Setting off on an Adventure

On Monday, my husband and I are leaving for a sabbatical semester in Interlaken, Switzerland. We'll be gone til early December. On the way to Interlaken we are traveling for 3 weeks, including a stop in Stirling to see the Unicorn Tapestries being woven, and to attend the British Tapestry Group's Conference.

I have a new blog for travel related stories, The Path and the Puddle. I hope to keep up with this blog too. After all, there will be tapestry stories while we're away. I am taking a couple of frame looms with me. I'm still hoping to finish that Chaotic Fragments tapestry before we leave, wish me luck!

Tangled Wefts

Usually when I photograph my tapestries in progress, I get all the wefts out of the way so I can see the actual tapestry.

Here's the reality: this is what it looks like while I'm working on it.

As you can see I have MANY wefts, and in fact, something about the combination of using bobbins and the little shelf on this loom seems to encourage terrible tangling.

I made a lot of progress yesterday, but today, none at all, since I was driving to Cape Cod to see my Mom at the nursing home. We had fun looking at photos of her new great grand-daughter, Ruby, on Facebook.

I have finished the hardest parts of this tapestry and the rest should be relatively easy, so hopefully I can finish up in a few days.

Racing the Clock

Here I am, struggling to meet a deadline again. I really want to be able to enter this piece in a show with a November deadline, and it's not a large piece, about 12x12." So you would not think there's a problem. However, we're leaving on August 24 for a sabbatical in Europe, and won't be home again until December. So, I have about 2 weeks to finish it, but of course, there is a lot of other stuff to do to prepare for our trip. Leaving home for 3 1/2 months is complicated.

I have marked on my calendar every day when I think I could possibly get into the studio, and if I weave 1/2 inch each of those days, I'll make it. Although it's not large, it's finely woven, and fairly complex, so there is a certain amount of unweaving (to see the photo larger, just click on it). In fact yesterday, I ended up unweaving most of what I had woven.

This is the third in the Chaotic Fragments Series, and I posted about it here on June 9th.

Anyway, I thought if I wrote about it on the blog, it would give me even more incentive to finish, since if I don't, I'll have to confess to all of you!