Not Much Weaving

Well life has been keeping me away from the studio lately. First it was the Flood, then surgery, now I’m dealing with house painters and an elderly cat who suddenly went blind. She started bumping into the wall, and acting lost. Here she is a few years ago, when her eyes could still react to light. Now they are always dilated, and the vet confirmed today that her retinas have detached. Poor kitty. She’s learning how to find her way around; at least she can find her litter box and food dish, and this morning she made it down the stairs, although very slowly and carefully.

It seems  like once there’s an interruption in my weaving, I easily get out of the habit, and it’s hard to get back into it. Thank goodness for my tapestry diary, at least I’ve managed to do that almost every day. If I miss a day, I just do it the next day. For some reason, my parallelograms for the month of April have turned out much TALLER than previous months! There are stitches on April 6, then 3 days of bruises! Most of the days are just whatever pattern I felt like playing with that day. On the upper  left you can see a day that says TWiNE, although it’s not very easy to read. That was last Wednesday when I gave a Powerpoint lecture and slideshow at the TWiNE meeting (Tapestry Weavers in New England). It was my first Powerpoint ever and I had a blast putting it together. The title was “Northern European Tapestry Adventures.”

After my last  post, I looked at the photo of my tapestry in progress, “On the Edge of Chaos,” and realized I was unhappy with a few things. So the next day I did some unweaving (or Penelope-ing). It was mostly the right side where the word “of” was in progress. I’m much happier with it now.

That’s a lesson; sometimes you can see errors in a photo that you just don’t notice otherwise.

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What’s Going On?

It’s been a very eventful few weeks. Rhode Island had 17 inches of rain in March, 9 of it in 36 hours last week. The flooding has been called catastrophic. 

All the rivers overflowed, houses and businesses underwater, the sewer treatment plant was flooded, the 2 major suburban malls were flooded (one of them employed 4,000 people, who are now unemployed) and the major highway was closed, as were many secondary roads and bridges.

Here’s a good slideshow.

We are fine, because we have underground rivers running through our basement all the time, so we have french drains and sump pumps. But it was very stressful, and it’s sad to see so many people’s lives ruined in one way or another. One photo is out the kitchen window at the water flowing past, about 12 inches from our foundation. The other is in the backyard. Fortunately we live on a hill, so the water flows instead of just collecting.

This week brought another kind of excitement. I had a small basal cell carcinoma removed from right next to my nose. It’s the slowest growing form of skin cancer, so no worries, but I ended up with more stitches than I expected, and now I’m all swollen and bruised. I walked to the library today, in my disguise.

What have I been doing in my studio? Well I’m still working on my tapestry diary every day. I highly recommend this experience, I am learning so much, and it’s very un-stressful since I have very few expectations. I get to try out something new every day. I learned a new way to weave raindrops last week.

Sometimes I just weave a plain parallelogram if that’s how I feel. This shows the tail end of February (note polka dots for the last day of every month), then all of March and the first week of April. I wove stitches for Tuesday, and purple bruises on a green background for Wednesday. The heart is for our 33rd wedding anniversary. I have also been working on my latest Chaos tapestry, which I noticed, from an old entry in this blog, I started a year ago. YIKES! I’d better get on with it. The title of this one is “On the Edge of Chaos,” which is what it will say at the top, but right now you can only see the bottom which says “Chaos on the Edge.”  

It’s circular. On the Edge of Chaos on the edge of chaos on the edge. I hope it’s not as crooked as it  looks in this photo, I don’t think so. Whenever I take a photo I see imperfections I had not noticed before.

I’ve been using a special black and white boucle yarn in this series, and I just discovered another one that is more white. You can see each of them in this photo, but mixed with white.

It’s fun to see how many different kinds of black and white marks I can make with different yarn combinations. 

 

I am also getting ready to start some more of the small Chaotic Fragments pieces. I’m thinking of introducing a little bit of color, but no sure exactly how I want to do that yet.

 

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