Another Summer Begins

Here it is, Memorial Day Weekend, the traditional beginning of summer. Our family gathers at the Cape Cod summer cottage to sweep up the dead insects that have piled up during the winter. The water is turned back on, the hot water heater fired up, food returned to the shelves, the tall grass in the yard is mowed, screens replace windows on the porch. This year there was a long To Do list, but it was still nice to get together and escape from normal life.

Thanks to the slow economy, I don't have to go to work tomorrow, so I get to stay an extra night and avoid the traffic backing up from the bridges over Cape Cod Canal. This year we have internet at the cottage, so I can blog while I'm here....that's nice, but maybe I'd rather be doing a jigsaw puzzle or playing cards. Things change.

When my Mom was growing up in New Jersey, her parents used to pull them out of school Memorial Day Weekend (2 or 3 weeks before the end of the school year) to go to Cape Cod and plant the vegetable garden. Although my grandparents were not wealthy, they did not allow their children to work for money until they finished high school. Perhaps because my grandfather had to leave school to work at 14, after his father died. Although they put in a lot of hours in the garden, and helped to can vegetables to last through the winter, they had a whole summer of hanging out on the beach, digging clams, reading books, playing cards, climbing trees, and eating wild berries. My grandfather could take the train up on the weekends. The trains are gone now, and the tracks are paved for the Cape Cod Rail Trail.


Before I left home I took some photos of all the flowers blooming in my yard. Here are a few of them in a collage which clearly demonstrates my pathetic grasp of Photoshop.

I planted the Columbines, Ajuga, Anemones, Myrtle, and Bleeding Heart. The Johnny Jump-ups are coming up in the lawn from the ones I planted last year.

The Jack-in-the-Pulpit just popped up on its own, right in my flower garden! I find them scattered around the yard here and there, along with clumps of tiny Bluets. The Rhododendrons and Azaleas are old, some look to be at least 40 years. The 2 pink dogwood trees looked sickly when we bought the house 4 years ago, but with some tender loving care they seem to be holding their own, and look lovely this year.

Cover Girl

At my age? OK, it’s not me, but my tapestry in the spotlight.

“Chaotic Fragments Part 2” was selected for the American Tapestry Alliance’s newest juried show “Connections: Small Tapestry International.”

Then they decided to use a detail of it for the cover of the catalog, what a thrill!

It's a charming catalog, smaller than ATA’s Biennial catalogs, which makes perfect sense, since the tapestries are all 100 square inches or less.

We were asked to keep our artist statements to 50 words or under, which was a lot of fun.

Here is mine:

A 27 year old oil painting of my messy studio table. Color copies, scissors, black colored pencil, hours of gazing and tinkering. In a flash the fallen cone of wool morphed into a Black Hole; I had finally found Chaos.

My husband, Kim, and I flew out to California on Thursday, and stayed with our daughter and son-in-law, Zoe and Jason, near San Jose.

We hiked in the Sunol Regional Wilderness, and the weather was absolutely perfect. High 70s, slightly breezy and very dry. After we hiked a while, Zoe and Kim took a run, and I walked back to the gates alone. Then I read the information board, where I was informed that when walking alone, because of the Mountain Lions, I should have been talking and singing! YIKES!

We visited with Kim’s mother, his brothers, sisters-in-law, nephews, niece, dog, and our new grandkittens, Maia and Ewok. (Can you guess which one is Ewok?)

On Sunday I attended the opening reception at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, along with Zoe and Jason, but alas, not Kim, who had forgotten, when we planned the trip, that he was the keynote speaker at a meeting in Washington DC on Monday morning!

The reception was great. The museum is lovely, the exhibit is really inspiring, and I got to see old tapestry friends, and met some new ones too. Fellow tapestry blogger, and Connections Committee Chair Kathy Spoering was there to see the results of all her hard work. Great job Kathy! It was great to see you again in person.

Five of us made comments about our tapestries, which helped to provide insight into the artists, their creative processes and their work.

To top off the weekend, Zoe and Jason treated me to a delightful Mother’s Day dinner in Palo Alto on Sunday night. As a parting gift, here’s a link to their Cookie Blog. I can personally vouch for the deliciousness of the Pumpkin Muffin Tops with Butterscotch Chips. YUM!

Fun with Watercolors

I have always loved playing with watercolors. At one point I even enjoyed weaving tapestries of some of my watercolor paintings, including this one.

I took a workshop with Marcel Marois, and he suggested that I should include a very thin strand of white silk in the weft to give the illusion of the white paper showing through the transparent watercolor. The other thing I learned from Marcel was to consider every single dot of color as I weave.

The painting was completely abstract, and after I wove it, I could not think of a good name for it, so I consulted an expert: my daughter, who was about 10 years old. My kids were always good at thinking of names for pets, so I figured “pets, tapestries, same general idea right?” I told her that although it looked like it meant something, I had no idea what it was about, so she titled it “Secret Message."

Last week I was doing some cleaning at my Mom’s summer cottage, and I noticed that 2 of my old watercolors had gotten a little moldy over the years.

This happens in the humid climate here when buildings are unheated. Both paintings are at least 20 years old. So although they are headed for the trash can, I decided to preserve them digitally.

I don’t care about the grid, because I made lots of those and they are really easy, almost mechanical. But I am sad about the still life; it’s one of my favorites and would be impossible to reproduce.

SPRING:Time for Progress

Spring is here, kind of.

It was only 41 yesterday, but today it’s sunny, and flowers are popping up all over the yard.

I love these Scilla.

I was delighted to find them in the backyard, and knew them from the Flower Fairies book I had when I was a kid.

This is a detail from a tapestry called “Flora,” which I wove in 1999. It is based on a pastel drawing from about 1978.

Why am I posting about old tapestries? Because I’m not making much progress on the new ones.

I have not been working in the studio much recently.

Here is a photo of the “large” tapestry I started a while ago.

(“Large,” because at 24” wide it’s about the same size as one of Kathy Spoering’s “small” tapestries!)

It’s the latest in my Chaos series, and will have faint text around the border. The text will say “On the edge of chaos on the edge of chaos on the edge.”

Now I have 3 Chaos tapestries started on 3 different looms.

Enough! I need to start finishing them. I am setting aside Wednesday nights for weaving, now that the library is going to be closed that night. The new mayor does not seem to like us, and has cut our budget radically. Besides cutting our hours, we’ve had to give up buying any books, movies or music Cd’s. I felt terrible on Friday when I had to tell a patron that we did not have the book she was looking for, and that we would not be getting it. The silver lining is that I now have 4 extra free hours a week. Rather than fritter them away, I am marking a studio date on my calendar. Now I hope to be able to report regular progress.

Kreativ Blogger Award

Finding the Real Me has nominated me for the Kreativ Blog Award. That’s exciting! Accepting this award means following some rules:

1. Copy the Kreativ Blogger Award to your blog
2. Put a link to the person from whom you received the award
3. Nominate 8 other blogs and
4. Link to them
5. Leave a message on the blogs you nominated

1. Desert Song Studio - The first tapestry blog I ever saw, inspired me to start my own. Always a nice change to read about desert life!

2. Bhakti Ziek - Jacquard weaving and life in an old house in Vermont.

3. Meab Warburton - Irish tapestry weaver living in France. Designs with paper collage. Includes an extensive list of links to British fiber artists.

4. Laura Foster Nicholson - Gorgeous brocaded tapestries, which I’ve loved since seeing the vegetable garden series in Fiberarts years ago.

5. Three Little Cameras - Croatian artist Asja Boros’wonderful whimsical drawings.

6. Spirit Cloth…Quilting a Story - Fabric, stitching, texture, stories. Delicious.

7. Works by Tracy Helgerson - Powerful figurative paintings, using the “underpainting” technique. Makes me want to get out my oil paints.

8. Sojourner Design - Sheep, wool, lovely stitched felted fiber art.