I spent last week at one of my favorite places. I haven’t been to Colorado State University’s Mountain Campus since 2019 due to Covid. It was high time I went back. I do go hiking in this area outside of Fort Collins fairly often and have seen the campus from trails above many times since 2020. It felt great to move back into a cabin and teach in the lodge.
The campus is largely used by environmental and forestry students for summer study. They also have a small conference center where I hold tapestry retreats. The property is at 9,000 feet elevation surrounded by high peaks of the Mummy Range and is just a few miles as the trail goes from the border of Rocky Mountain National Park. I love spending part of each of my teaching day wandering the trails, watching moose, birds, and other creatures in the forest and river, and seeing the stars at night.
This year’s retreat was about sketch tapestry. We wove small tapestries based on things we were either experiencing on campus or some students worked from images of other places they brought along. There was frequent laughter, many discoveries, and a lot of tapestries were woven.
A huge thank you to Kristine, Cathy, Kat, Donna, Deb, Elaine, Anne, Ramona, David, Sonya, and Anne for all your good humor, laughter, and hard work.
We wandered around campus and some of us climbed until the snow turned us around on higher trails. We watched a pair of nesting ospreys and got dive-bombed by hummingbirds who insisted we were pretty flowers. We watched moose and learned about the nesting tree swallows. We wove our way through afternoon thunderstorms while exploring different technique concepts for small format weavings. Most importantly, we had fun turning our experiences into small tapestries which are excellent reminders of our time high in the Rocky Mountains and we made a lot of new friends.
I have spoken a lot about sketch tapestry or my tapestry diary here on the blog. In the retreat I was encouraging the class to do this sort of practice where simple tapestries are made from something that inspires you. The range of subjects was wide and though I missed getting photos of a huge percentage of the tapestries woven, believe me that they were numerous and a lot of fun. The gallery below has a few of them. If you want to try it yourself, try out the sketch tapestry free mini-course HERE.
If you’re interested in this practice in an online version, my Summer of Tapestry 2023 course is open for registration HERE. Join the fun!
The gallery below has more photos of the week of weaving. If you’re getting the blog via email, you will see these images as a long string of photos. If you want to see the captions, please click HERE to see the post on my website. Click the thumbnails to see the whole image, hover to see the full captions.
