Those gnomes are still not helping me with the weaving, but they were seen having a marvelous time in the woods of north Georgia. In fact, judging by the drawings scattered around my studio at Hambidge each morning, they do like to draw quite a lot.
Mary Hambidge's legacy
Many of the craft schools in Appalachia feature weaving in their beginnings. Mary Crovatt Hambidge (1885-1973) started Hambidge Center as a weaving business in her home. In the mid-1930’s she created the Weavers of Rabun near Rabun Gap, GA, where I am sitting today. By 1937 she was selling the items produced here in her shop in New York City.
Luminous beings are we... Yoda
I visited the Denver Art Museum yesterday. The Star Wars and the Power of Costume exhibit is only here for a few more weeks and though I am not a complete science fiction geek, I do love me some Star Wars. I had to go.
The costumes were stunning. I really enjoyed seeing the concept art which was presented as drawings, storyboards, and costume fabric files along with a few videos.
Where to find perspective? Lessons from geologic time...
Layers.
Time.
This place is all about unimaginable spans of time.
I am spending the month of November at Petrified Forest National Park as their artist-in-residence.
From a distance, the huge trees look very much like they fell and were cut by a chainsaw quite recently. Up close, they are miracles of color and form in stone. Because, of course, these trees have not been trees for at least 216 million years. All of their tree-ness was replaced by minerals and became hard stone so long ago—just now eroded out of their hiding place in the Chinle formation.
Doit (or maybe Do It!)
This was one of the many little weaving experiments I did for the Weaving Tapestry on Little Looms class (now open for registration HERE!). I wove this for a section about weaving text and I intended it to say, Do it! (I was going to weave another one that said "Just" but ran out of time.)
But when finished, I realized that it sort of looks like it says "Doit!".
So I looked up the definition.
Driving all of Nebraska with the ACC conference at the end
To get to Omaha from Colorado, you have to drive the entire length of Nebraska. It is a long state, though not without interest. After many Woolful podcasts, I arrived at Kaneko in downtown Omaha. If you've never been to Kaneko, make sure to make a visit--and leave yourself some time. Their tag line is "open space for your mind." And it is a place that will inspire you if you let it.
I was there for the American Craft Council conference, Present Tense. I was interested in meeting other creatives and having a few days to talk about the world of art-making.
How many days can you go without a shower? The Colorado Trail in 9 days.
My hike was wonderful. I was unable to post to the blog from the trail, so what follows is a little photo record of my walk. I hiked for 9 days and I can tell you with firm certainty that this is my limit for not having a shower. There is only so much a little bottle of Dr. Bronners and freezing cold stream water can do. I came to the trailhead at the only major paved road ten minutes before a hail storm and nine days in and that was it. The second car by was a nice woman with two dogs who, though she did turn on her car vent a couple minutes after I got in, did not complain about my smell. Straight to a hotel through a hailstorm I went. Clean clothes, shower X2, pizza... all was well. Though I got off one day before I intended to, it was the unknown shower wall that demanded it. Nine days is the limit.