Not Much Weaving

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

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

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

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

Technorati Tags: Tapestry Weaving

What’s Going On?

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

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

Here’s a good slideshow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

Technorati Tags: tapestry,tapestry weaving

New Mini-Bobbins

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

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

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.