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I’m teaching in Taos this week at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. This is a group of alumni to my retreats and most have been to Taos before. We have become a great group of friends over the years and it is a marvelous way to share about tapestry weaving, coming together in a beautiful and quiet setting. There is a fire going in the house at all times, the food is beyond marvelous, and the thick adobe walls ensure quiet rest.
This week I am leading the Mirrix Summer Weaving Challenge. You can find my challenge on Mirrix’s website HERE. Those of you who have taken my Summer of Tapestry course probably recognize this challenge because I used a similar idea as the beginning of that class.
In the Mirrix challenge, I encouraged you to go for a wander somewhere and to take some time to enjoy really looking at what is around you. When you find something that grabs your attention, focus on the colors of that object or place. You can see the rest of the suggested instructions in the challenge write-up.
I wanted to weave another tapestry for my own challenge response beyond the one I show as an example. This month I was able to go camping with my family for several days in southern Colorado. It had been raining a lot and there were mushrooms growing everywhere. It seemed like every day there were new ones we hadn’t seen before. My nieces are budding mycologists and they took us on mushroom hunts where we identified many of the mushrooms we found.
Making circles is a tricky thing in tapestry weaving. To weave a circle we believe is round, you have to trick the eye or make it really big. Tapestry is woven on a grid and to make a form perfectly circular means you basically take a square and cut the corners off. If your tapestry is huge, then this illusion is not as hard to make, though it IS still quite difficult to make a perfectly round circle given fiber’s propensity to squish and move about.
If your circles are small, it is all the harder because you don’t have very many warps to convince us that what is a shape with steps is really round.
I definitely notice how much I rely on familiar rituals when things change in my life. Emily and I have been taking care of a little dog named Rosie for the last year. Her family went overseas on a research fellowship and they couldn’t take her along. We haven’t had a dog since Cassy died in 2013 and after taking care of her for a few days and being completely charmed by her adorableness, we agreed to take her for the year. She needed a house without other pets or kids and we definitely qualified.
Rosie’s family came home last weekend and she went home to them this week. It was so hard to let her go, but seeing her absolute overwhelming joy at seeing them again made it worth it. She was beside herself when she realized who was in front of her. I do wonder what dogs think when their lives change. She took a few months to really blossom with us but I hope she goes right back to her old life now that she is home again.
I’ve been focusing on my tapestry diary for the last couple months. I started doing these small tapestries based on things I see around me again because I am teaching an online course about this practice (see Summer of Tapestry). But I quickly remembered that the process of weaving small, quickly finished tapestries in which I explore something I saw or a feeling I had are a great way for me to remain grounded when the world feels a little haywire.
It has encouraged me to finish some of the tapestries from Iceland which, though a bit larger than my normal tapestry diary piece, are still in the same vein. I’ve planned a few more tapestries from Icelandic inspiration and I’ve also finished quite a few small pieces from Colorado inspirations. I talked about the rose tapestry in THIS blog post. I titled that post “What would you weave if you knew you could not fail?” because that is such an important part of weaving these small things for me. There are no rules. I have no expectation of ever showing these pieces. I am not worrying about technique or whether they are “good”. I’m just playing.
. . . So I spent last weekend sitting still and doing some small weavings. I watched my judgey monkey brain say, that is too simple. That is too small. You’ll never express anything if you choose this. And I told that little voice to step off, grabbed the yarn colors of the roses in my back yard, and started weaving. These rose bushes were here when I moved in. They’re hardy. They have to be because I don’t do much besides occasionally aim the hose in their general direction and trim them back at the end of the season. They seem perfectly happy to offer up white and pink blooms year after year and I admire that persistence.
I can pinpoint the moment when I started my practice of sketch tapestry. I had just driven 70 miles from my childhood home in Gallup, NM to Petrified Forest National Park in early November of 2016 through a driving rainstorm. It was the kind of rain that the desert longs for. The rain that fills the arroyos to gushing almost instantly. The rain that makes the desert smell like sage and wet sand.
I arrived at the national park to start my artist residency just as the sun came out. As I was taking my looms and yarn out of my car and settling into the casita I would live in for the month, a rainbow appeared over the painted desert just outside.
