Tapestry Weaving

Weaving in the woods: the Lillian E. Smith Center Residency

Weaving in the woods: the Lillian E. Smith Center Residency

I was fortunate to receive the McClure-Scanlin Residency Award at Lillian E. Smith Center this year. I’ve been here almost two weeks now and I’ve greatly enjoyed my time in the woods of northern Georgia. I came here to work on designs for a new body of work. I am reminded over the course of these weeks how slow that process is for me. But having a place like this to jump-start the ideas is highly useful.

At past residencies I’ve brought boxes of stuff: lots of art supplies, as many yarn color choices as I could cram into any corner of my luggage, and lots of ideas about what I wanted to make while I was there. This time around, I didn’t bring much with me: a watercolor set, some fleece and a flick carder, two spindles, two very small looms, and a small selection of weaversbazaar yarn. And of course I brought my walking shoes, a camera, and my design sketchbook.

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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.

Tapestry retreat: Vermont 2019

Tapestry retreat: Vermont 2019

My Vermont retreat is always a time full of exploration, good food, and the sense of camaraderie that comes with people staying in the same big house for 5 days. This year was no exception and I enjoyed the five days with another exceptional group of people immensely.

The retreat was about color use in tapestry weaving. This is a huge topic so of course we only scratched at it a bit in the course of 5 days. But many great questions were asked and we played with many potential answers.

I like to start these color retreats by having people look at value. It is one of the most important concepts in design and I find that people disregard it so easily.

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A tapestry weaving demo

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A tapestry weaving demo

I made a video while weaving some of the tapestry I talked about in my last blog post. It shows me weaving for about 13 minutes on The Beckys. This is a tapestry diary piece about personalities and perception. This version of the video starts with me talking for a moment in my campsite and then the rest of the video is me weaving. I’ve added music in case you get bored, but feel free to turn the volume off after I stop talking if my music choices are not yours.

I made a second version of this video with real-time commentary about what I was doing and why for the Weaving Tapestry on Little Looms online course. If you’re in that course, you can find that version of the video in the Answer Vault section of the class. It describes how and why I am making the choices I’m making while weaving. If you haven’t taken it yet, now is a great time to do it.

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Little Looms and Ani

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Little Looms and Ani

I’ve been going to Rocky Mountain Folks Festival in Lyons, CO since 1996 when I was gifted a ticket for the weekend. Later I dated someone who not only went for the full weekend but also for song school the week before. Now I choose who I want to go hear and this year it was Ani DiFranco. She was headlining Friday night and there were a few other bands I wanted to hear, so off we went last Friday to Planet Bluegrass to sit in the sun and the rain and hear some music.

It turns out that festivals are also good places to weave. I brought my tiny copper pipe loom and finished the tapestry diary piece just before it got dark.

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Process not product. Travel weaving.

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Process not product. Travel weaving.

Emily was off speaking at a conference on the east coast last weekend and I decided to take myself camping. I loaded up the car with all my favorite bits of camping gear, a cooler of random stuff that was in the frig, and looms + yarn. I had multiple small projects in process and somehow I thought three days in the woods was going to be enough to finish all of them.

Instead, I started a new one.

This little idea was in my tapestry diary idea book and I decided to weave it while testing out this new Handywoman loom.* The piece is called The Beckys and it is about the way I mostly see myself versus how someone else in my life sees me. I’m pretty much the eternal optimist, so you can guess which side is the one I think expresses something about me.** The yarn is wool and silk from weaversbazaar with 20/6 cotton seine twine warp. The campground is pure Colorado.

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Untangled: A Crafty Sheep's Guide to Tapestry Weaving

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Untangled: A Crafty Sheep's Guide to Tapestry Weaving

Untangled: A Crafty Sheep’s Guide to Tapestry Weaving has been several years in the making. The idea came from a student in a workshop I taught at the Michigan League of Handweavers Conference in 2015. Marg heard me describing yet another little trick I like to use when weaving tapestry and she said I should write a book about those tips. So I did.

I happen to know a fantastic children’s book illustrator, Molly McNeece, who was interested in the project. Molly is my first cousin and this project has become a wonderful collaboration. The book is dedicated to our grandmother, Marian Mezoff, who encouraged us to be artists when we were kids.