This post contains a few updates for you all on my world. Thank you all for your concern about the fires in Larimer County, CO. An update is at the end of this post.

New Logo

I’ve been working on a logo for my business for about a year now. Some of you saw an earlier version and I appreciate your feedback on how you thought it did or did not reflect me and my teaching style.

I’m happy to say that I finally have a logo that I am really happy with. The designer, Kerry Jackson, did a fantastic job. You’ll see me pivot a lot of my graphic design to match this logo and font package over the next year so I hope you like it! I think the logo both reflects what I do in terms of teaching tapestry but also expresses my personal philosophy of teaching, life, and my love of the outdoors.

The book release: The Art of Tapestry Weaving

And of course I also have a book coming out. The official publication date is November 3rd* and there is a lot of information about the book on these two pages of my website:

https://rebeccamezoff.com/the-art-of-tapestry-weaving This page has information about what is in the book, reviews, and some ideas about where to order it.

https://rebeccamezoff.com/book-launch And this page has a list of book launch events I am doing now and over the next several months.

It is not too late to pre-order! May I suggest THIS site if you’re in the USA?

Launch webinar, November 3

I am having a launch webinar on November 3 at 11 am MST (this is the time in Denver, CO). You can register for the webinar HERE.

Can’t make a weekday event? How about Saturday, November 7th?

Because that is the middle of the day and many of you work, I’m repeating this webinar on Saturday the 7th at 4pm MST. This should be a time that those of you in eastern Australia could also attend. You can register for this webinar HERE.

I gave a talk for Damascus Fiber Arts School this week about the book. (I’ll have the link to view the recording in my newsletter most likely next week.) It was really fun to talk about the making of the book and I know many of you were able to attend live. Thank you!

Someone asked in that talk what my favorite part of the book was and I had difficulty settling on one answer. I realize that isn’t unusual for my wildly ranging mind, but I think I will stick with what I said in the moment. Don’t get me wrong, I love how the whole book came out and I’m not saying this section is the best, just that it is my current favorite. The teaching sequences are clear and well-illustrated both with step-by-step images and with tapestry examples from artists all over the world. Making that happen required endless editing and testing.

How to be a Beginning Tapestry Weaver

My answer on Tuesday about my favorite part of the book was about a piece in the Introduction called “How to be a Beginning Tapestry Weaver.” This might actually have been the seminal idea for the whole manuscript.

In my teaching of adults, the vast majority of which are over 50 years old, I’ve learned a lot about how adults learn. I’m not going to say “older adults” because I’m fast approaching 50 myself. Maybe I should call us mature adults. Let’s be honest. We’re pretty set in our ways by this time in life. I also think we are less willing to do things that are risky. And our brains perceive the new and unknown as taking a risk. Especially for people who have not spent a lifetime playing with art materials or pursuing our own ideas in a way that reinforces that they are good ideas, diving into a medium that involves both a lot of technical learning, new materials to master, and concepts around artistic design can be rather scary. We are also not taught that failure is the best way to learn and doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t keep trying.

Being a beginner at 40 or 50 or 60 is not easy.*** In order to find our own path in an artistic process, we have to be willing to experiment. And boy are we taught that experimenting is not okay! So many of us were encouraged to pick a path in life and follow it to something called “success” (though what success actually looks like is mostly a mystery in my opinion). So when we want to learn something new like tapestry weaving but we haven’t spent time in artistic pursuits thus far in our lives, the gremlins in our head tell us that we’re failing almost immediately. So often I hear beginners saying they’re not getting it when they are 4 inches into weaving their first sampler. Tapestry is a medium that requires a lot of practice. You have to learn the motor skills involved with manipulating the tools and materials and you also have to cognitively understand the process. It seems like the simplest thing in the world, but in reality there are a lot of subtle things to learn and that takes practice.

So “How to be a Beginning Tapestry Weaver” simply tells you to have faith and to experiment. Let’s have fun with yarn and color and image and just see where things go. It takes a lot of time to craft your own journey and you know what? I think that is not only okay, it is imperative. We need things in life that take dedication and that also fascinate us. For some of you, tapestry weaving is that thing already. For others, it could be if you let go of the critical voices in your head and just play. So while I present a lot of “rules” in The Art of Tapestry Weaving, from the very beginning I encourage you to take them all with a grain of salt. Sure, it is important to learn them. But once you understand why they are there, you are free to break them in any way you want to.

The essence of it is, let’s not take ourselves so seriously for once! Experimenting and a playful approach to learning is important, especially in a world that is feeling a bit challenging lately.

The Art of Tapestry Weaving and a tapestry in progress. — *The Art of Tapestry Weaving* and a tapestry in progress.

Larimer County is burning

I am including this section because many of you have contacted me with concern about the fires in northern Colorado over the last few weeks and many of you aren’t on Facebook to see my updates there. It does feel like my entire county is on fire. There are four huge fires in northern Colorado right now and several smaller ones actively growing. The Cameron Peak Fire is the one outside of Fort Collins that I wrote about HERE and HERE (Weaving about the Cameron Peak Fire, Parts 1 and 2). I’m still weaving about the fire with some focus on imagining regrowth, because weaving destruction is just too depressing right now.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t discouraged though. Yesterday the East Troublesome Fire which started last week near Lake Granby blew up in the biggest way. It grew over 100,000 acres in one day and is fast burning through Rocky Mountain National Park on the opposite side of the park where the Cameron Peak Fire is currently burning. They closed the park this morning and mandatory evacuations as far away (from Lake Granby) as Estes Park. Just safe from the Cameron Peak Fire, Estes is now very much threatened by this other fire—and if it gets there, it will have burned a huge portion of RMNP in the process. The national forests in 5 counties were all closed yesterday, an unprecedented move by the USFS.

The fires are:

Mullen Fire (started in Wyoming near Laramie and is now burning south into Larimer County close to the start of the Cameron Peak Fire) 176,863 acres
Cameron Peak Fire (the one just a handful of miles from my house now though it started 40 miles away—300 square miles now burned) 206,977 acres and the largest fire in CO history currently
CalWood Fire (causing evacuations of the communities in the mountains just outside of Boulder) 9,978 acres and in a more heavily populated area
East Troublesome Fire (Started near Lake Granby, now a ferocious beast of a fire and the worst of the lot today, more than earning its name) 125,602 acres
There is another fire in the Mt. Zirkel Wilderness just west of where the Cameron Peak Fire started and various other smaller fires in this county and adjacent counties.

We had some scary days last week when the Cameron Peak Fire jumped containment lines and ran down Buckhorn Canyon. Basically if you know the area, it ran from CSU Mountain Campus to Masonville which is 6 miles from my house. It takes me 90 minutes to drive to CSU Mountain Campus (as-the-crow-flies miles being a lot less than that time indicates—it is gravel mountain driving). It was a very big run and those of you on Facebook know it was very scary for Fort Collins and everyone else in its way.

Smoke has been bad some days and fine others (mostly being suffered by the communities farther south). It is raining ash again today and though the plume was south of us earlier, the light is orange outside my window again and at 2 pm it feels like dusk which is very disorienting.

Fort Collins is safe but so many people in the mountains of Larimer County and beyond are not at all safe. As a global community, we have to address climate change and we have to do it in a big way immediately. There is absolutely no time to waste. (And here is my last plea—if you haven’t voted yet in the USA, please vote for the candidates who are concerned about this issue because truly none of the other issues will matter if we don’t have an inhabitable planet. Mother Earth can’t absorb our human idiocy any longer.)

We, the residents of Larimer County, are weary. The constant state of alert, the smoke and ash, and the knowledge that those flakes that are falling were the trees we all love so much, hurt. If you live in Colorado you probably value time in the mountains. It is hard to see them burn. May winter come quickly because that is the only thing that will put these massive fires out. As the incident commanders on these fires say so often, they need 3 feet of snow on top of them.

*The date we’ve had for publication has been October 27 for a very long time. At least a year. So when I found out the books missed the deadline to arrive at the warehouse by one day, I was a bit disappointed, but there isn’t anything to be done about that. When I realized that meant the new release date was November 3rd however, I groaned. November 3rd is Election Day in the USA and this is shaping up to be the most fraught election I’ve ever experienced. There is drama and hate and violence across our nation and it makes me so very sad. I hope that if my book arrives on this day at your house, it is a bright spot.

But don’t open it until you vote!

Additionally, I just learned Seth Godin’s new book, The Practice, also comes out November 3rd so I feel a bit better about it, because if it is okay for Seth, it is okay for me.

***I am going to go out on a limb and hope that once you get to 80 it gets easier to be a beginner again. Please tell me that finally finally near the end of our lives it becomes easier to live from our own center instead of trying to please other people all the time.

A new look, a new book, and the energy the fire took...