the upcoming “Enchanted Pathways” small format unjuried exhibition.

The nice thing about using a kitchen fork to beat in the weft is that you can always find one. The forks in this house are nice and heavy with good sharp tines.

Inspired by the Unicorn tapestries at Stirling Castle, I decided to weave a mini-Mille Fleurs tapestry. As it happens, there was a brochure at the house about the Alpine Wildflower Garden at Schynege Platte, so I used it as a reference for my design.

Unfortunately the gardens had closed the week before, so many of these are flowers I have not seen in real life, only in photos.

Note to self: next time I make a cartoon for a representational tapestry, I should make it WEAVABLE! I am used to taking an old drawing or painting and just weaving it however I can.

For these wildflowers, some were just not possible to weave the way I’d drawn them, on the number of warps I had (9 per inch). So I ended up inventing, and using a lot of trial and error and lots of unweaving (or Penelope-ing as we tapestrists call it). The Silver Thistle was the hardest because the petals radiate all the way around the center.

I used one strand of the Weaving Southwest yarn, with Paternayan, Appleton, and Ymmy yarn (my Irish friend Edith sent me some as a gift). I like how hairy the WS yarn is, and slightly uneven too, like handspun.

The exhibit will open next summer in New Mexico, and I prefer to let people see it for the first time in the exhibit. So I am only showing a detail here, not the whole piece.

Enchanted Pathways, William and Joseph Gallery, Santa Fe, NM, July 17 - 29, 2010.

The Burgundian Booty - NOT

Before coming to Switerland I asked around, but nobody mentioned tapestries in Bern, the Swiss capital. At the British Tapestry Group conference, I first heard about the Burgundian Booty in a  lecture by Dina Ward. 

These tapestries were left behind by Charles the Bold (also known at Charles the Rash), last Duke of Burgundy, along with a heap of other valuables when he fled for his life, after his defeat by the Swiss in Grandson in 1476. Just before the battle, Charles had ordered the execution of 412 Swiss men, and when the victorious army came upon the scene, this atrocity united them as never before. They went on to annihilate his army, one of the most feared in Europe, 4 months later in the Battle of Murten.

The Burgundian Booty is still displayed at various museums in Switzerland. 

The two places I had been advised to visit in Switzerland were the Basel Historical Museum, where the main tapestry gallery turned out to be closed due to renovations, and the Abegg Foundation, which is closed completely for renovation. Wouldn’t you know, when I arrived at the Bern Historical Museum, expecting to see the Burgundian Booty, I found out that this exhibit was also closed!  In this case, it’s not because of renovation, but because some of the tapestries are on loan, some at the Getty in LA, and the oldest known Mille Fleurs on loan in Bruges and Vienna for an exhibit on Charles the Bold, he who lost them in battle. (For the Mille Fleurs, click on the link then scroll down the page)

With typical Swiss understatement the receptionist said, “there is one tapestry downstairs...."

Well, that one tapestry turned out to be a series of 4, each about 12 feet long, "Leben und Tod des heiligen Vinzenz." 1515.  (The Life and Death of Saint Vincent).

These are spectacular! They are hung so closely together, it could be one very long tapestry. So masterfully woven, colors still bright, some of the best faces I've seen in tapestry, and just loaded with hachures defining such lifelike folds in the robes.

They hang all in a row as one long narrative of the life of St. Vincent and his gory martyrdom. The topic is a bit disturbing, lots of stabbling and the like.

Each tapestry has a red border with beautiful gothic lettering, in Latin. In the catalog, the latin phrases are written, and translated into German.

Google translate was not helpful, neither was an online Latin to English translation tool. I believe the words tell the story, because in scene 9, where we see Saint Vincent being disemboweled, these words appear:  “burning, fiery , penetrate, wound, death.” OK, not the cheeriest story….reminds me of the book I used to check out of the library when I was about 9, called “Sixty Saints and How they Died.”

Here’s an example of Google’s translation of Scene 11: “sin as a rapper corpel preserves.”  Hmmmm……they really need to work on their German.

I bought the reasonably priced catalog, but since it's in German I've been sitting with my dictionary for hours, and never could find any information about where the tapestries were woven. Finally on a remote corner of the museum's website, after about 17 Google searches, I found a statement that mentioned they were woven in Brussels.  If this is what tapestries from Brussels look like, I can’t wait to see more!

I was also able to discern that the tapestries were woven specifically for the Bern Munster, which was dedicated to St. Vincent of Saragossa.

These tapestries were hung on panels just behind the choir seats.

I was allowed to take photos, but with flash not allowed, and the lights so low… I apologize for the lousy quality, and hope you can get an idea of what they are like.  Don’t forget you can click on them to see the full sized images.

And what about the infamous Burgundian Booty? At least I got some postcards!

Four of the tapestries picture scenes with captions in French from the Story of Caesar.

They were woven in Tournai, about 1470, and are said to have belonged to Louis of Luxembourg, Count of Saint Pol, who was put to death as a traitor in Paris in 1475.

I found this information in the book "Tapestries; Their Origin, History And Renaissance", by George Leland Hunter, which is available in full text online.

 

Catalog Information: 

Leben und Tod des heiligen Vinzenz: Vier Chorbehange von 1515 aus dem Berner Munster, authors Anna Rapp Buri and Monica Stucky-Schurer.

There are copies available through www.abebooks.com, from European booksellers; not sure if they would ship to USA.