Tangled Web

One Week Down only 51 to Go!

2012-01-12T23:57:00.001-05:00

Here’s the first week of my 2012 tapestry diary. For the first month I plan to keep it simple, play around with colors, yarns, patterns etc.

I’ve been thinking about making bluish halos around the black and white images in my tapestries, so I’ll explore how that might work.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Contemporary Tapestry

Tapestry Diary Links

2011-12-27T00:17:00.001-05:00

Since so many people have been asking me about the Tapestry Diary, here are some links from previous blog posts.

There are some other short mentions of the diary in other blog posts from 2010, but these are the ones with the most information.

Basic Plan: 14 inches wide, the finished piece is more than close to 5 feet long. I wove a small parallelogram every day, about 1 inch tall and 1.5-2inches wide. They started out abstract but soon I began including text and sometimes small images for special days. I used the diary to experiment with techniques, textures, colors and shapes. Every month had a color scheme.

If I was away made up the days when I got home, sometimes weaving an entire week as one entry.

I kept it spontaneous, and rarely thought about what I would do until I was sitting at the loom. I kept a small sketchbook next to the loom and occasionally I did a small sketch first.

January 2010 – Starting to weave the days

February 2010 – 7 weeks in

November 2010 – Nice photos of the fall months

January 2011 – The finished 2010 tapestry diary

September, October, November 2010

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Contemporary Tapestry,Tapestry Diary

2012 Tapestry Diary Coming Soon

2011-12-23T23:48:00.001-05:00

I have decided to keep a tapestry diary again, starting January 1, 2012. Some of you may remember that I did this in 2010; you can read about it here. I was inspired by Tommye Scanlin’s tapestry diaries, which you can read about on her blog.

The basic idea is to weave a small section of tapestry every day. It can be a way to mark the passing of time, an opportunity to weave without the pressure or expectation of creating a masterpiece, a chance to play and experiment.

I wanted to try something different for 2011, and chose to do a sketch diary.

I posted on this blog about the first part, which was Moon Snails.

After that I worked from some photos of trees, mostly dark tree trunks against the snow….we had a LOT of snow last winter.

The sketch diary lasted about 6 months, and then all of my traveling got in the way. I know, you would think I could just do a sketch wherever I found myself, but it didn’t work out that way. The sketch diary had morphed into a serious study of certain objects and forms, with each sketch fitting into the ones around it. For example the page shown above contains 15 sketches.

Even though I did not continue for a full year, I feel like I got so much out of the experience.

This tapestry diary will be a bit different from the last one.

I keep looking at the last part of the 2010 tapestry diary, where I played with black and white.

Most of my current tapestries are black and white, and I have been dreaming of adding little bits of color to them, so that will be the subject of my explorations in the 2012 tapestry diary.

I decided to get a head start, so I have warped up the loom, and woven the heading with the year on it. I have always loved the look of a fresh warp, perhaps because it’s all possibility, like a blank canvas.

This warp looks cool because I put black poster board behind it. Otherwise, because it’s a circular warp, I would be seeing 2 sets of warp threads one behind the other, and it makes my eyes go blurry.

(This photo looks a bit crooked, so either I took it from a strange angle, or I need to adjust the spacing at the top of the loom! TIP: take a photo to see imperfections that you may not notice otherwise!)

Nevertheless I was a little peeved when my husband told me he liked the blank warp so much, perhaps I should just leave it that way….hmmmph.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Contemporary Tapestry,American Tapestry

Open Studio

2011-10-31T23:47:00.001-04:00

The weekend before last I participated in a local Studio Tour. It was really amazing to see how much space I have in my studio, once I got it all cleaned up! I was also amazed at how many tapestries I have…..that’s a bit depressing actually.

I own a large painting by Ruth Dealy, which I bought when preschoolers were pals about 25 years ago. It’s 61 x 86 inches, and the only wall in our current house that’s big enough is in my weaving room, or so I thought.

I didn’t want someone else’s art on display for the Studio Tour, so I moved it into the dining room, temporarily. Here it is between the wall and a drop leaf table. I realized then that I could hang my largest tapestry in its place.

Luckily, with my handy measuring tape, I discovered another wall that is big enough for the painting; it’s in the guest room, so I’ll have to go lie on the bed and meditate on the painting, which covers an entire wall. One thing I love about this painting is that I will never get bored with it, there is so much to look at.

I finally accepted that I will never have time to frame all the small tapestries, so I pinned a bunch of them to a piece of painted sound board, then put it on my easel.

Visitors could see my framing process, as I had 3 tapestries in various stages of framing, including this one (“Weaver’s Palette”) pinned to its frame, with the curved upholstery needle threaded, ready to sew.

I had 2 small tapestries professionally framed, so folks could see how nice that looks.

The folks at Finishing Touches are very good with framing textiles, so I kept a pile of their business cards on the piano, next to the 2 tapestries they framed. By the way, a piano makes a lovely display case!

I was delighted to sell two tapestries, “Winter Forsythia,” (right) and “Cranberry Bog.” (Below). It was great to send them out into the world.

“Cranberry Bog” is the one that I wove for the Australian exhibit, “LAND.” It’s only 4 inches tall, and is based on a photo I took from my husband’s small airplane, of a Cape Cod Cranberry Bog in March.

I figured they wouldn’t have too many other cranberry bogs in the exhibit. It’s always nice to be unique.This was my first year, but other artists say the numbers were down from last year, and that people bought less and smaller, less expensive items. That’s no surprise with these economic conditions.

It’s not just about sales.The best thing about the studio tour was talking to all the visitors, and explaining what I do.

One artist said she sold a painting to a customer who had visited the year before, fell in love with the painting and finally bought it this year. Others said this event is the best advertising, and I believe it. I made a lot of good connections, got a list of people interested in taking classes, and enjoyed demonstrating tapestry weaving.

I had about 25 visitors on Saturday and 40 on Sunday. Some were friends, co-workers, fellow weavers, and neighbors. Most were strangers, but all were very interested in learning about tapestry.

I consider it my mission to educate the public about tapestry weaving, so we won’t have to read any more newspaper articles about the dead art of tapestry. (I guess they don’t know about the 500 members of the American Tapestry Alliance!)

The black and white tapestry that is on my vertical Glimakra loom in the above photo, had 7 inches left to weave after the studio tour. I wanted to enter it in a juried show with a deadline of Monday, October 31. Today.

I had planned to work on it the week before the tour, but it was more work than I expected, cleaning up the studio and hanging tapestries everywhere.

I figured out that if I could weave one inch per day it would be finished in time. It’s only 24” wide, but I do a lot of picky stuff, like twisting my black and white blended wefts to line up every spot exactly where I want it, at exactly the right angle.That takes a lot of time.

Then I missed 2 days of weaving because life happened. I was determined to finish it, and in the end, I wove through the night, finishing at 5.30 this morning. Luckily I am a night owl, and never felt sleepy. Yay! I did it!

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving

The Lady and the Unicorn

2011-09-14T23:30:00.001-04:00

How did I miss seeing this for so many years? I was in Paris in 2000, but for some reason this was not on my MUST SEE list…I was in Paris in 1972, while I was an art student, and spent every day in the Louvre, but that was before I knew anything about tapestry. This time I had only one day to visit museums, and this was my top choice.

Even though the guide books now tell you that The Lady and the Unicorn is in the Musée Nationale du Moyen Age, in fact, you won’t find that on a map. They still call it the Cluny.

The Cluny Abbot Hotel was built, as a residence for the abbots, at the end of the 15th century, next door to the “thermes,” Gallo-Roman Baths dating to the 1st-3rd centuries. The building is beautiful, in that magical medieval style.

Before we found the Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries we were pleasantly surprised by an exhibit of Coptic tapestry fragments from 5th and 6th century Egypt.

What a treat! These tiny tapestries are so finely woven and so expressive.

I know that many tiny Coptic tapestries were either applied to, or woven into garments. They are well known for their use of eccentric wefts.

The Copts were (and are) a population of Christians living in Egypt, and their tapestries are legendary in textile history. What a thrill to see these up close.

Finally, the Lady and the Unicorn tapestries. I was practically speechless (which anyone who knows me would realize is quite unusual!)

As a tapestry weaver I am so impressed with the technical virtuosity necessary to achieve the designs (like the patterns in the Lady’s dresses, for example). As an artist it is clear that these tapestries were designed by a master of composition.

They are so well preserved, the colors are bright and most of the silk yarns are still there, and still lustrous (silk can often become brittle and just fall apart over time). That said, the bottom edges had rotted and been replaced at one time.

(please excuse the poor quality of the photos…the light in the gallery is very low, to protect the tapestries from further fading, and flash photography is forbidden)

As is often the case with old tapestries, there is a lot of uncertainty and controversy about their exact meaning.

Experts believe that these tapestries are about the 5 senses: Touch, Taste, Smell, Hearing and Sight, plus a sixth sense: The Heart, or perhaps, Understanding. “A Mon Seul Désir” (To My Only Desire) is inscribed on a banner in this sixth tapestry. The symbolism is far too complex for me to write about. Apart from the lady herself, the lion, the unicorn, the trees, and her lady in waiting, there is a mille fleurs background, and many animals. Nothing is insignificant.

The designer has been established as the Master of Anne de Bretagne, but apparently there is no certainty about exactly where the tapestries were woven. It’s likely that they were designed in Paris and woven in Flanders (or perhaps Paris) around 1490-1500. They were commissioned by the Le Viste family of Lyon.

You can get some information, and see complete photos on Wikipedia. I love that it says it “is often considered one of the greatest works of art of the Middle Ages in Europe.” YEAH!

There is also information on Tracy Chevalier’s website (she wrote the novel “The Lady and the Unicorn”).

I bought a book in the gift shop: The Lady and the Unicorn, by Elisabeth Delahaye, Director, Musee de Cluny, 2007. ISBN: 978 2711 850358. The photos are wonderful, and the author does a good job of explaining things in just 96 pages.

It is not available on Amazon.com. There are 2 copies at www.abebooks.com, the English one is about $30, but the French one is $668.75 (???). You might be able to order the book from the museum gift shop for 18 Euros, but I don’t know if they will ship to the USA, or how much that would cost. Make sure you order the English version, unless, of course, you prefer French.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry,Cluny Museum,The Lady and the Unicorn Tapestries

Youthful Indiscretions…

2011-08-17T22:27:00.001-04:00

Some of you have heard the story of how one of my tapestries went missing from an exhibit. This was in about 1980, and the exhibit was in the galleries at the Durham Arts Council in Durham, NC. I also had a studio space in that building. (Looking at their website now, I see it’s the same building, but it was renovated in 1988…not a moment too soon; my studio was on the ground floor and sometimes when it rained, water came through the 2 stories above me, right through the light fixture, and filled up the empty jars holding my paintbrushes!)

I was really upset about the tapestry being stolen, because I had finished it just in time for the exhibit, and entered it without taking any photos.

A few weeks later I saw something strange poking out from a large potted plant, and it was my tapestry. Someone had slid it off the tacky dowel it was hanging on (this was before I had a clue about velcro and all that), folded it up, and stuck it in the pot.

At the time I assumed it was a thief who intended to steal it and then chickened out.

It was only many years later, after taking a library school course on Intellectual Freedom and Censorship, that it occurred to me, this may have been an act of censorship rather than a botched theft. For reasons that are unfathomable to me, some people are offended by images of the human body, even when highly abstracted. Lucky for them they don’t live in Florence where they would be having the heebie-jeebies daily!

At the time that I wove this, I was weaving mostly functional items and had very little tapestry experience. The weft is a combination of strange rayon-ish synthetic yarns, with a border of a shiny black chenille, and the warp is 12 ply cotton tobacco twine, set very coarsely, maybe 4 epi. Hey, it was what I had, and I was a poor starving student married to a poor starving student.

The title is Life Study. It’s about 30 x 18 inches. I wince at the messy fringes top and bottom and the cheesy dowel.

The interlocks are VERY messy, but I still like the design. It’s a holdover from my high school days when I painted many posters of abstracted nudes, and my family would play “Find the body.”

I was not trying to be mysterious, I just thought it was fun to look at the shapes of positive and negative spaces (although I had never heard those terms used).

I ran across this tapestry in my attic recently, and decided to write about it since I have had NO time to weave anything new this summer. Hopefully that will soon change.

Rag Rugs

2011-07-20T00:35:00.001-04:00

A few months ago I started weaving a series of 3 rag rugs, for that most banal of reasons: they will match my new kitchen!

It is light green, dark green and white…not so much from choice, but because the walls are vitrolite historic structural glass.

I used to weave rag rugs many many years ago, in fact the ones I have are at least 30 years old! They are so useful; I put them near the door in the winter, and leave my wet boots on them to dry.

I use them under the Christmas tree, or on a table that has houseplants on it. They can be machine washed and dried.

I am very low tech, I cut the strips with scissors.

I did not like how wavy the fabric got when I tried tearing it. My strips are fairly narrow, about 3/4” wide.

I fold the fabric and cut a point at the ends, so I can overlap the strips during the weaving and not have a big lump.

I discovered years ago that sometimes the ugliest fabric makes the prettiest rug.

Bright green fabric with large pink frogs was very dramatic when woven, but I felt a little cruel squishing the frogs into blips of pink!

I love the way striped fabric looks when cut across the stripes. Like a tapestry design but much much easier!

Some of these fabrics were purchased for 39c per yard, about 20 years ago.

This crazy cartoony fabric had many printing errors but I bought about 10 yards of it, and have gotten a lot of good use from it. Besides that, it makes me laugh.

They were in the scrap bin at my favorite fabric warehouse, Lorraine Fabrics, in Pawtucket, RI.

The Kokopelli fabric was upstairs with the $1.99 quilting fabrics. I love knowing that those tiny specks of black are little kokopellis hiding in my rug.

When I first started weaving rag rugs, I cut up old wool skirts and pants that I bought at the thrift store.

They had special days when you could buy a bag full of clothes for $3. It was a pain cutting them up, but the wool did make nice rugs, heavier than my cotton ones.

Later, when I started buying fabric, a quilter friend became quite angry at me for “ruining” good quilting fabrics by cutting them up.

I was a bit perplexed, as I thought I was making something beautiful, but I guess it’s hard to appreciate the lovely patterns on the fabric when it’s cut up and woven.

In case you don’t already think I’m a bit obsessive, I lay the fabric strips into the shed very carefully to make sure the right side of the fabric is always facing up (most fabrics have a definite right side). So my rugs have a right and a wrong side. One can twist the fabric in the shed to make a pattern of light and dark, but mostly I just like the dark (printed) side up.

I also like to overlap in such a way that the new color nestles under the old color and it makes a nice kind of a pointy join. I guess we all have our little obsessions!

Once upon a time, about 30 years ago, I wove a large tapestry using fabric strips. It was based on a small watercolor of a “yield” sign.

I really enjoyed playing with the colors and patterns of the fabrics.

If you look carefully, you can see those squished pink frogs.

The only problem was that it was so noisy weaving it, using a beater (and you have to beat HARD for rag rugs), in the room right next door to my baby’s room.

The only time I had for weaving was when she was napping, and my weaving would waken her immediately, so I got very little done.

I discovered soon after that weaving a tapestry, Gobelin style (using leashes instead of harnesses and treadles) could be completely silent, and that’s part of the story of how I became a tapestry weaver.

Sara Hotchkiss weaves gorgeous rag rugs and tapestries, and exhibits them at her Old Point Comfort Gallery in Waldoboro, Maine. The annual Studio Open House is August 6th and 7th, so if you’re in the area, check it out.

If you’re not in the area, maybe you should be! Maine is a lovely spot for a summer vacation!

I still don’t understand how she makes her joins without messy lumps, which was a problem for me.

Sara weaves rugs in all sizes from small mats, to large room-sized rugs, and she will custom design and weave whatever you need for your house.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry,Rag Rugs,Rug Weaving,Weaving

Tapestries in Milan

2011-07-09T00:39:00.001-04:00

Recently my husband had a meeting in Varese, northern Italy, not far from Milan. It didn’t take much arm twisting to convince me to join him.

Then I remembered that I have a Tapestry List* friend who lives in Milan, so I contacted Elena Rossi by email and she very kindly offered to pick me up at my hotel so we could visit the tapestries in the Castello Sforzesco.

*The tapestry list is a wonderful yahoo group to discuss all things tapestry. To subscribe: tapestry2005-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

I was quite relieved that I didn’t have to find my way to Milan alone, thanks so much Elena!

I brought her a copy of the Small Tapestry International: Connections catalog, and Elena gave me a gorgeous book on the Battle of Pavia Tapestries, which are in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.These tapestries are so well preserved, the colors and the details are amazing.

It was great to have a native of Milan to show me around this lovely city.

The Castello Sforzesco is in an enormous castle, which looks very much like a fortress, in the center of Milan.

It was built from the 14th to 16th centuries.

We saw gorgeous mosaics and frescoes, 15th century weaponry, renaissance sculpture, musical instruments, and rooms decorated by Leonardo da Vinci; but our goal was to see the Trivulzio Tapestries of the Twelve Months.

The tapestry gallery was not open until the afternoon, so we took a break for a quick lunch, and then Elena showed me the sights.

The Duomo is awe-inspiring; it is the 4th largest cathedral in the world, and took almost 600 years to complete! Look how tiny the people look in this photo!

As we entered the building the guard at the door informed me that my shorts were too short (they are pretty long shorts) and made me pull them down to cover my knees.

Good thing I was wearing a long t-shirt or my belly would have been hanging out! Are bellies more acceptable than knees?

I was also impressed with the Galleria Vittoria Emanuele II, an elegant 19th century covered arcade, with high end fashion shops. Here is a youtube video about it.

There is a mosaic of a bull, and if you put your heel on his testicles, and spin around 3 times, it is supposed to bring good luck (and perhaps improve your sex life!)

I tried it just in case…

Finally it was time to return to the museum for the Trivulzio Tapestries of the Twelve Months!

These were woven for Marquis Gian Giacomo Trivulzio (1440 or 1441 – December 5, 1518) in 1503-1509.

Here are two details of December.

There is a wealth of symbolism in these tapestries, which the people of the time would have understood easily. In the 21st century, sad to say, we are pretty clueless!

I am always impressed with the way fabrics were represented in tapestry.

By the time we had seen all 12 of these tapestries I was pretty tired, and very grateful for Elena, who took me to the train station, helped me to buy the correct ticket and helped me find the train back to Varese.

Another wonderful tapestry adventure!

Technorati Tags: Tapestry,Tapestry Milan,Castello Sforesco

Anne Jackson Knotting Workshop

2011-06-10T23:47:00.001-04:00

Back in April 2011, Anne Jackson came to the American Textile History Museum to present a lecture about her work.

I knew that TWiNE (Tapestry Weavers in New England) members were fascinated by her tapestries and curious about her knotting technique, so I convinced Anne to present a day long workshop the day before the lecture.

Anne Jackson: Witch Hunt Maleficium (in memorium)

We met at the museum, in their lovely education room. I supplied all of the materials, which are pretty simple. All you need is a piece of Sound Board (“Tentest” in UK), some T-pins or large sewing pins, and some yarn. The yarn should be smooth, and can be cotton, rayon, linen or a blend of thin threads.

(Right: Anne Jackson, Leaving Eden, detail)

We spent the morning learning the technique, then in the afternoon Anne presented a slide talk about Creativity, Sources of Inspiration and Working Practices. Some of the participants shared images and comments on these topics as well, and it was really inspiring.

In my first knotting effort (below), you can see that we started off using a heavy cotton, and we used it with both warp and weft doubled.

So the knots at the top (the left in this image) are very big. Then I used the same yarn (Lily “Sugar and Cream,” a good weight for both warp and weft for learning), only not doubled. When I got home I thought it would be simple to make a sampler like my tapestry students: Squares, Triangles, Curves….it turned out to be more challenging than I expected.

I tried color blending, using combinations of thin cotton, and played with dropping warps to create triangular shapes at the end. This is a great technique for making shaped pieces.

I have found knotting to be totally addictive.

For a few weeks, every time I went into the studio to weave, I found myself pulled away from the loom. It’s really fun to just play with something new, to see what it can do.

I made myself some smaller boards for travel, and then realized that, unlike tapestry, it is very simple to just remove an unfinished piece from the board, fold it up until later, and pin another one onto the same board.

So with one board, a small box of pins, and some yarn, you can work on many pieces simultaneously….that may or may not be a good thing for me, I don’t need encouragement to start new projects before finishing the old ones.

By the way, the sound board is very cheap, but I had to buy it at a real, old fashioned lumberyard. Neither Lowes nor Home Depot had even heard of it. It also sheds, and makes a big mess, so after the workshop I painted my boards them with 2 or 3 coats of white latex house paint (including all the edges). If you were really enterprising you could mark a grid on it too.

Even with a cartoon pinned underneath, I have found it difficult to make well defined shapes, especially vertical lines.

So I’ve been playing with simple stripes. For the piece above I used a space dyed microfiber knitting yarn. LOTS of fun! (3x6”)

It looks really cool on the back side too.

My latest project is TINY, only 1.5 inches wide. I’m using a linen warp, which I really like. It behaves very nicely, and since the warps are loose, there are none of the tension problems I have using linen warp on a floor loom.

Although I understand how to do the knotting, I still can’t figure out how Anne achieves such perfect shapes and so much detail in her large knotted tapestries.

I guess it’s the same way you get to Carnegie Hall:

Practice, practice, practice.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry,Knotted Tapestry,Anne Jackson,Knotting

Last Day in Taos

2011-05-07T22:01:00.001-04:00

Despite the high winds and dust, I decided I had to see the famous Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, which is only 10 miles from Taos.

There is a small parking lot next to the bridge, but it was impossible to see much from there, and I saw somebody walking across the bridge to take a photo.

Off I went, with my fear of heights, and having the feeling I might blow overboard.

I’m sure I looked foolish clinging to the railing all the way. I’m glad I didn’t know it at the time, but I heard later that the gusts were up to 60 miles per hour!

The sun came out, and those amazing New Mexico clouds appeared.

As I drove back towards Taos I had to keep stopping to get photos of the clouds, the mountains, the trees. Even the dust! I stopped to visit Taos Pueblo, a World Heritage Site and National Historic Landmark. Some of the adobe buildings are 1000 years old, and they are still inhabited.

The north and south villages are on either side of Red Willow Creek, which flows from the tribe’s sacred Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristo Range.

I had a lovely tour from a young woman who told me all about the history of the church and the Pueblo Revolt.

We stayed inside the San Geronimo Chapel, to avoid the dust blowing around outside. Photos are not allowed inside the chapel, but it was very beautiful with wonderful stained glass windows.

She explained that the river comes from Blue Lake, which is not only the source of their drinking water, but of the people themselves.

The lake and the land around it was taken by President Theodore Roosevelt as part of the National Park system in 1906, but was given back by Richard Nixon in 1970.

I wandered around, taking lots and lots of photos, accompanied by an adolescent dog who seemed to think I needed an escort.

I entered a tiny shop where the proprietor greeted me with wet clay on her hands.

She was making Grandmother Storyteller figures, which is just so serendipitous, since I already owned 2. Obviously I was supposed to buy another one. Then I saw the minis, so now I have 4! Here are the 2 that I bought at Taos Pueblo. The artist wrote her name on a card for me, but I lost it, sad to say.

These figures take me back to the times when I would read aloud to my children in the library, and suddenly realize I had acquired about a dozen more kids!

It was a beautiful day, and an inspiring place.

NOTE: You can click on any photo to see a larger version.

Taos Fine Art

2011-05-04T23:18:00.001-04:00

On my last day in Taos, I woke up to a cloudy day, with high winds. I’ve never seen dust flying around like that before, and I was so tickled to see actual Tumbleweeds tumbling across the road!

My first order of business was to visit Taos Fine Art, just a block from the Taos Inn. I was lured in by the rugs in the windows, but once inside I found another treasure: Prints by Gene Kloss, (1903-1996) a renowned printmaker who lived and worked in Taos from 1925 to 1996. Her work is in many important collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian. I fell in love with her drypoint etchings, particularly those that are inspired by Pueblo culture.

Gene Kloss, Corn Husking – Taos Pueblo, 1960

I was also quite taken with the color woodcuts of Gustave Baumann, (1881-1971). When I was getting my MFA in painting, I did an independent study in color woodcuts. It’s a medium that I’m familiar with, but I don’t see them very often. Gustave Baumann, Taos Placita, 1947.

I got chatting with the owner, and he offered to show me some very rare antique Navajo rugs. One was an exquisite child’s rug, mostly white and including designs made with white wool against white silk (unraveled from French underwear!). The other was the “Spider Blanket” in the picture below. Both rugs were beautifully woven, with very fine yarns.

According to Anthony Sobin, this rug was collected by J.K. Moore ca. 1865. “He had been in the Civil War and, when mustered out, made his way to Wyoming. He made a living by bringing salted Bison meat and skins (which were still relatively plentiful on the high plains), to the Four Corners area and would trade them for blankets and other items produced by the Pueblo/Apache/Navajo peoples which he would then trade back to the Blackfeet, Crow and Lakota people for more bison.”

“He understood that this blanket was something special and rather than trading it, he wrote his name on it and kept it until his death, after which it found its way to us in the 21st Century through descent.
It is impossible to say for sure what the intention of this textile was but it is highly likely that it was ceremonial. The presence of the small eight-legged "spider woman" crosses is not unusual but when combined with the major design element which is itself a huge, highly abstract spider, it becomes likely that is was a homage to Spider Woman, the mystical being who taught the Navajo to weave.”

“Two other such ‘spider blankets’ have survived and all three textiles use the same secondary colors, (golden yellow and sage green) in addition to the standard red and indigo colors of classic period Navajo weaving. This is undoubted a woman's wearing blanket because of its size. It is a good educated guess that such blankets were viewed by their makers and their users as power objects--likely specifically for weavers because of the Spider Woman imagery.”

“When worn, the legs of the spider would envelop the wearer and if she were a weaver, would prepare her for the challenge of her next blanket and would hopefully imbue her with the power and skills of Spider Woman herself through the medium of the blanket.”

“The blue-dyed hand-spun wool is from from indigo obtained through French traders. The two reds were obtained by unraveling English/Scots red trade cloth known as Bayeta which used natural reds obtained from lac and cochineal from Mexico by way of Spain-- (the darker, browner red at the top of the blanket was dyed with lac--the lighter, bluer red in the lower part of the textile came from cochineal). The ivory is natural, home-spun Navajo wool. The gold and green were raveled single-ply commercial yarns from undetermined European sources. It was probably woven close to the date of 1860, when the art of Navajo weaving was at its highest point. It was created by a master weaver and is an example of the very best extant Native American textile art which anticipated the optical and highly abstract forms of the mid-20th Century art of the Modern period in Europe and America.”

For more about these rugs and prints, check out Taos Fine Art.

Technorati Tags: Navajo Rugs,Gene Kloss,Gustave Baumann,Taos Fine Art

Northern New Mexico Studio Tour

2011-04-15T22:43:00.001-04:00

In conjunction with Small Tapestry International 2: Passages, the American Tapestry Alliance organized a Northern New Mexico Studio Tour on Saturday, April 2. We had a mini-bus with local tapestry artist and blogger Rebecca Mezoff as our guide, and a very pleasant and reassuring driver, who ferried us to four studios in the area.The first stop was Metier Gallery, in Dixon, where we saw all kinds of handwoven items, from rugs and tapestries, to baskets and delicious wearables. Next was Centinela Traditional Arts, in Chimayo, which is owned by the renowned Rio Grande weavers, Irvin and Lisa Trujillo.

Jeane George Weigel wrote two wonderful and thoroughly researched stories about them, with photos and video, on her blog High Road Artist. After you read about Irvin, read part 1, about Lisa here.Both Irvin and Lisa weave gorgeous tapestries and rugs and have won many honors and awards. They also operate a business that sells their own work and that of other local weavers to collectors around the world, enabling many weavers to earn a living.

Lisa showed us how quickly she can weave a large Saltillo rug, standing at the old loom that Irvin’s father built.

Then we watched Irvin weave on the 12 foot wide loom he designed and built himself. Very impressive and inspiring.

I’m intrigued by the standing looms. I suspect they may be better for the body than sitting all day long.

A fabric weaver friend was diagnosed with a case of Weaver’s Bottom (really!), and standing would certainly prevent that! I don’t know if it’s hard on the feet or any other body parts….

We had lunch at the famous Rancho de Chimayo, where we enjoyed comparing the amount of heat in the red sauce vs the green. I thought the red was a bit hotter, but both were pretty mild.

Then on to Ortegas Weaving Shop, also in Chimayo. This spacious shop has huge piles of rugs from small mug rugs and placemats, to large floor rugs, all with simple traditional designs.

I think the delicate white lines in this piece are called jaspe, but I can’t find any confirmation of that. Please let me know if I’m wrong. Ortega’s also sells clothing made from the handwoven wool fabric. The last studio we visited was the Española Valley Fiber Arts Center, a cooperative gallery and educational facility.

You can buy all kinds of fiber art there, as well as materials and equipment.

I was delighted to find some of the lovely white wool warp (Clasgens) that I’d seen Lisa Trujillo using. It’s thinner than any other wool tapestry warp I’ve used before, and I think it will work at 10 epi. I can’t wait to try it out!

We used one of the rooms at EVFAC for a slide show of work by Rebecca Mezoff and Cornelia Theimer Gardella (Connie).

The slide show included images from Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus, a collaboration between Rebecca, Connie, and James Koehler. The exhibit traveled from a modern Albuquerque gallery to a small church, in the medieval town of Erfurt, Germany, last summer and fall. Such beautiful work.

After the slide show, Connie showed us some actual tapestries, and dye samples (left). We were all impressed with Connie’s perfect tapestry circle, which, as any tapestry weaver can tell you, is very difficult to achieve.

My photo was taken from a strange angle as the tapestry is fairly large, and it was lying on a table, but you can still see how smoothly the curves are woven.

It was a wonderful day, and in addition to visiting the studios, we had the excellent company of our fellow tapestry artists. It was fun catching up with old friends and getting acquainted with new. We arrived back at the hotel with about a half hour to clean up and walk across the street for the opening reception at Weaving Southwest.

Technorati Tags: tapestry weaving,New Mexico weaving,Rio Grande weaving

Small Tapestry International 2: Passages

2011-04-07T00:15:00.001-04:00

When I entered this show, and saw that the first venue was Weaving Southwest, in Taos, NM, I told myself “If I get in, I’m going to the opening.” I did, so I did!I arrived in New Mexico last Thursday, and spent the weekend basking in the dry, sunny, and at times quite warm weather. Aaaahhh. . . After this horrible winter, and the cold rainy spring so far, it was quite a relief.

I stayed at the Historic Taos Inn, a lovely un-hotel-like place, and right across the street from Weaving Southwest. Did I mention that I love Weaving Southwest? and Taos? Now I love the Taos Inn too. I spent most of Friday wandering around Taos looking for a necklace or earrings to match the red border of my tapestry, and luckily I found both! I like to dress to match my tapestries when I attend opening receptions, just in case someone takes my picture in front of my tapestry; wouldn’t want to clash!

I had lunch with fellow tapestry blogger, Kathy Spoering, who was in town to review the show.

Then I attended an Arlo Guthrie concert at the little auditorium right next door to the Taos Inn. Awesome concert, by the way, he’s an amazing performer.The opening reception was quite well attended, and I’m sorry I didn’t take enough photos, but I was buy schmoozing. You can see all of the tapestries in the very reasonably priced catalog, or visit the exhibit either in Taos, or at one of the 2 other venues:

Handforth Gallery, Tacoma, WA June 1 - July 2, 2011

The Cultural Center at Glen Allen, VA Sept 15 - Oct 30, 2011

The exhibit is sponsored by the American Tapestry Alliance. Kay Lawrence, the Director of the South Australian School of Art, was the juror, and the show includes 47 tapestries by 41 artists.

My tapestry is the latest in my Chaos series.

I have a hard time remembering which of the Chaotic Fragments are Parts 1,2,3 and 4, so I decided to give this one has its own name: “Turning From Chaos.” It’s 10 x 10 inches.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Weaving Southwest,Tapestry Exhibits,Small Tapestry International

Tribute to James Koehler

2011-03-05T17:11:00.001-05:00

The first time I met James was a few years ago, at the Fiber Art Center in Amherst, where he spoke to TWiNE (Tapestry Weavers in New England). I had seen his amazing work of course, and knew how successful he was, so I was quite surprised to find him unassuming, friendly and kind. His lecture was thought provoking and inspiring.

Last summer, after Convergence in Albuquerque, I went to St John’s College in Santa Fe, for the ATA retreat “Tapestry Enchantment,” where I spent 3 days learning from James. I discovered that his reputation for being an incredibly generous teacher was well earned.

On the first day, James talked to us about creating layers of image and/or meaning in our designs. I was working on sketches of Moon Snails, and once he realized I was drawing a complete blank, he suggested the word Moon! Pretty obvious, but it had not occurred to me. My design process does not involve a lot of thinking, so after the initial excitement, I was still baffled as to how the moon could be incorporated into a design with the snail, and decided to forget it.

That evening in my room, I decided to draw the shell again, only because my first drawing was too small. I felt my drawing needed more depth, and decided to draw the shadow. In one magical moment I realized: the shadow of my broken moon snail shell was a perfect waning moon!

James invited all 32 of the retreat participants to visit his home and studio one evening. Here are a few photos from that visit.

Although he could be wickedly funny at times, this photo shows how seriously he listened when his students asked him questions. He told us that if we had questions later we could email him, and if he felt it required more than an email he would talk to us on the phone. He said that once we took his class we would be his students forever, and he was right about that. I’m sure none of his students will forget what they learned from him.

Seeing his luminous hand dyed yarns on the shelves, and his tapestries on the walls was inspiring. Everything about James was inspiring. I was completely shocked to hear of his death. It is a huge loss for the many many people who were touched by this exceptional artist and man.

Perhaps the best tribute will be for his students to make an extra effort to live up to his example, in our art and in our lives.

Technorati Tags: James Koehler,Tapestry Weaving

Moon Snails All Over

2011-03-04T00:06:00.001-05:00

I have always loved Moon Snails. I find them on the beach at Cape Cod, and out on the flats at low tide. Usually they are broken, but sometimes not.

One day I brought home a handful of them, and was standing in the front yard chatting with a neighbor when I felt a tickling in my hand. A hermit crab had set up house in one of the shell fragments! So I had to carry him back to the beach.

Some of my shells are Sharks Eye, which are a type of Moon Snail. My favorites are the Northern Moon Snails, which are more colorful and have more dramatic spirals, like this one.

The spirals always go the same direction: clockwise from the center, when you look at the outside of the shell.

My brother, who reads a lot, tells me that there are rare snail shells that go counter clockwise, so I am on a lifelong quest for the “widdershins” Moon Snail! (Did you ever wonder what they called it before the invention of the clock?)

I have been drawing and painting Moon Snails for about 30 years. This is an oil painting I did in graduate school, about 1981 I think!

Last summer I took a workshop with James Koehler, and he asked us each to bring along supporting materials for a concept or symbol of our choice. I brought Moon Snails.

This is the sketch I came up with for a small tapestry: a broken Moon Snail shell, with a shadow that is a perfect waning moon!

That was in July, and I have still not finished it. It’s being woven sideways, the left side in this photo will be the top of the tapestry. In other words, I will turn the tapestry clockwise when it’s done.

I got stuck on that thin yellow curve, and had to figure out a better way to do it. Now that I fixed that, I should be able to finish it pretty quickly, and I will….tomorrow…..or maybe the next day.

Meanwhile, my 2011 Sketch Diary is well on its way. Every day I draw in one of the squares. My rules are fairly simple.

Rule #1 Sketch every day #2 No going back to fix what I did the day before. #3 Don’t think too much or judge what I’ve done #4 Draw what I feel like drawing #5 Work quickly.

I started page 1 with Moon Snails, thinking I would change the subject for page 2, but I ended up doing 3 pages of Moon Snails! I just started page 4 and it is much more abstract. More about that later. Here is page 1. So many Moon Snails!

“An Artist at Work!”

2011-02-21T00:12:00.001-05:00

Last Saturday I took my show on the road, to the American Textile History Museum, where I demonstrated tapestry weaving outside the gallery where the American Tapestry Biennial (ATB8) is installed.

I love weaving in public, and answering all the questions.

As usual I brought my Harrisville “Friendly Loom,” which is just a frame on legs, with pegs for the warp.

The height is adjustable, so it fits easily in my car. I don’t use the pegs, because when I tried, my very tightly wound seine twine warp pulled the frame out of whack.

So instead, I just wind the warp around the frame, which means I can weave on both the front and the back.

I put a piece of black poster board between the two sides so my eyes don’t get confused seeing both warps at the same time.

For this demonstration I put two narrow warps on the loom.

I started a simple geometric tapestry using the initials of the museum ATHM, woven sideways, on the right, and a landscape, also woven sideways, on the left.

The colored designs are taped to the top of the loom, and inked cartoons are stitched to the back of each tapestry .

This loom has no shedding mechanism, so I use a shed stick for one, and pick up the other by hand. I like weaving this way.

If you live near Lowell, Massachusetts, go see ATB8, and better yet, enjoy one of the upcoming lectures:

March 13, 2011 Under the Influence; or Is It Just Inspiration? 2 PM

Susan Martin Maffei explores the effect of textile history, both of the past and personal, on the creative process and growth of her own work in tapestry. Her path, including an overseas internship, commercial studio work, and gallery conservation of antique textiles, provides insights into the development of the artist/ weaver of the 21st century.

April 10, 2011 Anne Jackson: Knotted Tapestries 2 PM

Anne Jackson makes vibrant, complex tapestries exploring contemporary ideas, often in a historical context. Focusing on her current project, 'The Witchcraft Series', her illustrated talk will cover the development of her work and take a wry look at the place of textiles in the art world.

May 1, 2011 Bodies of Work 2 PM

Focusing on the human form in tapestry, Micala Sidore examines the history of tapestry weaving from an Andean culture in 500 BCE to the present. For both newcomers to tapestry and those in-the-know, she suggests an approach to viewing tapestries, understanding what makes them successful, and appreciating the weaver’s work.

Small Tapestry International 2: Passages

2011-02-04T23:02:00.001-05:00

I’m thrilled to have my newest Chaos tapestry selected for this wonderful American Tapestry Alliance show of small tapestries, 100 square inches or less.

I’m also thrilled that I’m now obliged to visit Weaving Southwest again! ATA has organized a studio tour on April 2, the day of the opening, and I’m already signed up.

ATA has planned a Chimayo Weaving Workshop with Lisa Trujillo, April 3, 4, 5. Very tempting, but I don’t think I have time.

Sorry, I’m not ready to show the tapestry yet, I worry that everyone will be bored with it before the show opens. So I’m going to show just a little detail of it here. The title is “Turning From Chaos.”

Weaving Southwest; Taos, NM March 30 – May 2, 2011; Show opening: April 2, 2011, 5:00-7:00pm

Handforth Gallery; Tacoma, WA; June 1- July 2, 2011; Show opening: June 4, 3:30-5:30pm

Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen; Glen Allen, VA; September 15 - October 30, 2011; Show opening: Thursday September 15, 2011, 7:00-9:00pmHere are some photos I took at Weaving Southwest last July. Tapestries, rugs, scarves, yarn and you can’t see them but they also sell looms and spinning wheels! HEAVEN! If you can’t make it to any of these venues, you will be able to purchase a catalog here. The Passages catalog is not available yet, but you can still buy catalogs of previous exhibits to satisfy your tapestry viewing needs.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,New Mexico,Weaving Southwest,American Tapestry Alliance,Chimayo Weaving

ATB8 Opens at ATHM

2011-01-22T23:56:00.001-05:00

Lots of acronyms there! The American Tapestry Biennial 8 opened at the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA on Thursday evening. It was a lovely reception, lots of artists, staff and other guests. I was relieved that the weather cooperated and I didn’t get lost.

It was great to see old friends from near and far, and to meet a new friend too. Marie-thumette Brichard came all the way from France. Her piece is beautiful and SO BLUE, and the way it’s displayed at ATHM makes it glow and makes you feel you are falling into the blue waves. Spectacular. Here it is at the previous venue, it’s the blue one in the middle. You have to see the real tapestry to get the feeling. It is 57.5 x 76.5

Kathy Spoering came all the way from Colorado, and her husband took some photos of the two of us with our tapestries. Mine is above and hers is below, and is titled “January.” It’s part of a series she is doing of each month. It looks an awful lot like those tree shadows on the snow in my front yard, but in fact, it’s HER front yard!

You can see that the walls are painted to compliment the tapestries which looks really great. They did an excellent job hanging the show, the groupings are very good, and I like the galleries, which are big enough that each tapestry has enough space, and yet small enough to feel intimate.

For once I did not take any photos of the exhibit, just enjoyed looking and chatting.

My daughter came along and it was great to share the occasion with her, and get her reactions to the work, since she’s quite an accomplished artist herself. This is a detail from a collage she did back in high school. You can click on it to see it larger.

Technorati Tags: American Tapestry Biennial 8,American Textile History Museum,Tapestry,Tapestry Weaving,Fiber Art

Dazzled by the Snow

2011-01-17T00:22:00.001-05:00

It snowed a few inches last Saturday, then another 11 on Wednesday. I can barely make it through a day without taking photos.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been weaving in black and white, but today when I went for a walk in Goddard Park, I kept having to take off my gloves, fish my camera out of my pocket and take some more pictures! I guess I need to hang it around my neck!

I’m thinking of a series of tapestries of very simple tree images. I was thinking of it even before the snow.

What I really mean is the spaces between the trees. If woven sideways, trees make perfect sense to weave, which would be new for me. I usually weave things that don’t make any sense at all, and I’m getting a bit tired of all that struggling!

Sometimes the trees are dark and the background is snowy white. Other times the trees are white and the background is dark. And I love the sun and shadows on the snow.

Sadly, the camera that has served me so well the past 4 years bit the dust. It traveled to Europe on our sabbatical in 2009, where it took thousands of photos. Somehow it got moisture inside the lens, and for what it would cost to get it repaired, it made more sense to buy another one.

At least I was smart enough to buy a new one that uses the same batteries, so I can use the 2 spares I already have. There was a sale on, but they had run out of silver, and I didn’t want black because it’s too easy to lose, so I chose this bright pink color.

On the plus side, it’s 14 megapixels (although why would I need that when I mostly save them as small files for the web?) and has the image stabilization that the old one lacked.

Ring out the old Diary, ring in the new….

2011-01-03T23:20:00.001-05:00

On New Years Day we had an impromptu “cutting off” ceremony for my Tapestry Diary. I have been weaving a small parallelogram every day since January 1, 2010, except when I’m away from home. At those times, I would weave all those “days” after I got home. Most days were simple, sometimes I just wove a color I felt like weaving, but on other days it seemed appropriate to weave something special. I have a small notebook that identifies those special days, like a birthday, my Mom’s memorial service, or this day when my grand niece Ruby visited from afar.

Every month has a color scheme. Below is September into October.

This choice, as well as the choice of what to weave each day, was not something I gave much thought to…these decisions were quite spontaneous. I realized after a while that this project was really about the process and not the product.

Each day I would sit at the loom and weave what I felt like weaving; at the end of a month I’d think about what colors I felt like using for the next month. I didn’t worry too much what each day looked like, after all, it was only one out of 365! Every inch is a week, so the width of the tapestry has 7 parallelograms, always beginning with a Friday (because January 1 was a Friday). At the end, I had ONE day left to weave, so I wove an entire line that day, including my signature, the year and the words Tapestry Diary.

So back to the cutting off ceremony, my husband was a little perplexed to be intercepted on the way to his woodworking shop…and to suddenly find himself performing this (not so) solemn ritual, all properly documented with a camera.

The back side looked like a rya rug, I have spent some time trimming all those ends, but have not hemmed it yet. I also cleaned up the mess around the loom.

This project was woven with left over yarns from my Thrum Bag, which is still quite overstuffed. I actually threw away some of the short pieces that were lying around in my yarn basket and on the floor. I feel so virtuous.

I have started my 2011 Sketch Diary. It will consist of large pieces of paper, made into a grid. Every piece of paper, which has 20 days, will have a theme, and maybe a medium….so far, I am drawing moon snail shells and using a china marker. I expect to use this, as with the tapestry diary, to try out different approaches and techniques.

It’s very exciting because although I don’t know exactly what I will sketch, or how, I know that it will be an adventure, and a learning experience, just like the tapestry diary.

The last few days of October, and all of November and December.

Sol Lewitt Retrospective

2010-12-10T00:54:00.001-05:00

I have always wanted to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and finally I did it in November. During the ATA tapestry workshop in July, James Koehler mentioned Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawings, which struck me as relevant to my plan for a 2011 Drawing Diary. Then in August I had a visit from my dear friend and former college roommate Abby, who lives in Bennington, Vermont, just a short drive from Mass MoCA. We have been trying to set up a meeting for a long time and this seemed like the perfect outing. As another coincidence Micala Sidore mentioned she wanted to see this show too, so now we were three!

Mass MoCA is on a 13 acre historic mill complex in North Adams, a small city in Western Massachusetts. During the colonial period this area was home to numerous businesses including shoe manufacturers, a brick yard, a saw mill, hat manufacturers, marble works and more.

Arnold Print Works occupied the site from 1860-1942, at one time supplying fabric for the union army. They employed 32,000 workers in the early 20th century but in 1942 the effects of the Great Depression and the falling price of fabric forced them to move to a much smaller facility. Sprague Electric bought the site and turned it into an electronics plant that made components for weapons and the space program.

After Sprague closed in 1985, the town was looking for a way to use the property, and Thomas Krens, the director of the nearby Williams College Museum of Art was looking for an exhibit space for large contemporary art. With support from the Massachusetts legislature, the community and the private sector, the museum opened in 1999. You can see beautiful photos of the renovation by Nicholas Whitman.

I love the building. The renovation preserved the feel of a working mill building. The brick walls have stories to tell, like the one above that shows evidence of an old staircase. I was as intrigued by the walls as I was by the artwork.

The Sol Lewitt Retrospective is in a 27,000 square foot building which was restored specifically for this exhibition. It took 6 months and 65 artists to complete the installation of 105 wall drawings. The artists included 22 assistants who had worked with Lewitt, 33 student interns from Yale, Williams, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and other colleges, and 13 local artists.

The Yale University Art Gallery owns some wall drawings, and the entire wall drawing archive (donated by the artist), and their director Jock Reynolds, collaborated with Lewitt to plan the retrospective, and with Mass MoCA and Williams College Museum of Art to create it. Lewitt made some new works for it before his death in April 2007. Since the exhibit opened in 2008, I assume Lewitt did not get to see it, which is very sad. This is the first time the wall drawings have been gathered in a group, in the past you had to see them one at a time in far flung galleries.

I was not sure what to expect; Lewitt was a leader in the field of Conceptual art, a movement with which my art school professors were quite enamored back in the 1970s.

It never did much for me, obviously, or I would not have turned to tapestry weaving!

Lewitt believed that the idea was the real work of art, and that the execution of the art could be performed by others, which makes perfect sense given the history of tapestry weaving.

In this case, each wall drawing consists of a set of detailed instructions. For example, the left side of this photo shows Wall Drawing 46, and the instructions read

“Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly.”

The materials range from pencil and chalk, to transparent ink washes, to glossy enamel paint, and cover the years from 1969-2007.

I had a great time taking photos of these.

They are all very large, and cover the walls completely, so there were many places where I could see 2 or more at the same time, and taking a step to one side would change the view radically. These drawings were made with translucent colored ink washes, giving an unusual matte finish that makes the colors glow, almost like wools in a tapestry.

In other cases, with the glossy drawings (executed in acrylic paint) reflections of another drawing seem to add a three dimensionality to the work. This is 821, alternating glossy with matte bands of black.

Wall Drawing 901 consists of colored bands and a black blob.

The blob is glossy, and has the same properties of reflection as 821.

I wonder whether Lewitt considered this possibility, given that most of the wall paintings were not in groups.

Below is Wall Drawing 880, “Loopy Doopy.” I found it painful to look at because of the intense contrast of the orange and green. Apparently the painters did too. They executed this by taping the wall, so they never saw both colors together until it was almost finished. Then when they did the final touch up they discovered the dizzying effect of the contrast.

I didn’t notice the effect of the sunlight on the walls until I looked through the camera. It almost looks like the wall is glowing from within.

On the right is a photo of 2 different drawings, on walls that are at 90 degrees. The composition of this photo would be something else if I took a step to one side of the other.

The catalog, “Sol Lewitt: 100 Views” can be purchased here. You can also see all of the works on the web here and some time lapse photos of their creation.

Because of the size, you really have to see them in person.

The exhibit will be at Mass MoCA for 25 years, so you have plenty of time to get there!

Technorati Tags: Sol Lewitt,Mass MoCA

2010 Tapestry Diary

2010-11-10T23:58:00.001-05:00

is almost done! I had a little scare when I saw how little warp I have left, but it will be enough….whew, just barely enough, but enough. My one inch weeks were expanding into 1.5 inch weeks, but now I’m being very careful to keep them to an inch or less. September was just obviously blue and yellow, I don’t know why but that was clear to me right away. I made October all shades of red, yellow and orange, for the fall foliage and because it just seemed like it was about time I used colors like that. November is brown, orange and white, and I’ll decide on December when it comes up. One thing I love about this project is that I can play it by ear like this, no thinking ahead.

In addition to colors, I have also been choosing images to weave, like in September I wove a lot of spirals, in October leaves, and in November I’m doing tree branches. Of course I continue to include special occasions.

The yellow hills are from my trip to California.

As much as I’ve enjoyed this, I have decided not to do it again in 2011. I have learned so much, using the diary to try out new ideas, and techniques. There is really no worry about the final product because every day I weave just that one parallelogram, which is just one 365th of the tapestry!

Next year I plan to do a drawing diary, but instead of doing a separate drawing for each day, I want it to be like the tapestry where each day’s drawing is just part of a larger whole. So I will probably take a large piece of paper and make a grid. I will also choose a topic for each month, like, for example, Moon Snails. I might also choose a medium for each month, like a colored pencil, or pen and ink, or graphite pencils or china marker.

I hope to learn as much from my 2011 drawing diary as I have from this 2010 tapestry diary.

Victoria BC, Fremont CA and ATB8 in Nebraska

2010-10-14T02:11:00.001-04:00

Just back from a long trip. I was away for 13 days and it sure feels good to be home.

The first leg was a flight to Seattle, WA, where my friend and fellow tapestry weaver Ellen Ramsey picked me up at the airport and treated me to a delicious dinner at Wild Ginger. I stayed at a downtown hotel so I could make the 8AM passenger ferry to Victoria BC. The weather was OK, but the views would have been better on a clear day.

In Victoria I stayed with my Dad’s cousin, Kathy, who lives in a lovely little wooden house on a lake. I’ve heard about her my whole life, and we’ve been pen pals for a few years, so it was great to meet her in person. We had so much to talk about, since we have a lot of relatives in common: her mother and my grandmother were 2 of the youngest from a family of 14 kids. I spent hours sitting on the dock trying to get a photo of the huge turquoise dragonflies, but they would NOT sit still or even slow down. So instead I got lots of photos of the reeds and the reflections.

I spent a few hours exploring the city of Victoria, which is really lovely. It’s the provincial capitol and has some gorgeous architecture. I was inspired by the First Peoples exhibition in the Royal British Columbia Museum. There is also a collection of totem poles outside the museum in Thunderbird Park; you can see an online exhibit here.

Next stop: Fremont, California, to visit my daughter Zoe on her birthday. The weather was gorgeous, and it was great to see Zoe, her husband Jason, and the grandkitties.

I took the BART to San Francisco and the ferry to Sausalito one day, and met my cousin Posey.

We drove up to the Marin Headlands by the Golden Gate Bridge. The views are amazing from there.

Then I visited tapestry weaver and old friend Alex Friedman in her spacious studio.

Alex has been experimenting with 3 dimensional tapestry the past few years, this one is “Big Soft Flips,” 9x9”.

She was preparing to hang an exhibit, “A Show of Hands,” which is at the Gail Van Dyke Atrium Gallery, Marin Cancer Institute, Green Brae, CA until January 7, 2011.

Here’s the tapestry that is featured on the exhibit postcard. It is titled “Flow: Unfathomed.Last Wednesday I flew to Omaha, Nebraska and rented a car to drive to Lincoln. My purpose was to attend the opening reception of the American Tapestry Biennial 8 on Thursday evening.

I met friends Sue Pretty, Lany Eila and Elizabeth Quick, all fellow tapestry weavers and exhibit participants. The exhibit opening was planned to coincide with the Textile Society of America annual meeting.

We were not registered for the meeting, so instead of listening to lectures (some of which did sound very interesting), we visited some of the 32 exhibits in the area.

Our first stop was the TSA Marketplace in the hotel. It was hard to tear ourselves away, but luckily many of the vendors did not take credit cards, so we were able to get out before we bankrupted ourselves on delicious textiles.

I bought a lovely small indigo-dyed rug from Veggie Zapotec Arts. (It’s much more blue, but I took the photo at night….)

Then I bought a silk scarf from India, black with very thin white stripes. I always like to match my tapestry at the opening reception!

Next we drove to the Elder Gallery on the Nebraska Wesleyan campus, and had a nice, leisurely visit with ATB8.

Since we were the only visitors I got a lot of photos without people in the way. This is an impressive exhibit, with a lot of variety. It’s never easy to hang such a show, but the 3 room gallery is very nice, and they did a great job.

My only complaint is that there were a few areas that were not quite adequately lighted, like the very top of this group, which is Archie Brennan’s tapestry. Below left is Janet Clark, then me on the right, then Pat Williams below.

Don’t forget you can click on the image to see it full sized.

Top, left to right: Rebecca Mezoff, Lynn Cornelius, Joanna Foslien, Mary Zicafoose and Dorothea Van de Winkel. Below, left to right: John Nicholson (above), Sarah Swett, Marie-Thumette Brichard, Marianne Haller (above) and Christine Pradel-Lien.

Top, left to right: Anne Jackson, Ulrikka Mokdad, Lany Eila, Barbara Heller, Susan Hart Henegar. Below, left to right: Susan Martin Maffei, Urban Jupena (above), Linda Rees, Kathy Spoering, Maximo Laura, Susan Iverson (above), Manuella Cocchis, Agneta Henerud

Top, left to right: Michael Rohde, Sarah Swett, Anne Brodersen, Ann Naustdal. Below, left to right: Joanne Sanburg (above), Don Burns, Suzanne Pretty (FIRST PRIZE!), Inge Norgaard, Jennie Lee Henderson.

This is an interesting grouping, with a very large, 3 dimensional tapestry by Mary Kester and two tiny tapestries by Kathe Todd-Hooker. I think it works, but it looks a little shocking in the photo because you can’t see the space around them.

Top, left to right: Jennifer Sargent, Elaine Duncan (above), Kristin Saeterdal, Jane Freear-Wyld, Becky Stevens (above), Christine Pradel-Lien, Jane Freear-Wyld. To see all the tapestries just buy the catalog, it’s a bargain at $20.

I didn’t mean to photograph the entire exhibit, but as our group moved around I shot photos of whatever was unobstructed. Later I realized I’d photographed almost the entire show, so I apologize to those few whose tapestries were left out.

Next stop: International Quilt Study Center and Museum.

This modern museum on the University of Nebraska campus opened in 2008, and was on my must-see list.

It was founded in 1997 when Ardis and Robert James donated their large quilt collection.

We saw an exhibit of ralli, kantha, bullock covers and snake bags (really!) from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and another exhibit of doll quilts.

Very inspiring.

One of the South Asian quilts (above left) featured an unusual embroidery stitch, which I was wondering about, until I saw that it was illustrated on a poster.

It’s the Hoormutch Interlacing Stitch. It almost looks like darning.

Our last stop for the afternoon was the Nebraska State Museum, to visit “A Turning Point: Navajo Weaving in the 20th Century”

This show displays some of the very finest Navajo weavings, curated by Ann Hedlund. Sadly, photographs were not allowed, but there are some on the museum’s website.

An extra attraction was the demonstration by Navajo weavers Melissa and Lola Cody and Martha Schultz. I met Melissa at the Southwest Indian Arts Fair a few years ago, and was impressed back then by the large and very intricate rug she was just beginning.

It was fun to catch up and see photos of the finished piece. I don’t think she has a website, but here’s a photo of her demo loom with a piece in progress.

Finally it was time for the ATB8 opening reception. There was quite a crowd, and a lot of the artists were present. Exhibit chairs Michael Rohde and Susan Iverson said a few words, then the artists were introduced, and the juror, Rebecca A.T. Stevens asked if perhaps we would each stand next to our tapestry so people could ask us about our work. I had a good time meeting new people. Luckily for me, my tapestry was right above Pat Williams’, so we had each other to chat with between visitors. Even the food was excellent. Who knew Petit Fours could be so moist? I had to try one of each flavor of course.

Technorati Tags: American Tapestry Biennial,Tapestry Weaving

Tapestry Enchantment

2010-10-04T16:11:00.001-04:00

In 2006 I attended the ATA Tapestry Workshop/Retreat after Convergence in Grand Rapids. I was in Jane Kidd’s class; she is a fantastic artist and teacher and was a big inspiration. After 27 years of weaving tapestries, I am not looking for a lot of technical help, but can always use wisdom and guidance. It was also a blast to hang out on a college campus with a bunch of other tapestry weavers.So when ATA announced the 2010 program, there was no hesitation. I have never visited New Mexico before, and as you can tell from my previous posts, I was not disappointed one bit. In fact, I have promised to go back again, hopefully many times.

At the end of Convergence we hurried to St John’s College in Santa Fe to register and unload our luggage. The reason for the rush was the opening reception for “Enchanted Pathways,” the biennial non-juried small format tapestry exhibit, that evening.

This exhibit was at the William and Joseph Gallery on prestigious Canyon Rd. What a road! Gallery after gallery after gallery!

As befits a small tapestry exhibit, the room it was in was also quite small, and full of visitors during the opening reception. We had to (or GOT to!) walk through the other rooms of the gallery and admire some amazing artworks. This exhibit continues to grow; there were 179 tapestries by artists in 12 countries, and 28 US states. The maximum size is 10 x 10 inches.

There is a catalog for Enchanted Pathways, which can be purchased from ATA (American Tapestry Alliance), the sponsoring organization. As with all ATA projects, the work was done by dedicated volunteers. Letty Roller and her team did a fabulous job photographing the pieces and hanging the show.

I had enough time to make a quick visit to the Jane Sauer Gallery just up the road. WOW! I have never seen a gallery that included so many interesting artists in so many different media. Glass (I adore glass), paintings, sculpture, fiber, mixed media. I wish I’d had more time. The website says “At the forefront of innovation and excellence in a variety of media.” Yeah, definitely.

Back to St Johns, I loved my room. It was very plain, but very functional. White walls and floor, sturdy wooden furniture. Large desk and book case, adequate closet, bureau and bed. My window looked out onto trees and a distant view of the mountains.

We had perfect weather, at least if you’re like me and appreciate a good monsoon, which arrived at lunch time one day, and knocked out the power for a few hours. OK, weaving with no lights was a little challenging.

I have always been fascinated with St John’s College, with one campus in Annapolis, MD and the other one in Santa Fe. According to their website

“The all-required course of study is based on the reading, study, and discussion of the most important books of the Western tradition. There are no majors and no departments; all students follow the same program.

Students study from the classics of literature, philosophy, theology, psychology, political science, economics, history, mathematics, laboratory sciences, and music. No textbooks are used. The books are read in roughly chronological order, beginning with ancient Greece and continuing to modern times.”

So nice to know there are still students interested in getting this kind of education, but of course, we were there for something else entirely.

I took James Koehler’s workshop “Layers of Meaning.” The other workshop was Lynne Curran’s “Hand and Heart.” I wrote an article about James’s workshop for the ATA newsletter, Tapestry Topics. It should be coming out soon so you’ll have to read about it there.

I can tell you that I came home with a folder full of notes and handouts, and a head full of inspiration and ideas.

Although I was not in Lynne’s class, I enjoyed her slide lecture, and many nice chats with her, and with my fellow students .

A high point of the retreat was a field trip to James’s studio.

We carpooled over there and admired his looms, yarns, workspace, tapestries, art collection and garden.

The only thing I regret was not having time for more explorations of Santa Fe, but that was my own fault! I’ll be back!

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Weaving New Mexico,American Tapestry Alliance

More on New Mexico

2010-09-21T11:37:00.001-04:00

Saturday morning I took a brief driving tour of Albuquerque’s Old Town, in search of the Rattlesnake Museum.

Old town is lovely, and the museum was on my itinerary because my favorite celebrity, “TV’s Craig Ferguson” has a rattlesnake mug he got there.

It makes a good conversation starter on the Late Late Show. The Museum is really just a small gift shop with some tanks of snakes in the back room. I do like snakes, so it was fun.

The best part of Convergence is the Vendor’s Hall, with all the yarn, books, textiles, looms, spinning wheels etc. This would have been a good time to leave the credit cards in a safe place… I had a great time chatting with the folks in the Glimakra booth. They have a new cute little counterbalance loom called Julia. It’s tempting. I bought a skein of gorgeous very thin Swedish wool called Mora, that is perfect for tapestry. Unfortunately it only comes in a large skein, but I’m using a lot of black, so that’s what I bought.

I missed the Weaving Southwest booth, and now I wish I had tried the Rio Grande spinning wheel, it is very intriguing. I always loved spinning on the great wheel at Slater Mill, when I was a tour guide there. This one is similar but you get to sit down and use a foot treadle.

I visited the Convergence exhibit hall, and saw my own tapestry hanging in Small Expressions. The Eye Dazzlers exhibit was also great, and included one of Tommye Scanlin’s tapestries, called “Spring Profusion.” Isn’t it wonderful? I love the earthy yet ethereal colors, and the spirally ferns are so expressive.

I also got a look at the preview of the Navajo Rug Auction. So many stunning rugs.

Then Marcy and Tommye and I drove to Village Wools to see Kathe Todd-Hooker’s show. I had to make a concerted effort to ignore all that gorgeous yarn calling out to me as I walked to the gallery in the back of the shop!

I have seen many photos of Kathe’s tapestries, and a few actual tapestries, but seeing a bunch of them all in one place was awe-inspiring. These two tapestries, “Kona Pink” (left) and “So Many Chances” include threads that came from my mother’s life long collection of sewing thread. Kathe says she used Mom’s threads in the deep greens and turquoise, and in the orange in another tapestry “Kona Orange.”

We lived overseas for 18 years, and Mom sewed most of our clothes, as well as evening wear for herself. Her collection came from South Africa, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and England.

When I inherited her sewing stuff, I sent a bunch of the threads to Kathe, and I’m so happy she has been able to use them in creating beauty.

Next up, the opening reception for the show Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus. I had the address which I had copied from an email I received from somewhere listing all the exhibits. We had GPS in the rental car, so what could possibly go wrong? I’m still wondering where that address came from, because when we arrived, about 20 minutes SOUTHEAST of Albuquerque, this is what we found. Yes, a dirt parking lot with an RV and some guys on dirt bikes. The real gallery was about 20 minutes NORTHWEST of the city, so we didn’t have time to get there before ATA’s Enchanted Evening social back at the Convention Center. So far we had missed 2 excellent exhibits, and I was really bummed out.

Enchanted Evening was a nice chance to catch up with old friends and meet new ones. There was a dinner afterwards at a very nice restaurant. Then Sunday was the ATA Forum, “Unraveling the Creative Strand,” with slide lectures by James Koehler and Lynne Curran. Both are amazing artists, and their talks were informative, entertaining and inspiring. After the forum we took off for St John’s College in Santa Fe, for the ATA Educational Retreat, “Tapestry Enchantment.” More on that in the next installment!

Farewell Our Furry Friend

2010-09-21T00:14:00.001-04:00

Xerox was the best kitty ever. She was always gentle and loved sleeping on our laps. She never peed anywhere she should not have. She never climbed on the kitchen counters, never mind stealing the chicken that was defrosting on the counter like other cats!

She loved to be outdoors, at least in warm weather, but never had a flea! Apparently she was immune. We should have cloned her. She was an incompetent hunter and never caught anything but crickets until she was 8 years old and accidentally cornered a chipmunk.

Then she would occasionally leave us a mouse or chipmunk that was completely intact, just dead. I think she played with them til they died of fright. She only weighed 6.5 pounds, so even in old age people assumed she was a kitten.

She was an expert at sneaking into closets, attics, or anywhere else that was behind a closed door. You’d open the door briefly and never see her sneak in, then 12 hours later you’d wonder “Where could Xerox be?” The most impressive was her recent venture into the warming oven!

It’s hard to get used to being catless after 16 years and 8 months (actually we had 2 other cats before, who lived to be 16, so it’s more like 32 years). I keep looking around to make sure she’s not hiding in my studio before I close it up. I imagine I hear her calling me from outside the kitchen door, or asking me to put water in the bathtub.

Yes, she loved drinking out of bathtubs and sinks.

About 4 months ago she suddenly went blind. It was obvious when she started walking into walls.

Blind cats also vocalize, which is a bit different from the usual meows. More like AAARROOOL. When she went blind we discovered she didn’t hear very well either. The vet told us her retinas had detached and were all folded up, possibly due to kidney disease or high blood pressure.

She still seemed to enjoy life until last Thursday, and we enjoyed her company so much.

We miss her terribly.

Weft Interlock Front and Back

2010-08-30T23:02:00.001-04:00

The subject of weft interlocks came up on the tapestry list, and since I had written about it on this blog a few months ago, I jumped right in with an opinion.

Donna asked if it looks the same on both sides. I said I thought it did, and then she asked if I could post photos of the front and back of my samples.

Well, I am not at home, so my first reaction was that I could not do this. I hate to admit defeat, though, so I thought “I can just weave a small sample and photograph it.”

Although I have 3 portable looms here with me, they all have projects on them so I can’t just weave a sample and cut it off to see both sides.

I looked around for something I could put a warp on, and spotted a nice little chair.

Bran Flakes? You might be wondering how they function in tapestry weaving.

Is this why they call it Fiber Art?

I use a piece of the box to put between the 2 layers of warp so I don’t go crazy looking at both layers at once. I also use small strips of the box as a header at the beginning.

It’s only 12 warps wide and it took about 45 minutes to warp it up, weave the sample, cut it off and photograph it.

Unfortunately I forgot I would be looking at the back, so I had some short weft ends hanging out and to make the photo look nicer I just snipped them off leaving some fuzzy areas.

My conclusion after performing this scientific experiment?

The weft interlock looks the same on the front and the back; but don’t take my word for it, try a sample yourself!

It’s not that hard after all!

Small Expressions and Chaotic Fragments

2010-08-06T22:19:00.002-04:00

One of the exhibits I saw at Convergence was “Small Expressions.” It was an excellent show, and I was honored to be included, but a bit disappointed that it was in the Convention Center instead of in a gallery.

The organizers worked very hard to find gallery space in Albuquerque, but it was just not available. After all the work organizing, jurying, mailing and hanging this show, it’s too bad it was only up for 5 days!

The juror was Rebecca A.T. Stevens, Consulting Curator of Contemporary Textiles, at The Textile Museum in Washington, D.C. If I remember correctly from past years, there will be photos of the Small Expressions pieces in an upcoming issue of Shuttle, Spindle and Dyepot, the magazine of the Handweavers Guild of America.

My piece in Small Expressions was Chaotic Fragments: Part 4 (above right), 9x9 inches. It’s the 4th in the Chaotic Fragments series, and that whole series is based on a larger tapestry called Chaos, which is 24 x 19 inches.

Chaotic Fragments: Part 1 (left), 10x10 inches. In this piece I included some very thin strands of dark red and blue, so that the black is not really black.

Chaotic Fragments: Part 2 (right), 10x10 inches. A detail of this was on the cover of the catalog for Connections: Small Tapestry International. The designs for these first 2 came from fragments that were cut into strips and then reassembled.

Chaotic Fragments: Part 3 (below left), 14x14 inches has been accepted into the American Tapestry Biennial 8, which opens in Lincoln, Nebraska in September.

More about this exhibit in a previous blog post. Excuse the repetition, but I thought it would be fun to see all 5 of these together!

I’m working on 2 more tapestries in this series, one large like Chaos, and one small.

I’ve had a great time experimenting with different ways to make black and white marks in tapestry. Below is Chaos, 19x24 inches. All the Fragments come from this original cartoon, cut into pieces.

As I wrote in the ATB8 catalog, these tapestries evolved from a 27 year old oil painting of my messy studio table…..

there was copying, dismembering, tracing, then in a flash, the fallen cone of yarn morphed into a black hole in the universe. “I had found the chaos I was seeking.”

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Handweavers Guild of America,Handweaving

Totally Enchanted

2010-08-05T00:06:00.001-04:00

The license plate doesn’t lie, New Mexico is truly the Land of Enchantment. My trip was only a week, and packed with visits to exhibits, Convergence, and the ATA retreat, so I didn’t have nearly enough time to explore. I will definitely be back! I arrived in Albuquerque in the early afternoon, and was pleasantly surprised by the lack of traffic, and ease of driving. (OK, if you can drive in RI anything else seems easy).

The airport is only about 15 minutes from downtown. After checking into the remarkably inexpensive Hotel Blue, I called Donna Loraine Contractor and invited myself over to visit her studio. She gave me an important clue about finding my way when she said “Follow Central Ave east, that’s towards the mountains.” AHA! Central Ave is also Historic Route 66, and features some lovely old buildings, like this one, the Kimo Theater.

Sadly, my photos of Donna’s studio seem to have disappeared, except for this one. You can see her tapestries on her website, and read about her latest adventures on her blog.

This photo of Donna taking my picture in her studio shows her amazing AVL loom, and some of her many collections. As a glass collector myself, I’m jealous of the wonderful window that shows off her glass.

The next day, my friend (and roommate) Marcy and I drove to Taos, because I felt the need to visit Weaving Southwest. This is a wonderful gallery that also sells hand-dyed yarns, and looms and spinning wheels. It was the brainchild of the legendary Rachel Brown, who opened it in 1985 as a market for her Rio Grande Looms and Spinning Wheels. Even though the drive was incredibly scenic, I was a little doubtful about driving for 3 hours just to see one store, but when I walked in the door, I was overwhelmed with delight: totally worth the trip.

The walls are covered with tapestries, and there are racks full of handwoven rugs and tablerunners. And yarns, many many yarns.

After spending lots of time and money at Weaving Southwest, we walked a few blocks to LaLana Wools, a small shop just packed with plant dyed yarns and fibers.

More oohs and aahs, and more exercise for my credit card!

After a very late lunch, we hoped to get back to Albuquerque in time for an opening reception, but it started raining so hard we couldn’t get back to the car for almost an hour!

Of course we were prepared, with a raincoat and an umbrella…..in the car. All the way back to Albuquerque we could see lightning off in the distance in every direction, and occasionally had to slow down for more torrential rains.

New Mexico has the most amazing clouds, particularly during this “monsoon season!”

We missed the opening reception, but the drive was spectacular.

Stay tuned, there will be lots more about New Mexico.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,New Mexico

American Tapestry Biennial 8 Catalog

2010-07-13T00:44:00.001-04:00

I received my complimentary ATB8 catalog recently; that’s because I am one of the lucky ones whose work was accepted for this, the Cadillac of tapestry exhibits. I know, it’s a weird analogy, but my father worked for GM his whole life, so humor me.

I don’t want to spoil the surprise for those who will see this exhibit or buy the catalog, so here is a TINY image of my tapestry. It’s Chaotic Fragments: Part 3, 14x14”

In the past, the American Tapestry Alliance’s prestigious, international juried ATB shows have opened during the big biennial summer weaving conference, Convergence, but this time a gallery could not be found at the conference venue, Albuquerque, NM. So the exhibit will open September 20-November 15, 2010, at the Elder Gallery, in Lincoln, NE, in conjunction with the Textile Society of America conference.

It will also travel to the American Textile History Museum in Lowell, MA, January 22-May 1, 2011.

It’s really too bad it won’t be showing during Convergence, since so many weavers will be in Albuquerque, and I remember gallery sitting at past ATBs, where many conference attendees told me it’s always their favorite exhibit. They will miss it this year.

Meanwhile, the catalogs have already been printed; they will be available at Convergence, and can also be purchased online or by mail through the American Tapestry Alliance website.

It’s an excellent catalog. Technically it’s perfect: no typos, no errors, layout and print quality are perfect. 53 pages of tapestries in full color, YUM!

The front cover is a slightly cropped version of “Riverroad” by John Nicholson. The back cover is a detail from “Peggy” by Joanne Sanburg, and I have to confess, it’s one of the funniest tapestries I’ve ever seen, while irresistably sumptuous in color and texture. Tempted to buy the catalog?

The juror, Rebecca A.T. Stevens, is a renowned scholar with a deep knowledge of tapestry, and Consulting Curator of Contemporary Textiles for the Textile Museum in Washington D.C. Her essay is thought provoking. A second essay is by Paula Owen, president and CEO of Southwest School of Art and Craft. She writes about her 10 favorite tapestries from this exhibit.

I was very nervous that maybe the photo of my tapestry might be out of focus or something. In the past I have seen catalogs where one or two of the photos were not clear, but I was quite relieved to see how nicely my photo printed up.

I have entered this show many times before, but this is the first time I’ve been accepted. Submitting all the catalog information caused me a few moments of anxiety, because after all, once it’s in print, it’s permanent!

So I agonized over writing the artist statement and the brief bio, and which photo of myself to submit.

Here’s the original photo that I cropped to show just my face.

It’s me and my old 9th grade best friend, Dagge, when we reunited in northern Sweden last September.

It makes me happy to know that she was standing next to me when the photo was taken, even though you can’t see her in the catalog.

It’s as if she’s there holding my hand and keeping me company.

I chose the other one for the catalog because it’s more flattering, but I love this one with us laughing together, just like old times!

Technorati Tags: American Tapestry Biennial,ATB8,Tapestry Weaving

No More Homework, No More Books

2010-07-06T00:06:00.001-04:00

No More Teachers’ Dirty Looks!

My last tapestry class finished up a few weeks ago, so I guess it’s really summer vacation!

I’ve had a total of 14 students since January. The classes were 2 hours a week for 4 weeks, and were planned that way because people have a hard time committing to more than 4 weeks at a time.

After the initial 4 weeks, most students opted to do another 4, because there is so much to learn.

It sounds like a cliché, but it’s really true: I did learn as much as the students.

For example, because it’s so difficult to weave a circle (and on these looms they only have 24 warps to do it on) I discovered it makes more sense to try a half circle first!

I’m looking forward to next fall when I can plan some more classes.

The hardest part is scheduling. Everyone has so many other demands on their time.

Here are some photos of tapestries by the students in my last class.

All are samplers, in which students practiced weaving the basic shapes, rectangles, triangles and curves, plus stripes, pick and pick, and hatching.

The detail on the left includes an ancient Coptic dolphin.

Can you see it?

Hint: it’s swimming in blue water!

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Tapestry Classes

It’s All About the Flowers!

2010-06-10T23:33:00.001-04:00

This is the worst time of year to weave. How can I stay inside with so many flowers blooming?

True, my tapestry diary for May was woven in all the sickly sweet flower colors! So I’ve been out photographing my favorites.

I love foxgloves, but would not have them in my garden when my kids were little. They are quite poisonous, unless of course, you have a heart condition that requires digitalis, then perhaps they’d be good for you?

At our last house, I found them in the garden and observed that there were some with pink flowers and some with white.

Since I like the white ones best I began to cut off all the pink blooms each year, so that only the white ones would set seed. (Foxgloves are biennials)

It worked, but you always get a few pink ones that come up anyway. So I have pink in my driveway garden, and white far away in the front yard next to the stone wall. This year there was only one pink among the white. I cut it down right away, even though it was a very pretty pale pink.

The roses are all in full bloom, but with all that hot weather we had 2 weeks ago (one day it got up to 99F!) the earliest ones bloomed like crazy all at once, and will go by very soon.

This red knockout is humungous, it has swallowed up the salvia and a bunch of daylilies.

If you have a large space to fill, this is your rose!

Sadly, no fragrance, but I guess you can’t have everything.

For fragrance, I love “Topaz Jewel,” the yellow Rosa Rugosa.

The flowers are gorgeous too, but talk about thorns! It’s covered in vicious thorns right up to the flowers. No picking these without leather gloves!

The buds are tinged with pink. This rose blooms early and then again in the fall.

When we moved here 5 years ago, the “Foundation” plants on either side of the front door were overgrown and ugly, so I tore them all out (except for 2 giant, ancient white azaleas, which I radically pruned) and planted new.

My two Endless Summer hydrangeas, on either side of the front door are getting so big I can’t get to the faucet anymore. They are about 5 feet tall and wide.

Everything is so well established I guess I won’t have to water them anyway.

I love these when the flowers first come out and are just starting to turn blue. A week later, they are almost solid blue and getting nice and round.

These plants bloom on old wood, like other blue hydrangeas, and also on the new wood, so even if you have a brutally cold winter you have flowers.

If the buds make it through the winter, as they did this year, then it will live up to its name and bloom endlessly! Did you know that hydrangea means “water loving?” Perfect for our yard, which is very very wet.

Next to the hydrangea is a pink knockout rose, which is also getting a bit too big for its space. I’ll have to prune everything this fall.

I love the simple flowers, like wild beach roses, and the buds are absolutely adorable. In front of this rose are small Stella D’Oro daylilies. When they are all in bloom, it’s blue, pink and yellow. So pretty. The first daylilies just opened up a few days ago.

Despite all these modern, carefully bred and very well-behaved plants, one of my favorites is this wild daisy.

I rescued one of these from the lawn at our old house, and once it was in the garden, it flourished and reseeded. I have as many as I want now, and forever.

Another weedy plant that I love is feverfew, with its smaller daisy-like flowers. They pop up everywhere, and I enjoy seeing them bloom between the cracks in the driveway! I don’t mind plants like this as long as they are easy to pull out, which these are.

This weekend I hope to finish planting annuals in the few spaces left in the gardens, and in pots for the back porch. Sadly, I also have to eradicate hundreds of poison ivy plants that pop up every year. If only the neighbors would control the giant seed-producing vines growing up their trees….sigh. Between the poison ivy and the Lyme Disease-bearing deer ticks, I have to put on my hazmat gear every time I work in the yard.

Hopefully I’ll have time to do all this, AND watch the World Cup match between USA and England on Saturday.

Handmade Weaving Implements

2010-06-06T23:34:00.001-04:00

I thought I had already posted something about these lovely shuttles my husband, Kim, made for me, but now I can’t find it.

Kim has made me many frame looms over the years. One is very small, and I use it on trains and planes. I find it difficult using my fingers to pick up the warps and make a shed, when the warp threads are so small, so I asked him to make me these.

They are based on the tongue depressors I used in my classes with school children years ago, only much smaller, and much nicer. They are about 3 inches long, and made of hardwood.

I discovered that, in addition to using them like a yarn needle, with the weft just threaded through the hole, I can also wrap the weft around like a bobbin.

Used like a needle, I can pick up the warps to make a shed, and used like a bobbin they are good for just passing the weft through the shed. They are good with the Mirrix, which makes a shed, but a very narrow one; these fit much easier than a bobbin.

I have also made weaving tools myself, from the various sizes of wood craft sticks I’ve bought at Michaels craft store.

I bought myself a small electric drill, because it’s very hard to drill a small hole in a small tool with a large heavy drill. The shaping is done with coarse sandpaper, then fine sandpaper smoothes them out. This photo shows the scale, Kim’s shuttles on the left, my own on the right, with my favorite ruler. I bought this for $1 at an antique store. My favorite antiques are those I can actually use!

The Teacher Learns about Weft Interlocks

2010-05-31T22:35:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago I was teaching the weft interlock to a student, when we both observed that it sometimes looked really good and other times it looked awful. I have always hated using this technique and now I know why! Because I was doing it wrong.

I had always taught that it’s important to be consistent about which weft goes under and which one goes over, which is somewhat true, but it’s far more complicated than that.

After consulting many books, and trying it out myself, I finally made sense of it.

Carol Russell’s book explains it, but I couldn’t understand the explanation until I tried it.

Here goes.

When the 2 wefts meet in the same shed, they will meet between 2 warps.

One of those wefts will have to go under a raised warp afterwards, and it is THAT WEFT that must go under the other, then back over it and weave itself into the next shed first.

If you do it the other way, then the join will look lumpy, as you can see in this example.

Here you can see the correctly woven join at the bottom, then when I shifted to the next warp space on the right, but continued to weave the left weft first, it came out wrong. Messy and lumpy.

So instead of saying that you must always weave the left hand (or right hand) weft first, which is what I used to say, I would now say that you have to judge it by which one goes UNDER a RAISED WARP; and that will change each time you move to the next space.

So if you are moving over one warp at a time, you will have to alternate left and right. Try it! You’ll see.

Now that I’ve got the hang of it, I’ve discovered what a lovely join it is, and have been playing with it this weekend, so that I can offer examples for my students. It certainly makes a lot of sense when you have a long vertical line.

I realize that this will be different if you weave all your wefts in the same direction while in the same shed, but since I preach the “meet and separate” method, where adjacent wefts go in opposite directions in the same shed, this is how it works for me.

It’s the official beginning of summer here on Cape Cod, where I’ve spent the Memorial Day weekend with my sister and her family, cleaning the cottage inside and out.

The weather has been perfect, and I enjoyed paddling my kayak in Cape Cod Bay. The water was not as cold as I expected, so I even went for a brief swim yesterday. This morning it was so smoky that I couldn’t stand being outside. We discovered it was from wild fires hundreds of miles to the north in Quebec, but luckily for us, the wind changed in the afternoon and the air cleared.

Alpacas and Goats

2010-05-19T22:30:00.001-04:00

…but no sheep! Just lots of wool at the RI Wool and Fiber Festival. For some reason I thought it was the RI Sheep and Wool Festival.

All the signs said “Fiber Festival,” which really made me wonder if anyone who was not already into fiber would be encouraged to attend.

Most people think Fiber is what you find in healthy breakfast cereals.

I spent the day demonstrating tapestry weaving on my Friendly Loom, and helping children weave on little frame looms. I took this photo before I adjusted the height of the loom. It gets shortened to fit in the car.

It was a gorgeous day, sunny and just warm enough but a little windy.

I had to borrow two large rocks from the nearby stone wall to put on the loom’s feet, after it almost blew over. It was fun to see many friends and some of my students who were participating in the Sheep to Shawl demonstration.

Here’s the tapestry I was weaving…..I think I’ll unweave it. I usually weave with about 9 or 10 warps per inch, and this is only 4 1/2. ACK! It’s really hard to make a nice steep diagonal line, never mind a smooth curve. It was fun to weave something that grows so quickly, but I think I’ll re-warp the loom with more warps per inch before the next time I demonstrate.

I love to introduce people to tapestry weaving. You might say I’m kind of a tapestry evangelist.

My tent-mate was a hooker, just like my Mom (who also got a big kick out of referring to herself this way!) only instead of rugs, Kit Salisbury hooks smaller projects like tea cozies, runners etc.

I particularly admired her sheep and cows.

There was a stream of children visiting our tent and concentrating on hooking small houses and the like, and weaving on my frame looms.

I can’t believe I’ve never been to Coggeshall Farm before, since I’ve lived in Rhode Island for 26 years.

It’s a small historic farm on a hill overlooking the salt marsh, on the edge of Colt State Park. I know my kids visited on school field trips, like very other RI school child! Between Coggeshall Farm and Slater Mill Historic Site, you won’t find too many Rhode Islanders who are unfamiliar with basic textile processes.

Here’s the marsh right across the street from the festival.

Our tent was next to a little shed in front of which a historic re-enactor was demonstrating flax preparation and spinning. His spiel was very amusing and I didn’t get tired of hearing it even after the first 20 times or so!

I bought a lovely silver and brass wool needle from Leslie Wind, who was demonstrating her jewelry making right next door. I was tempted by her lovely shawl pins, but was feeling a big frugal.

Another neighbor, Rose Ann Hunter introduced me to an amazing collection of pieces made with early American textile techniques that she has researched over the years.

All of these are creative ways to reuse the smallest fabric scraps, which are gathered, rolled and otherwise manipulated before being assembled. I particularly love her “Standing Wool” Rugs.

It’s hard to describe how this is done, but you might be able to tell from looking at the photos on her website.

I bought a pair of incredibly soft socks from the owners of these adorable alpacas, who live right here in RI, at Ice Pond Farm. They look so huggable. We’re having a few cold rainy days now and the socks are keeping my feet nice and warm.

This is Heidi, a pygora goat, whose fleece is heavenly. This breed is a cross between pygmy and angora goats. Heidi’s little friend is a lovely shade of grayish tan.

There were some lovely lacy scarves knitted from their fleeces. SOOO soft.

I think I stumbled on the best way to immunize myself against the temptation to add to my yarn stash.

A few days before the festival I was looking for a particular yarn for my demonstration tapestry (which I never found) and ended up taking all the storage containers out of my studio closet.

These boxes are in addition to the yarns on my shelves, and in large plastic jugs, assorted baskets, and in the cedar chest.

It was much easier to resist all the fabulous yarn at the festival, since that experience was fresh in my mind! I found myself thinking “Yes, but I already have an entire box or that kind of yarn, which I am not using….”

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Wool,Spinning,Alpaca,Coggeshall Farm

Spring Flowers Everywhere

2010-05-07T21:16:00.001-04:00

Flowers are blooming in the yard and on my loom. Now that it’s May, I have changed my color scheme for the tapestry diary.

May will be a riot of sickly sweet spring flower colors. I’m also having fun weaving viney flowery leafy shapes. Click on any photo to see it larger.

Here’s a basket of May colored yarns.

It’s hard to do anything inside, with the weather SO perfect.

Warm, sunny and dry, with delicious breezes and the occasional shower.

I always have to plant pansies first, as early as I can. That’s usually in March, but with the floods this year, I had to wait til April.

It’s impossible to choose, so I end up buying 6 of almost every color, and now I have at least 6 pots of pansies.

I grow them in pots so I can move them into the shade as the weather gets hotter, and it also helps to keep the slugs away.

These small violas are the ones I always used to give to my Mom for Easter.

There were many azaleas sprinkled all over the yard and in the flower gardens when we moved into this house 5 years ago. I don’t like them in the sunny flower gardens, and would NEVER choose some of the acidic psychedelic colors which can’t even be captured accurately in a photo. (that purple is more of a neon fuscia shade) So I moved a bunch of them to a spot under the tall trees in the front yard.

I have fond memories of azaleas growing in the shade of tall trees in North Carolina and mine are doing very well in their new location. Clusters of tiny bluets are sprinkled around between the azaleas.

This huge azalea, which is about 7 feet tall, lives in the back yard next to the stone wall. I have to be vigilant because various evil vines like Asian bittersweet and wild blackberries, dewberries and grapes, come creeping over the wall and try to strangle my shrubs and trees.

I was thrilled to spot these gorgeous blood red rhododendron blooms from across the yard. This color is unusual, as most of the rhodies here are in shades of pink, or purplish pink.

This rhodie was too close to the house, in a sunny spot I wanted to use for a perennial garden, so I moved it 4 years ago.

The next year it seemed to be dead so I cut it all the way back to about 6 inches, and for the past few years it’s only had a few leaves on it. If you look closely you’ll see wild blackberries growing around it. I was determined to get rid of them finally this year, but then I noticed they are covered with flowers, so maybe I’ll let them live until August and see if I get a bunch of good berries.

My favorite spring plant is this white Japanese bleeding heart, which is right by the back door, and grows from a tiny sprout to a bushel basket sized lush green plant in just a few weeks.

It’s covered in pure white hearts on gracefully arching stems, that stick around for a month or more.

So, for the month of May, I’ll be wallowing in flower colors, in the studio and the gardens.

Not Much Weaving

2010-04-28T22:55:00.001-04:00

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.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving

What’s Going On?

2010-04-08T19:22:00.001-04:00

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.

Technorati Tags: tapestry,tapestry weaving

New Mini-Bobbins

2010-03-27T22:05:00.001-04:00

OK, so it was my idea, but Kim had to assemble them. Having a woodworker husband has spoiled me!

When I started weaving tapestries we were poor starving students, and there was no way I was going to buy bobbins. For 25 years I have used butterflies, or just short strands of wool.

A few years ago I tried some Aubusson bobbins, the ones that are rounded on both ends, and I like them very much. This photo shows the Aubusson bobbin on top, and my 2 sizes of mini-bobbin below.

I often work small, and I use fairly thin weft, so it seems silly to use such large bobbins.

I also weave on frame looms sometimes, and since the shed is not that big, I wanted something smaller.

I just knew there had to be something out there that would function as a mini-bobbin, and then Kim told me about this great website: http://www.caseyswood.com/shoppingcart/zen-cart/

I looked under Shaker Pegs, and found 2 5/16” tie pegs. Then I found dowel caps whose holes are the same width as the peg: 3/16”.

I also bought some dowels the same size, so we could make some slightly longer bobbins.

My problem was that the dowels and the pegs were slightly too thick to fit into the holes on the dowel caps. I tried sanding them, but then they were uneven.

Kim used his excellent woodworking skills, and a little glue, and in a very short time he brought me a whole bag of bobbins! I’m already using a bunch of the longer ones, and we still have a dowel and some caps to make more. With the fairly thin wefts I use, I can fit about a 24” piece on the longer bobbin.

I tried using the tie pegs the way they come, and it worked OK, but I didn’t like it as much. I think you would not be able to put as much yarn on it, because it would slide off the end.

I had a little help with the photography from Xerox, my 16 year old cat, who came in and knocked over the cup full of bobbins.

She’s been acting a little weird since she discovered my Catmint plant the other day! Here she is rolling around on it.

Click on any photo to see it full sized.

Very Impressive Student Work

2010-03-24T23:14:00.001-04:00

My tapestry classes are going very well. We have a lot of fun, and the students are totally “GETTING IT!”

The Wednesday morning group finished 4 weeks (although we had a few snowy days to contend with), and are taking a break until late April, when we’ll do another 4 weeks.

They were my first group, my guinea pigs, and they took off like a shot, jumping right to the advanced techniques. Before I knew it, they were all weaving circles! YIKES!

I had to re-design my sampler. Now it has more specific elements listed, and some of the advanced techniques are on a separate sheet, so I can present those when I feel the students are ready.

The Monday class is almost done with their second 4 weeks. Two students are weaving every element on the sampler.

Two students have finished the sampler and are working on tapestries now.

I have never seen a cartoon drawn on a post-it note, never mind HALF a post-it, so I had to document it!

She is weaving it bigger than this, obviously. In this case the cartoon will be a rough guide, as she works with color blending in lovely muted shades of green.

If you’re wondering why you don’t see any pick-and-pick, it’s because I’ve noticed this is one of the hardest techniques to understand. So it gets introduced later, after all the basic shapes have been covered.

Hopefully I’ll get good photos of every student’s work and post them all together sometime soon.

Finally! Just in the Nick of Time

2010-03-14T22:12:00.001-04:00

The stupid thing is that I finished my Enchanted Pathways tapestry, “Mille Fleurs Minus 978,” back in November. Then I couldn’t stand to waste all that extra warp, so I decided to weave another tapestry on the back side of the frame loom. It’s from a photo I took of Castelgrande, a castle in Bellinzona, Ticino, the Italian canton of Switzerland. Here it is, all finished.

A few weeks ago, I realized I’d better finish it , so I could cut them both off and send my entry to New Mexico. Then I ran out of a color. I thought I had plenty of it, but it turns out the color I had was slightly different. Even though it was only 1/3 of the weft bundle, it was sky, and I was afraid the difference would be noticeable.

Luckily I found a lovely website that carries Appleton, among other things. It’s the Needlework Corner. Then life intervened, and next thing I knew, I was at UPS, paying way too much money to have my tapestry delivered in 48 hours. Whew, it was worth every penny, but the exhibit chair had a brilliant idea: next time we should get everyone to send in their entries early, and donate the savings to ATA!

I’m not sure how we’d get all the procrastinators to change their ways…..er, I mean OUR ways!

In case you’ve forgotten, I’d prefer that you all be surprised when you see my tapestry, so I won’t post a photo here until the show opens. The title is because my Mille Fleurs tapestry has only 22 flowers, instead of the thousand that the title implies. All the flowers are Swiss alpine wildflowers. Here are 2 Edelweiss.

Exhibit Photos

2010-03-13T23:23:00.001-05:00

I’m very pleased with the way Chaotic Fragments Duet, my tapestry diptych was hung at the Imago Gallery.

They hung them one above the other instead of side by side, which is probably the best arrangement.

On one side is a photograph of Africa in very muted neutral colors, and on the left, a lovely print in similar colors. It all coordinates very nicely

I had a good time on Thursday evening at the opening reception, where I met some other artists.

One was Ewa Lenk, a potter who admired my tapestries because she knows how they were made. She told me that when she first came to the USA from Poland, about 25 years ago, her husband made her a large frame loom, and she wove a rug for her living room! WOW!

I got her permission to photograph this gorgeous pot. It’s so organic, and reminds me of the sand collars we find in Cape Cod bay at low tide. They are made by moon snails.

On Sunday there was an art talk by Deborah Baronas, an artist with a background in textile design. Very interesting talk, and very impressive work. At the art talk there were only about 15 people, so I had a chance to chat with the Art League’s president. I am excited to be part of this group of artists.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving,Art League of Rhode Island,Imago Gallery

Chaotic Fragments at Imago Gallery

2010-03-01T23:28:00.001-05:00

My Chaotic Fragments tapestries are at the Imago Gallery, 24 Market St, Warren, RI, from March 3-21.

The event is the Art League of RI 4th Annual Associate Members’ Exhibit. The opening reception is Thursday, March 4th, from 5.30-8pm.

There is a Art Talk on Sunday, March 7th, Noon – 1.00.

I dropped them off yesterday, and it’s a lovely space.

They will be exhibited as a diptych, and they can be either side by side or one over the other.

I’ll see on Thursday!

Tapestry Diary – 7 Weeks

2010-02-21T21:03:00.002-05:00

I’ve been working on my tapestry diary for 7 weeks now. One day a few weeks ago, I was having a really lousy day, and when I realized I still had my diary entry to look forward to, it was such a relief.

Sometimes I find myself wondering if I’ll get bored weaving the same shape every single day, but I always find some new variation.

Of course, there are the special days when I get to weave a symbol or text, like this Valentines Day heart. (Which is lavender, by the way, but for some reason, it turned out blue in this photo)

Then I decided to try Peter Collingwood’s horizontal lines, made by using 2 colors of weft in the same shed. It’s on page 98 of his classic book The Techniques of Rug Weaving. The chapter is “One-Shuttle Techniques,” and the section is “Twisted Wefts.”

When weaving with 2 colors of weft in the same shed, they can either form specks, or they can form very straight horizontal lines, unlike the wavy lines you get by weaving 1 pass each of two different colors (as you can see just below). It shows up much better with contrasting colors, but I used lavender and white. And in fact, I used 1 strand of white, with 2 strands of lavender.

I’m planning to do some more of this. It’s a technique I learned 30 years ago, but have not really used, other than to make a perfectly straight line. It would be fun to use it, as Collingwood describes, to form a design by twisting the weft to produce spots in one area and stripes in another.

Some days, I really enjoy the serenity of just weaving a solid color.

I am weaving this diary using only scraps from previous tapestries.

My mother was a rug hooker, and I have one of her scrap rugs in the studio. It’s not her original design, but it is her color scheme.

She reversed it from dark background with light squiggles, to a light background with colored squiggles.

Mom was well known for her excellent color sense, and her very fine, very even hooking. This rug is one of my favorites.

My Tapestry Guinea Pigs

2010-02-17T21:36:00.001-05:00

Just after returning from our sabbatical, I found out that, due to state budget cuts (passed down to the cities and towns), my part time librarian job had evaporated. I’ve been working there for 12 years, and they will keep me on the payroll, and call me to fill in now and then, but I have NO regular hours.

I go to the library once a week to work as a volunteer doing book repair. It’s a good learning experience, and I enjoy being there.

My immediate reaction was “Now I’d better do something else!”

While we were on sabbatical, I made a list of resolutions for changing my life when I got home. One item on the list was to teach tapestry classes.

A few days after I lost my job, I got an email from a member of the local weavers guild, asking if I knew anyone who was teaching tapestry classes in the area. I replied “Yes, actually, I am.”

I remember the first time I taught a weaving class. It was in about 1976, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, at a cooperative called Womancraft. Because I had no floor looms, we made frame looms, and I taught mainly tapestry techniques, because that’s what is fun on a frame loom.

The last time I taught tapestry classes, a few years ago, it was at an arts center, and it was such a pain dragging all the stuff down there, I decided that next time I would teach in my studio.

That way I have all my tools, books, tapestries and looms to share as needed, and also, my trusty assistant, Xerox, who can’t resist a shed stick.

It took some work to make space in the studio, and round up tables and chairs, frame looms, and yarns.

I told this first group that they would be my guinea pigs! It’s a good thing I limited the class size to 6, because that’s exactly how many can fit at the tables.

I made up a new sampler, and made copies of it, but realized pretty quickly that I had not included enough details.

I had imagined us going over it in class, but I had forgotten that they would take it home and try things on their own. So for the second group who started last week, I redid the whole thing, this time with more details, and illustrations.

All the students in the first group are members of the Weavers Guild, so they all have floor loom experience.

The second group includes Weavers Guild members, and Spinners Guild members, and again, all have woven on floor looms. So they are picking it up very quickly.

I decided to make the classes just 4 weeks, because most people have a hard time making a longer commitment.

I hope that we can schedule another 4 week class afterwards for those who would like to continue.

Unfortunately we had to cancel the 4th class last week, because of snow. And this week only 2 could come, so I only got a few photos. I’ll take some more next week.

So far it’s been a LOT of fun, and as I’ve said many times before, I am learning just as much as my students!

Weaving a Castle

2010-02-05T21:29:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-24T22:42:00.001-05:00

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

2010-01-03T22:44:00.001-05:00

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

2009-12-20T23:38:00.002-05:00

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

2009-11-25T18:55:00.001-05:00

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.

Swiss Tapestries

2009-11-19T17:28:00.002-05:00

Arriving at the Basel Historical Museum, I was disappointed to find that the entire downstairs, including most of the renowned tapestry collection, was in storage due to renovations.

There were a few tapestries in the gallery with all the gorgeous carved wood altars and religious figures. In this image you can see “The Effusion of the Holy Spirit” tapestry below the altarpiece.

I was impressed with how the tapestries were displayed: behind glass (but not far behind), so they could be down low, and people can get up very close to them. To preserve them from too much light, they have mechanical shades; you have to push a button to open the shade, which then closes again automatically in about 2 minutes. Of course that meant I had to keep opening them so I could examine the tapestries closely. The only problem is that you have no idea a tapestry is there, unless you happen to see someone opening the shade!

These are Swiss tapestries, woven in Basel and Aargau from 1480-1490. The tapestry pictured above is described as a “Pentecostal Altar Tapestry,” and I’m thinking they are all altar tapestries. They all feature religious figures standing in a row facing forwards. As for weaving style, I did not see any demi-duite, and what little hatching there I saw was for pattern or representation, and not for shading.

The backgrounds look like old silk velvet and brocade fabric patterns, and the catalog points out that it was common to have these types of fabrics hanging on walls, so they make an obvious background. The author says that the “representation of a textile within a textile was very popular with tapestry weavers…”

Along the bottom most of them have a few wildflowers, as if referring to the Mille Fleurs style, only instead of 1000 flowers, there are only 5, or 10 or at most 20.

One of the tapestries has missing weft in exactly the shapes of the feet, then I noticed that the remaining foot is black. I remembered the tapestry conservator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston telling us that they often used iron mordant to make black dyes, and that the iron rotted the weft.

In general these tapestries are in good condition for their age, although like many old tapestries, the yellows have faded, leaving lots of blue areas that used to be green. They are fairly small, most about 5 ft wide by 3 feet tall, although one, Three Scenes from the Life of Christ is bigger, about 9 feet wide.

There are no borders. The sett seemed to be about 17 epi and the wefts are quite fine.

I love the way they wove hair. In the Pentecostal tapestry they all look like they have dreadlocks!

One guy has locks of about 3 different colors.

In the Resurrection tapestry, they did a lovely job on Jesus’ hair and beard, even on the towel being held by St Veronica, with the image of Jesus’ face imprinted.

There is a lovely catalog of the permanent collections, with photos, (and including a few tapestries) and when I asked about buying it, I was told that if I filled out a survey I could have it for free! Then they had a small, inexpensive ($15) book of their tapestries, with photos, so of course I bought it. The title is “The Ancient Tapestries in the Basle Historical Museum,” text by Hans Lanz, Basel 1985. It’s more often cited by its German title “Die alten Bildteppiche im Historischen Museum Basel.” The book actually includes text in German, French and English in the same volume.

From the catalog, I can see that I’ll have to come back someday to see the rest of the collection. “Noblemen and Women Hawking,” “Depiction of the Power of Women,” and the charming “Wild Woman with Unicorn in a Forest Clearing,” which has the adorable brown unicorn, and the wild woman wearing a blue fur dress with holes in it for her bare breasts to stare out of.

Tapestries I saw, with apologies for the photos; the tapestries are behind glass, so there are reflections. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that photography is permitted, just not with a flash.

Five Women Saints:

St Barbara, St Agnes, St Dorothy, St Mary Magdalene and St Verena. (below left)

Resurrection of Christ.

Mary Magdalene and St Veronica (holding shroud with image of Christ’s face) and Two Angels. (below right)

Effusion of the Holy Spirit.

Mary and Holy Ghost (as dove) and 11 apostles. Pentecostal Altar Tapestry (below left)

Crucifixion, with Mary, John the Evangelist, St Francis of Assissi and St Clara. (Sorry, no photo of this one, click here instead)

Three Scenes from the Life of Christ (below)

REMEMBER! You can click on the images to see them larger!

British Tapestry Group Conference

2009-10-31T18:00:00.002-04:00

On Saturday, September 12, I attended the British Tapestry Group’s Conference Day, at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, in Stirling, Scotland, just down hill from the castle.

Standing outside, waiting for the doors to open, who should I bump into but Linda Wallace, a fellow board member, and recent Co-Director of ATA. She had come all the way from British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada, so I was not the only North American in attendance!

It was great to see so many tapestry weavers gathered in one place. I had a chance to talk with old acquaintances Joan Baxter and Louise Martin and met lots of new people too.

The conference included an exhibition called Weaving Within, Small Format Tapestries Woven by the British Tapestry Group.

There are 91 tapestries woven by 55 artists, including some fellow bloggers like Tommye Scanlin (USA), Marilyn Rea-Menzies (New Zealand), Meab Warburton (France) and Elaine Duncan(Canada). Other tapestries from North America are by Pamela Davis and Linda Wallace. Membership in the BTG is open to all.

“Out of the Ashes” by Linda Wallace.

This exhibition is very impressive. In fact, my husband was so impressed that I began to wonder if I should be insulted; after all this is not the first tapestry exhibition he has seen, and all the others are ones I have participated in myself….. There is a lot of talent and training in the group, and there are some very innovative works included, such as the 3D works by Margaret Crowther; shaped tapestries by a number of artists, many unusual materials like stainless steel in Linda Wallace’s piece, beads, painted pumpkin seeds, discs of fabric, various unusual fibers; knotted tapestry by Anne Jackson and the tapestry collages of Clare Coyle.

The more traditional tapestries also represent a wide range of designs and styles, and I have many favorites among these. Although there is no printed catalog, there is a brochure that includes one image per artist. It will be for sale sometime this month from the BTG website. (Sorry about the poor image quality, my copy is a bit wrinkled from use!)

“Weaving Within” hangs at both the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Stirling Castle, until Nov 8. So hop on a plane and a train and go! You’ve got a whole week!

The conference consisted of a day of lectures and a second day of workshops. I only attended the lecture day, and it was really fascinating. There were 4 main speakers, interspersed with numerous short presentations by participants in the exhibit.

I really enjoyed hearing from these tapestry artists, about the work they submitted for the exhibition, and I would give them all credit here, except that I mislaid my program. Sorry….

Joan Baxter spoke about the future of tapestry as a viable art form in the 21st Century, and asked us to think seriously about what we need to do to ensure its survival. It was a call to action!

Although Sara Brennan was listed on the conference program, she was not there, and instead we were treated to a delightful talk by Amanda Gizzi, about her work and her inspirations. She managed to be honest, insightful, profound and amusing all at once. I loved her comment about a man who dropped something, and as he got down to look for it on the floor, he happened to look out “a wee circular window,” and saw the world from a different perspective altogether.

Her work focuses on ordinary subjects, often with food and cooking. I love the tapestry titled “Pickled Peaches.”

Rudi Richardson spoke about his years in San Francisco, weaving tapestries for the legendary Mark Adams. This was very informative and filled in a lot of gaps in my knowledge of Adams, and San Francisco tapestry.

Dina Ward spoke about tapestry history, with many examples from around the world. She works at the Burrell Collection, which is in Glasgow, and has a superb tapestry collection. If I’d known, I might have been able to fit in a visit, but as it is, I’ll have to wait until next time I’m in the area. I also found out there are some interesting tapestries in Berne, Switzerland, which is just 45 minutes on the train from where we are staying now.

Dina said they are known as “The Burgundian Loot,” which is very intriguing!

I wish I could tell you more, but I decided to just relax and enjoy the experience, so unfortunately my meager notes are not that helpful. Next time you’ll just have to go yourself!

“WaterLily” by Tommye Scanlin

Unicorns Again!

2009-10-19T17:42:00.001-04:00

Last fall I attended a lecture at the University of Rhode Island, by Louise Martin, the head weaver of the unicorn tapestry project at Stirling Castle. I wrote about it on this blog and I said “I hope to visit next year.” So when we were planning our sabbatical trip, it was very high on my list of places to go.

As part of Historic Scotland’s renovation, research turned up an inventory of 100 tapestries in the castle during the time of King James V, in 1539; among these was a set called “The History of the Unicorn.” Nothing more is known about the set, but it was thought that they were woven at approximately the same time as the Hunt of the Unicorn Tapestries, currently in the Cloisters in New York.

Thus the project in which 2 teams of weavers, one at Stirling Castle, and one at West Dean Tapestry Studio, are recreating the 7 tapestries of the Hunt of the Unicorn. They will eventually be hung in the Queen's Presence Chamber in the Royal Palace, which is currently under renovation. The entire project is expected to take 12 years. Follow this link, and look for the video link at the bottom of the page. This is a photo taken in the nether bailey, just outside the tapestry studio.

On my first day in Stirling (see my travel blog, the Path and the Puddle for details) I walked uphill to the very impressive castle, and made my way to the weaving studio, where I was immediately impressed to find that the weavers have their very own guard! There I watched Rudy Richardson weaving for a while. You can stand directly behind the weavers, very close, but you can not speak to them while they weave. In fact, Rudy was listening to music on an iPod.

I found it very moving to see this tapestry being woven. The originals are among the most beautiful and celebrated tapestries in the world, and it was almost like being present at their creation, 500 years ago. The recreations, which are brand new, undamaged and unfaded, are exquisite, and the colors are delicious.

At 1pm, Rudy gave the daily “Weaver’s Talk,” which was very informative and gave me a chance to ask some questions. What a great way to educate the public about tapestry! People were fascinated. There is a life sized photo of the tapestry on the wall, and a weighted string hangs down to mark the point to which it has progressed. So it’s easy to see what shapes are being woven.

One of the other people in the audience was laughing at all the same things as me, so I decided she must be a tapestry weaver, and after the talk I introduced myself. It turned out to be Anne Jackson, one of the instructors for the upcoming British Tapestry Group workshops. We went up to the Chapel Royal together, and spent some time looking at the completed Unicorn tapestries. They are just fabulous, perfect in every way, and I just had to sit and look at them for a while.

Here are some things I learned:

Because of the ceiling height, the tapestries are being woven at 90 % of the size of the originals. Also, to save time and money, the warp sett has been reduced from the 17-19 epi (ends per inch) of the originals, to 10 epi. So there is an additional challenge in the interpretation, having to weave the same images, only slightly smaller and with fewer warps.

The warp yarns are cotton, which the weavers tell me keeps a more consistent tension than linen or wool. Most of the weft is Wensleydale wool, which is custom dyed to match the originals. A smaller amount of mercerized cotton is also used, to replace the silk of the originals because modern silk degrades very quickly. They are also using gold thread, spun around a cotton core, instead of the original gilt. To match the colors, they have private access to the originals in New York, and because of the size, they use a hydraulic lift to get up close.

The cartoon process starts with photographs of the originals, reduced to 90% of the original size, then traced and printed to make the finished guide. It takes 5 or 6 weeks to complete a cartoon. Although every tapestry requires some adjustment, because of damage and repairs, the most difficult challenge will be on the 5th tapestry. “The Mystic Hunt of the Unicorn,” consists only of 2 incomplete fragments. They will have to figure out what was most likely in the missing parts.

Another difference between the originals and the new tapestries is that these are being woven from the front instead of the back. West Dean Studio’s weavers have been using this method for years, because they like to see what they are doing, and I must say, I agree heartily.

I was surprised to see that they were weaving without any shedding mechanism, just picking the warps with their fingers. It was explained to me that most of the weavers had not used leashes before, so it was just as easy to pick the sheds by hand.

I saw weft yarns on bobbins, but the bobbins were only used to store the yarn, and to pack down the weft, not to pass it through the shed. They were not using butterflies either, just loose strands of wool. Apparently it was decided that the weight of the hanging bobbins put too much tension on the tapestry, and they also did not have enough.

I learned that to be true to the originals, and the weaving style of the period, there is no color mixing in the wefts. Only solid colors are used, and all the color mixing is accomplished with weaving techniques such as hatching, hachures and demi-duite (also known as pick and pick). Another technique you see in these tapestries is the use of small slits to make fine lines.

On Monday I went up to the castle again, and this time I got to see Mieko Konaka weaving, and hear her version of the Weaver’s Talk.

This project is so impressive, and the patience, skill and dedication of the weavers is amazing. Mieko was weaving a small orange tree, and she said she expected to be weaving that tree until December!

I look forward to seeing the 7 piece set hanging in the Queen’s Presence Chamber sometime in the future. Maybe you will too, but I highly recommend visiting while you can still see them weaving. It’s an experience I will never forget.

Technorati Tags: Unicorn Tapestries,Stirling Castle

The Queen’s Birthday Tapestries

2009-09-21T07:21:00.001-04:00

Imagine getting a set of monumental tapestries for your birthday!

These were commissioned on Queen Margrethe II of Denmark’s 50th birthday and delivered in 2000 for her 60^th. What anticipation! What excitement! What a price! $13,000,000 Danish Kroner (about $2,600,000).

You’d think they would be gorgeous, but then you might be a bit disappointed. Of course, one man’s meat is another man’s poison, or as my mother used to say “Everyone’s a bit strange except for me and thee and frankly, sometimes I wonder a bit about thee.” Anyway, I do hope the Queen loves them.

They are hanging in the Knight’s Hall at Christiansborg Palace, all 17 of them. The 11 large tapestries fit perfectly into the frames set into the marble paneling. The other 6 are smaller “entrefenetres,” which go between the windows. They were designed by the Danish sculptor Bjørn Nørgaard, and woven at the Gobelins and Beauvais studios in France. Here’s a link to some photos.

I was very impressed with the technical perfection of the weaving, but I don’t like the colors, style or compositions. The colors are garish, but perhaps I could learn to see them as luminous, or jewel-like, if the compositions didn’t seem completely disorganized. I know there is a tradition of medieval tapestries with very busy, even frenetic, compositions, but the really great ones are carefully worked out, balanced, fluid, graceful, and dynamic.

Some of the Queen’s tapestries, like “The Viking Age,” have an clearly defined structure, and I find that I’m beginning to like this one more and more.

Others, like “The Reformation,” come across as random and uninspired, with figures lined up in rows, as you can see below.

I object to the cartoony style of expression, particularly given the seriousness of the subject: the History of Denmark from the Viking Age to the Future. One of the tapestries, “Present,” depicts Queen Margrethe and her husband Prince Henrik, and their hands are about 3 times normal size. It makes them look awkward and unattractive, and it struck me as disrespectful.

Bjørn Nørgaard intended for these tapestries to be a lesson in Danish History, for recent generations who have not learned about it in school. He spent many hours devising a systematic plan for including innumerable narrative elements in each tapestry, and yet keeping a consistent formal structure over the entire project. He even chose to make full sized painted cartoons. He devoted 12 years to this project, so I feel bad about my (possibly uninformed) criticisms. Perhaps it’s a case of the intellectual concept over-riding purely visual or visceral concerns, or perhaps it’s just my taste.

I’m delighted that someone still wants to commission large original tapestries. These tapestries do fill up the large space in the Knight’s Hall, and the bright colors get your attention. Visitors seemed to enjoy puzzling over the diagrams provided, that explain all the people and objects and symbols in the tapestries.

I bought the book, “Tapestries for the Queen of Denmark,” (Peter Michael Hornung, ed.) and it’s very informative. I was pleased to see that it includes details about each tapestry, such as the name of the head weaver, number of shades of wool, time spent in preparation and weaving, number of weavers, dates, and size. It’s available used from Amazon.com.

Nørgaard seems quite respectful of the weavers, and knowledgeable about the process. I like this quotation from his interview in the book “….each and every square millimeter of these pictures is touched by human hand, and these people have invested their time in the tapestry. I believe quite naively that this is something you can read from the works. In a digital era with digital pictures, I think it is vital that we preserve pictures in which a great deal of time is invested.”

It’s sad that they spent such a huge amount of money, and so many years of artistic design and skilled weaving, to make something that is not beautiful. Given the number of brilliant tapestry weavers in Denmark, they could have had tapestries with the power to take your breath away; objects of exquisite beauty and grace.

I’d recommend visiting anyway, if you’re in the area, and I’d be curious to know how other tapestry weavers react. So far I have not spoken to anyone who disagreed with my position, but perhaps I’ll hear some dissenting opinions soon!

Danish Tapestry

2009-09-11T13:12:00.002-04:00

When I realized that my husband would be busy for 1 ½ of our 2 ½ days in Copenhagen, I decided to email Birgitta Hallberg, who I met last year at Convergence. I asked if I could visit her studio and she said she would meet me at my hotel at 10 am. When she arrived, I discovered she had invited Kari Guddal, another Danish tapestry weaver, to join us.

Kari has a car, so she kindly chauffeured us around for the day, and I got to visit not one, but two tapestry studios.

Birgitta’s studio is upstairs in her small house.

The room is dominated by a large floor loom, which she uses to weave her tapestries.

There is also a nice big table, with a frame loom clamped to it (I’ve got to try that), a wooden swift, and some small tapestries waiting for frames.

Birgitta weaves with thick weft bundles, in richly blended colors, and although she uses a cartoon, she makes up the colors as she goes along, interpreting the cartoon very loosely.

The result is a rich surface with very colorful, free and energetic marks.

Most of her tapestries are fairly large, but lately she has been enjoying working in small format as well.

As we were leaving the studio, I noticed some lace bobbins, and discovered that Birgitta makes, and teaches, bobbin lace.

The linen threads she is using for this piece are so thin you can barely see them.

Birgitta also has quite a green thumb, so it was lovely eating lunch in her garden among the flowers, grape vines, tomatoes, peach tree and fig tree.

We ate fresh home-grown grapes and tomatoes, both red and yellow, along with cheese and home-baked bread and home-made Elderflower Cordial.

Kari’s studio is in a building with other artist studios, and she shares a space with another artist who works in various media. Kari has a very old, very large vertical loom that is on loan to her from a Royal Castle in Denmark. The top and bottom rollers are gigantic. Click on the photo to see a larger image.

Behind the loom, you can see various sticks and things hanging neatly on the wall; definitely an improvement over my messy basket that keeps toppling over! She is weaving 2 smallish tapestries (about 20 inches wide) side by side, at the moment, but normally she works very large. One of her tapestries is 301 x 202 cm!

Kari uses only one type of wool, Norwegian Spelsau, and she dyes it all herself. In a 1998 catalog, she said she had dyed more than 300 different tones.

Her abstract tapestries have simple but intriguing compositions, with subtle, muted, earthy colors suggestive of landscape.

There is a feeling of ethereal light contrasting with deep warm darkness.

Kari gave me two catalogs of Danish tapestry. I could not resist accepting them, although to avoid paying for overweight luggage, Kim had ALL our books in his carry-on backpack, which now weighed about 50 pounds!

I’m enjoying the catalogs, and I’m amazed that there are so many accomplished tapestry weavers in such a small country. I’m also grateful to Birgitta and Kari for welcoming me into their studios.

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving Denmark,Tapestry Weaving

Oops, Forgot to Finish the Story

2009-09-11T11:42:00.005-04:00

Thanks, Edith, for pointing out that I never mentioned whether I finished my tapestry before leaving home. Yes, of course, in typical fashion I finished it about 2 days before we left, and managed to get a good photo or two.

I am not going to post a photo of it on the blog, because I am planning to enter it in ATB8. I'd be delighted if it could make it's debut there, but if not, then you'll be the first to see it, at least as a photo. I don't know why, it just makes me nervous to show it online before it's been entered in a juried show.

We've been traveling for almost 3 weeks now, and so far it has been fabulous. I have taken so many photos, and I'm spending a lot of time editing them. I'm behind on my blogging, but hope to catch up soon!

Right now I'm sitting in my B&B in Stirling, Scotland, having visited the castle and the tapesty studio (with unicorns in progress) today. I can't describe how moving it was to see the tapestry being woven. It is incredibly beautiful, as are the completed tapestries, but it's more than that; it feels like the closest I can come to seeing the original tapestries the way they were 500 years ago.

Tomorrow is the British Tapestry Group conference, which I will attend and report on later.

I'm also working on some other tapestry stories, so check in again soon.

Setting off on an Adventure

2009-08-19T23:17:00.003-04:00

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

2009-08-17T23:50:00.007-04:00

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

2009-08-09T00:12:00.012-04:00

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!

Whew, I made it

2009-07-31T23:03:00.006-04:00

I stayed up til 1.30 am to finish the postcard tapestry, and mailed it at 11 am on Monday morning. Fortunately I had the backing all ready to go. It's watercolor paper, with acrylic paint thinned down to look like watercolor, only permanent. Of course, once I had hemmed and ironed the tapestry, the backing was not an exact fit, and had to be trimmed a bit.

In an effort to avoid long lines, I tried the tiny post office in North Chatham, Massachusetts. It's just down the road from my Mom's nursing home. I hardly had to wait at all, and the postal worker was very helpful.

Imagine my surprise when I got an email on Wednesday, telling me it had already arrived in Arizona! I expected it to take at least 4 days. Kudos to the United States Postal Service!

The Weavers Dilemma

2009-07-26T22:14:00.004-04:00

This particular dilemma is unique to weavers. I wove a 6"x4" postcard for "Wish You Were Here," the upcoming exhibit at Tohono Chul Park. It was almost finished when I came to Cape Cod on vacation so I tossed the loom in my car, and brought along everything I needed to weave the hem and do the finishing.

The dilemma is that I can't bear to waste all the remaining warp on the loom, and this is a glorified frame loom, so if I were to cut off the postcard, the rest of the warp would be useless. I hate wasting materials, and I hate wasting time (the time it took to put the warp on the loom). So I said to myself "I'll just weave another small tapestry before I cut off the postcard."

What with all the sisterly activities, and a visit from cousins last week, I didn't get around to starting the second tapestry until a few days ago, so I've been a bit stressed over whether I'd be able to finish it in time to send off the postcard. In addition, the cartoon for the second tapestry is ridiculously detailed, so I had to leave out a lot in order to weave it, even on this 12 ends per inch warp. I don't like weaving at 12 epi any more, it's just too small and picky for my middle aged eyes and hands.

I know I have a few days left before I have to mail the postcard, but I am going home tomorrow, which means a lot of cleaning and packing then a lot of unpacking and catching up on 2 weeks of mail etc. I'm afraid once I get home I just won't get it done.

So now it's 10.20 pm, and I am almost ready to cut off. I just have a little bit of hem left to do, and my back is aching, so I'm taking a short break. If I'm really energetic, perhaps I can hem the postcard and attach the backing, then mail it from Cape Cod tomorrow morning?

Tapestry Bloggers on ATA Website

2009-07-26T13:50:00.002-04:00

The American Tapestry Alliance has a new educational article on the website. The title is "Blog Tech," and it's a series of essays by 6 tapestry bloggers, including yours truly, plus an introduction and resource list. It offers technical and inspirational insights into artists blogs, so check it out.

A Little Summer Distraction

2009-07-19T22:36:00.002-04:00

What happens when 3 sisters get together?

Decoupage!

Sister Greta is visiting Cape Cod, from Alberta, Canada, a rare treat. Sister Jan thought the bureau in the dining room needed a little updating from its 1968 avocado green “antiqued” look. Sister Sally came into piles of boat plans, old magazines and other boat miscellanea, when her son, Zach (a high school, soon to be college sailor), cleaned out an old boat building business. Sally confessed that she had been harboring a secret desire to engage in Decoupage, and since she’s the baby of the family we decided to humor her.

Step 1: Jan paints the bureau a color called Blue Dragon; after it dries we are all surprised to see it’s the exact shade known in our family as “Sally Blue.” Step 2: All 3 sisters spend an afternoon cutting out the coolest boats, text and diagrams, and piling them in boxes. Step 3: Sally wakes up early one morning and bravely begins arranging pieces on the top and the drawers. Step 4: Gluing with the mysterious substance called Mod Podge, on a hot afternoon (the FIRST hot afternoon this year!), with all the windows closed lest a gust of wind blow away our layout. Whew. Step 5: Adding a polyurethane finish for durability.

We chuckled over a drawing of a “Typical Crew” which had been altered by the designer, with a pencil, adding a shamrock tattoo and increasing his dimensions both bow and stern. I decided he needed a little more expansion in the bow.

Equally amusing are the reminders to “Remember the Stopwaters!” and to “Check for Twist or Warp by Eye.” There are useful diagrams of Boring and Screwdriving Tools, The Right and Wrong Way to Sharpen a Bit, not to mention Perry’s Perpetual Tidescope, showing the Approximate Times for High Water, Boston, 1947.

In this detail you can see the signature I pieced together from scrounged text, on the bottom right.

This being our first decoupage effort, it’s a little rough, but I think with all the boat lovers in the family, it will provide entertainment for years to come.

Just in case you were wondering why I don’t get more tapestry weaving done…..

Wish You Were Here

2009-07-03T15:33:00.008-04:00

I love this fiberart postcard exhibit, at the Tohono Chul Park's Gallery, in Tucson, Arizona. The idea is to create a postcard, and mail it, without an envelope, to the gallery, where they are all exhibited. I participated a few years ago, with this postcard, from a photo I had taken at Tumacacori.

That was my first visit to Tucson, I had flown there in February 2006, to drop off my daughter for the Audubon Expedition Institute. We even ate lunch at the Tohono Chul Park Cafe, so it seemed like a wonderful synchronicity when I heard about the exhibit a few weeks later.

Now here I am in 2009, with a half woven postcard. I have not been in the studio in 2 weeks because I've been sick.

I was sure it was flu, and I figured, since I'd had my seasonal flu vaccine last fall, that it must be Swine Flu. After the fever subsided, I continued to have terrible muscle/joint pains keeping me awake every night. Then the rash appeared.....well, considering I live less than 50 miles from Lyme, Connecticut, I should not be surprised that I have finally contracted Lyme Disease. Or so it seems. After 3 doses of Doxycycline, my aches have disappeared.

So, another day or two of lying around, and I hope to get in there and finish my postcard.

This image is from a family visit to the Flagstaff area in 2002.

The photo was taken near Sedona, at the Palatki Ruins, a truly magical place. The contrast between red rocks and turquoise sky is so intense. Visiting Arizona is such fun for a New Englander, I always feel like I'm on another planet altogether! OK, that's particularly true in February; it's not hard to figure out why Arizona is so crowded that time of year!