Tapestry Diary

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Retreating to the mountains for sketch tapestry... with 11 new friends

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Retreating to the mountains for sketch tapestry... with 11 new friends

I spent last week at one of my favorite places. I haven’t been to Colorado State University’s Mountain Campus since 2019 due to Covid. It was high time I went back. I do go hiking in this area outside of Fort Collins fairly often and have seen the campus from trails above many times since 2020. It felt great to move back into a cabin and teach in the lodge.

The campus is largely used by environmental and forestry students for summer study. They also have a small conference center where I hold tapestry retreats. The property is at 9,000 feet elevation surrounded by high peaks of the Mummy Range and is just a few miles as the trail goes from the border of Rocky Mountain National Park. I love spending part of each of my teaching day wandering the trails, watching moose, birds, and other creatures in the forest and river, and seeing the stars at night.

This year’s retreat was about sketch tapestry. We wove small tapestries based on things we were either experiencing on campus or some students worked from images of other places they brought along. There was frequent laughter, many discoveries, and a lot of tapestries were woven.

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Sketch Tapestry: Weave your world

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Sketch Tapestry: Weave your world

The Easy Weaving on Little Looms Summer 2023 issue has landed and in it is an article I wrote about my favorite summer weaving activity, sketch tapestry.

Sketch tapestry is what I call my practice of weaving something simple and fairly quick from an environmental inspiration. I also call it my tapestry diary and I’ve been doing it since 2016. I find this practice a lot like sketching. Especially if I practice it while traveling or backpacking, it reminds me to take the time to look at what is around me as I explore. If my intention is to weave something about my day, I’m much more likely to actually stop for an extra moment and explore whatever caught my eye and spend some time really looking.

A new backpacking/travel loom!

A new backpacking/travel loom!

Like a dog alerting to the small of cooking sausage, I noticed a loom I hadn’t seen before on the table of one of my students while teaching at SOAR. It turns out it was made by one of my favorite small loom makers, Janet Fox of Handywomanshop.com, but I had never seen one in person.

My backpacking loom was made by Jim Hokett and it is the lightest loom I can find that will allow me to weave small tapestries at 12 epi when hiking. Of course for backpacking I need something that is not only very light, but also very small but sturdy so I don’t break it in my backpack. Since Jim retired in 2019 I’ve been looking for a replacement, worried about the day that I’d lose or break his loom dropping it somewhere in the backcountry. When I picked up Emma’s loom at SOAR, I knew I’d found what I was looking for.

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A little more time in Taos: tapestry and Mabel Dodge Luhan

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A little more time in Taos: tapestry and Mabel Dodge Luhan

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.

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Weaving from the colors around me: the Mirrix Challenge 2022

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Weaving from the colors around me: the Mirrix Challenge 2022

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.

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Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

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Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

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.

Relying on ritual: The Year of Rosie

Relying on ritual: The Year of Rosie

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.