Blog
With the possibility of travel largely gone for the foreseeable future, exploring the places where we live seems like something to settle into. I’ve become more interested in details. In watching and understanding what is happening in my back yard. And in spending the time to watch what happens overnight on the trails I have loved for decades. I’ll keep weaving and spinning while outside and that will prompt me to weave more while I’m in my own studio.
Listen.
This small tapestry started as a lark months ago. I wanted to do a long narrow tapestry on a Fringeless warp during Change the Shed to practice curves and to test a new potential tapestry yarn from GIST Yarn. All of those things were good.
I talked about the Hot Flash tapestry I was working on last month HERE. I have now finished it as those of you who are watching my YouTube broadcasts have seen. This tapestry surprised me. It was so much fun. I definitely giggled my way through it. It turns out that a silly subject, bright colors, and playing with a challenging technique makes for a lot of fun.
When last you saw it, it looked something like this.
I’ve been reading the writing of Amy Irvine lately. She lives in Utah and her experience of the four-corners region where she now lives and where I grew up is familiar on a deep level.
Perhaps my enjoyment of this writing and the memory it brings up is simple. Irvine’s writing about the shifting sands of Utah, particularly of places that I have hiked and camped, and in Desert Cabal, her imagined discussion with Edward Abbey and her thoughts on environmentalism, all place me back in my own memories of sand in my shoes. I haven’t left my house except for walks in the neighborhood in what seems like forever. My summer thru-hike has become mostly a dream, and I’m asking myself what it is I want my life to look like inside our new coronavirus reality and then in the future. Because I don’t think we as humans will get to the other side of this quite the same as we were before. And I’m not sure that is entirely a bad thing.
Being forced to observe the birds in my back yard closely instead of pretending I’m observing them while pushing through a 12-mile hike means that I have to slow down and see the magic that is right outside my very own office window. That seems like a good thing.
The world sure feels different.
I feel different. I am lucky that I have a job that I can continue to do and that gives some focus to my days, because I definitely feel distracted. I am generally able to focus on a project fairly consistently, but the last few weeks, I have struggled with sticking with pretty much anything.
I’m guessing some of you know what I’m talking about. So I’m just going to say it again, it is okay to be rudderless for a bit. I’ve been struggling particularly with what to weave in my daily Change the Shed broadcasts.*
This should not be hard for me. I have been teaching tapestry for almost a decade now, I have a personal artistic practice, and I have scores of ideas of what to weave. But still, nothing seems to have quite the interest that it did a few months ago. So maybe I’ll weave about that. Or maybe I’ll just weave back and forth with some handspun. The color changes are fun and it takes away the stress of making any decisions.
It might be that we don’t talk about peri-menopause enough. I don’t know. I won’t belabor it, but I do think it can make a hilarious subject for a tapestry.
(A whole bunch of people just clicked away, didn’t they! I bet those of you left are over 40 and female… thanks to you my sisters).
In one of the Q&As I did for the Design Solutions class I was talking about the work of Pat Williams and how much I love it even though it is so different from my own work. And then I thought, why not? There isn’t any reason I can’t weave something funny and graphic.
I tend to do a lot of playing around with my tapestry diary/sketch tapestry practice. I figured that I could try a design like this, call it part of my tapestry diary which totally takes away any feeling that it has to be any “good”, and I’d see what happened. Then I decided I wanted to weave it larger and enter it in the American Tapestry Alliance’s Unjuried Small Format show, Renditions. So a 10 x 10 inch design was born.
The American Tapestry Alliance’s Unjuried Small Format show (this year called Renditions 2020) deadline is fast approaching. I’ve been getting increasing numbers of people asking me how to resize photos, so I’ve made a quick set of videos to help you with that.
