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I wove a pair of tapestries several years ago now which I liked a great deal. They were inspired by a moment hiking in the Austrian Alps with some good friends (how often do you get to say "hiking in the Austrian alps"?)...
I wove these two pieces titled after the Japanese haiku by Mizuta Masahide (1657-1723):
Barn's burnt down--
now
I can see the moon.
We had an amazing time in the July retreat at CSU Mountain Campus. What a group! We laughed, learned from each other, shared ideas, hiked some trails, watched the hummingbirds, looked for moose (no luck), searched out flowers, watched the clouds, and saw the brilliant stars.
Here is a bit of a photo essay from the week.
I get questions fairly often from people who know I backpack with a loom and want to know what I take. What I pack does vary depending on whether I am going backpacking or car camping or traveling to teach somewhere.
As a lightweight backpacker, my total pack weight before food and water is between 13 and 18 pounds. The lighter the better as food and water can add another ten pounds to the total. Hiking becomes miserable with more weight than that. So any craft that I bring into the backcountry has to be both small and light.
I've just returned from a week teaching in Victoria, B.C. Canada. Victoria was gorgeous, and mostly I just saw the UVic campus and places nearby I could walk to. I enjoyed the mild weather and time on the beach watching the sailboats. I talked a little bit about my love for Canadians in my last blog post HERE.
I just got home from Midwest Weaver's Conference which was at Butler University in Indianapolis this year. I have not taught at MWC before but found that it is one of the teacher's favorites. And for good reason. The students were bright, motivated, and self-starters.
(Spoiler alert for ANWG* students next week!) The pre-conference class I taught was Predicting the Unpredictable: Color in Tapestry. This is my color theory class and we start out talking about value. Value is the relative lightness/darkness of a hue when compared to the grayscale. It is incredibly important in art design and I find that many weavers don't understand it well at all. So one of the first things we do is rearrange the yarn table by value. This has an added benefit for me: I don't have to organize the yarn when I pull it out of the suitcase.
I just returned home from a fabulous retreat at Good Commons in Plymouth, Vermont. We had eleven devoted tapestry weavers gather there for five days of weaving.
We met at Good Commons, a retreat center in central Vermont. This is the second year I've held a tapestry retreat at Good Commons and we greatly enjoyed the marvelous food and venue.
Occasionally pieces I wove a long time ago pop up.
Before I became James Koehler's apprentice. Before I really knew all that much about weaving tapestry. Before I was an ATA member and read about tapestry and went to lots of shows and learned everything I could... back at the beginning, I wove some very simple things.
It turns out this one at least, is lovely.
