The image at the top of this blog post is a snapshot from an interview I did with Tommye Scanlin when we were both residents at Lillian E. Smith Center in Georgia. Tommye encouraged me to apply for that residency among others and I was fortunate not only to be able to spend two weeks in the Georgia woods one April but to find that Tommye herself was at a short residency during part of that time. Tommye’s fierce love of making art and her incredible skill at inspiring and teaching others to do so as well is one of the things I admire most about her. I did the interview as part of my Design Solutions for the Artist Weaver, Season 1 online course and you can watch it there.

The quote above is one that I think about frequently. One of Tommye’s considerable talents is inspiring students to make art. One of her most frequent comments is this one: Weave every darn day. You get better with practice and my own work and teaching have experienced this wisdom from Tommye over and over again.

Tommye has been a friend and mentor to me for many years. She is a dedicated artist now working mostly in tapestry. She is also an author and a committed educator. This review is about her third book.

DY Begay’s retrospective show at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC opened in September. She has been working on the show for years or perhaps we should say an entire lifetime. I haven’t seen it yet, but the catalog that accompanies it is wonderful. Calling it a catalog is a little misleading. It is a celebration of a weaver’s life, the places she comes from, and the experiences she has had that have shaped her work.

If you’re looking for a fun summer mystery which involves tapestry weaving, Betty Lucke’s new mystery, Tapestry of Light, might be for you. The story takes place in Santa Fe, NM. Karen is a tapestry weaver who is trying to finish a large tapestry for a show in a Santa Fe gallery. Her subject is racism and the imagery was developed after she witnessed an unfortunate incident with a child being bullied in a coffee shop.

I have some book recommendations for you. This post was going to be about one book which just came out, Unraveling: What I Learned about Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater by Peggy Orenstein. (It is clearly NOT the world’s ugliest sweater.)

And then just as I finished reading the book, I saw this marvelous review by Jillian Moreno on Modern Daily Knitting. And right then I decided I would let Jillian tell you about Unraveling and I would give you a list of my favorite books that tell stories about wool. I love every one of these books, have read them all more than once, and will likely read them again (okay, I haven’t read Peggy’s book a second time yet, but I just finished it… give me a few months). They’re all written by masterful writers in story-form. They’ll grab your attention and maybe even make you laugh or cry a little.