I can hardly believe it has been almost five years that I’ve been running Change the Shed, my free YouTube tapestry weaving live event. I still do it twice a month and plan on continuing that. I have had so many people support this program through donations and I appreciate all of you more than you’ll ever know. But the time has come to get some more consistent support so this program can continue.

To that end, I’ve started a Patreon page. Patreon is a sort of membership site created to support artists and creators. In general, creators ask for support from people who follow them in exchange for some sort of learning or community opportunity. The membership rates are low and the funds help the creator continue their work.

It has been a lot of fun seeing what everyone is weaving for this weave along. I’ve been giving ideas and patterns on Change the Shed. If you’d like to join us, you can find all the details in THIS blog post from November 13, 2024. That post includes a free PDF download with some tips for weaving and some suggested designs.

The two Change the Shed episodes where I have talked about this project so far can be found on YouTube. November 13, 2024 and November 27, 2024.

In the episode on the 27th I started a new tapestry and we talked some about choosing yarn colors, especially as it comes to value. During the broadcast I wove perhaps 3/4 of an inch in a design woven on its side. I had just gotten to a non-tree element, a holiday ball ornament that I felt compelled to weave and you all helped me choose which hand-dyed silk strands to use for the colors.

To celebrate winter and offer a fun project we can all weave together on Change the Shed, I’m doing a Winter Trees weave along. If you’d like a different subject for your holiday-themed weaving, feel free to choose something else. I’ll add some photos of past winter projects I’ve done below.

I’ll be weaving a couple different tree projects on Change the Shed on November 13 and 27, 2024 and December 13 and 18, 2024. Join me for those free live broadcasts. If you have questions about the project, you can ask them in the comments for this blog post or during the live broadcast. I’ll answer them all on Change the Shed.

I have woven little trees in the past and there are photos below. I’ve also woven other winter and holiday-themed tiny tapestries and if one of those looks like fun to you, feel free to copy it! I don’t yet have a woven example of this year’s trees because I’m weaving them live, but if you watch the episode today, you’ll have a good idea of a direction to take your own weaving.

Before I left for my teaching trip in Vermont and New Hampshire, I recorded a short Change the Shed episode to air on June 12, 2024. I wanted to address some of the questions I’ve been asked mostly about my business in recent months. The questions range from how big my team is (you might be surprised) to what I do with tiny tapestries. I suspect that person was wondering the bigger question, what good is tapestry really? And that quickly morphs into why do we even make art? I promise I don’t get into that in the video, but I definitely do in some of the online classes. It is a short episode at about 15 minutes.

I've always felt fairly private about my tapestry designs as I'm working on them. Since my apprenticeship ended 14 years ago, I rarely ask anyone for feedback on my designs unless it is a commission. Designs are fragile little beings that can be crushed by other people so easily and they need time for me to be sure enough about them to let others see them.* It is both a protective instinct that makes me guard my ideas to give them space to grow and also a fear of being criticized. No one wants their beautiful butterfly of an idea crushed by a careless comment from another human.