Making

Returning to beginners status

Returning to beginners status

I have some dear friends who made the monumental decision to have a baby. There were medical complications but eventually, the little tyke was conceived and he arrived in the world a month and a half ago now. I love to make things for babies. Cute, soft things that I usually knit. I know that they’re mostly impractical and I assume, though I’m not a mom myself, that frazzled parents really like stuff they can throw in the washing machine.

I was going to knit a beautiful blanket for this kid. I could imagine myself choosing the yarn, casting on, working away. And then I looked at my fall schedule and thought about how I was going to disappoint myself because there was no way I was going to finish the blanket I had in my head before the kid was born.

Then it occurred to me. “I’m a weaver! I could absolutely weave a blanket. I’m sure it would go faster and it would be more baby-friendly.”

I’m not sure why it took me so long to think of that. And in a moment of serendipity, my friends at GIST Yarn happened to send an email about a kit for a baby blanket that same day saving me the trouble of researching yarns and patterns. Bingo, it was ordered in a heartbeat. It arrived a few days later and my head was filled with visions of what a gorgeous blanket I was going to turn out. Because, after all, I’m a weaver and how hard could a plain weave blanket be?. (It is the Echo baby blanket kit and the yarn is lovely.)

Because of Memory

Because of Memory

You may have seen Tommye Scanlin’s tapestry titled “Because of Memory” or heard her talk about the Lillian E. Smith Center in Clayton, GA. It is because of Tommye that I did a two-week residency there a few weeks ago. It is ultimately because of Lillian Smith herself that I could enjoy this time in an artist residency away from the push of running a business at home.

Lillian E. Smith was a formidable woman from what I can tell. She is the author of the novel, Strange Fruit, which was banned for it’s statement about segregation and civil rights of people of color in the US. It was first published in 1944.

I had two weeks in the north Georgia woods at my artist residency. Lillian E. Smith Center is now owned by Piedmont College. But it used to be owned by the Smith family.

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Circumnavigating Massachusetts

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Circumnavigating Massachusetts

During my New England trip, I had a weekend where I drove completely around the state of Massachusetts. I’ll call it circumnavigation though I think that only applies to boats. We were shooting photos in Harrisville, NH on Friday and I stayed in a hotel on the border of MA that night. From there I headed south of Boston for some time with Sarah Resnick who owns GIST Yarn and Claudia Chase (owner of Mirrix Looms) who made the long drive from her home in New Hampshire.

Some practice is required

Some practice is required

If you’re in my online classes, you might by now be used to me saying that tapestry weaving takes practice. As adults, I actually think this fact can be a little hard for us to wrap our minds around. Many of us trained for a long time when we were much younger to become good at whatever we spend much of our days doing. We forget that back then, we practiced.

When learning tapestry weaving, we have to understand with our heads how the structures work and we have to teach our hands to manage the physical materials we’re working with.

In college, I trained to be a piano teacher. I knew I was never going to play in Carnegie Hall, nor did I have any desire to be a performer. I loved my pedagogy classes and ended up writing a piano method for preschoolers as a senior honors thesis. In the process of testing that book, I taught a little group of 3 and 4-year-olds to play the piano from my method. I was astounded at how fast these little tykes could gain the physical knowledge of pressing particular keys. They were not, however, so quick at understanding how reading music worked.

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The Mighty Ugly

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The Mighty Ugly

. . . The same thing has to go for tapestry weaving. It might be that I weave something and then weave it again another way and then again and again… and the good thing about that is then I have something that art people call “a body of work.” How cool is that? I thought I was just correcting mistakes! I find myself looking at weavings my online students make and recommending they try that idea again. I mean this in the sense of, “That is a great idea! Run with it!” and I hope they take it that way.

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Making ugly things

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Making ugly things

I’ve made some ugly things lately. Not on purpose really, they just turned out that way. Mostly they’re tapestry diary pieces. Sometimes they’re other fiber projects. I find that if I make something that I just don’t like, I will still pin it up on my tapestry diary wall, but I won’t tell you, dear readers, about it. I started wondering this week why I leave certain things off the blog and I can pretty confidently say that it is because I’m disappointed with them. Or perhaps if I’m even more honest, it is because I want to preserve some superhero tapestry artist image which I’m sure I’ve blown my cover on long ago anyway. However, in a social media glitz, glamour, and gossip world, who wants to post something that turned out kind of ugly?

I can’t always pinpoint exactly why something doesn’t satisfy me. I do tend to be more of a process weaver than a product weaver, so it does take quite a bit of “ugly” to make me lose interest in a weaving. I really enjoy the process of making things, and much of the time I care a lot less about the finished product. (I hear there are people with the opposite affinities. Is this true?) So when something doesn’t quite feel right, I tend to take advantage of the fact that I own piles of looms (for teaching of course) and just start something new. As you can imagine, that can leave a studio full of UFOs.*