Taos calls me back again and again. I lived near there for most of a decade and never tired of visiting and hiking nearby. I now teach there several times a year and next week I get to go back again. I’m teaching for Taos Wools Festival which happens October 6 and 7. My class is earlier in the week (I can sneak one more person in if you want to come!).
Taos Wools Festival is a brand new festival. I know you’ve heard of Taos Wool Festival and I’ve posted about it many times in the past. That festival was moved to Santa Fe last year and renamed Mountain and Valley Wool Festival. There were many political reasons the festival was moved and I only know a few of them. But Taos does need the tourist traffic from this festival so Joe Barry who owns Taos Wools has started a new event and named it after his business, Taos Wools.
You can find out more about the event at https://taoswoolsfestival.com/. There will be a wonderful art show with three tapestry weavers from the area, a lot of other art in a wide variety of media, and a wonderful list of vendors and fun mostly on Saturday, October 7th. I hope to see you there!
Tapestry in Taos workshop
Sal helping me take photos of the samples for the Taos class. She would not let me put the tapestry on the deck wood (my default quick photo spot), so this is what we get this time around!
I’m excited to teach a group of students using Taos Wools churro yarn. This yarn is so full of the spirit of northern New Mexico. I swear it speaks to you as you’re weaving. I don’t know if that is because the wool comes from local flocks, the care Joe Barry puts into hand-dyeing it in small batches, or the long-staple wool fibers themselves, but it is addictive.
In the class I’ll be challenging the students to weave a memory of Taos or something inspired by the area. I’ve been weaving samples for the class this summer and really enjoying the feel of the weft yarn along with the wool warp we’ll be using in the class. I use two strands of this chica-weight yarn at 8 epi on a 2-ply wool warp.
Did I mention that this yarn is hand-dyed? This is the only yarn I know of that you can order online that is carefully hand-dyed using the same sort of dye processes I use for my tapestry yarn. Joe has a great Instagram feed where he often posts photos of his dyeing in progress so you can see the careful work that goes into making this yarn. Perhaps that love is what makes it so special after all!
Three Weavers
Joan Potter Loveless’ book Three Weavers is a wonderful look at Taos and tapestry weaving. Written in the 1990s and published by the University of New Mexico Press, she recounts the weaving stories of herself and two friends, Rachel Brown and Kristina Wilson. These women made a big impact on the world of fiber in this part of the USA. Taos Wools Festival’s gallery show is modeled loosely on this older collaboration between fiber artists in Taos.
You may recognize the name Rachel Brown. She wrote The Weaving, Spinning, and Dyeing Book which is a classic book on these subjects. She also ran Weaving Southwest for decades and then passed the shop on to her granddaughter, Teresa Loveless.
The quote below from the beginning of the book is about that moment when you rise out of the canyon on the road from Santa Fe and see the Taos valley for the first time. Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself.
“Circling the valley a great sagebrush plain flowed on and on to the far horizon, where it was rimmed by other mountain ranges so far away that they appeared to be featureless cutouts of pale blue silk. This desert floor, which at first seemed to be flat, gradually as we looked became a flowing surface of slightest undulations, cloud shadows moving over it like enormous birds; then finally we saw the canyon of the Rio Grande as an intermittent slash across it from north to south, sometimes invisible and then, with a jog that threw shadow on a cut edge, appearing again. Here and there rose single low mountains, flared out where their evergreens met the desert floor and rising to single peaks or knobs like long-extinct volcanoes, which we later learned they indeed were.”
Sunset in Taos