Read this book if you ever question why you make things, second guess your worth as a maker or creative, need some kind support to believe in yourself, or think you can’t make art because a thousand reasons that are frankly, bullsh*t.

Don’t Call it Art was published in June by Penguin Random House. The subtitle is 10 ways to create like a kid again (and boy do we need to remember to emulate small children when it comes to making art).

I loved this book and will likely read it many more times. In Kleon style, it is a quick read with lots of graphics and rabbit holes (he loves to mention other authors and thus has caused me to buy more books every time one of his comes out. So sneaky.) He credits his kids Owen and Jules Kleon on the title page as they contributed all the illustrations Austin didn’t make himself.

Micala Sidore has done it again. This book is similar in style to her first book, The Art is the Cloth. Both of these books are stuffed full of images of tapestry weaving. Sidore has done us a huge favor by collecting these images in one place.

Here are some of my thoughts about Tapestry Talking: Understanding the language of handwoven art with 326 works from around the world.

I read a lot of books last year. I kept a stack of the books I had purchased or been gifted that I read and here is the pile. The first book I read is at the bottom of the pile all the way to the right. The last one is the top of the pile to the left.

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.