Tapestry Weaving

Weaving tapestry in Taos; time at Mabel Dodge Luhan House

Weaving tapestry in Taos; time at Mabel Dodge Luhan House

I’ve spent the last week weaving with a fantastic group of people at my retreat in Taos, New Mexico. I love teaching in my home state and I especially love spending time at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos.

Lest you think this is some high end hotel, let me tell you a bit about the place. My Taos retreats are held in the former home of Mabel Dodge Luhan, a renowned author, artist, and socialite, who spent the last decades of her life gathering people around her in this house far from her roots in Buffalo, New York. Though some of Mabel’s actions can be seen as problematic today, it is undeniable that she did manage to get many artists to come and spend time in Taos. They created works of art that made Taos into the artistic center it now is.

I love spending a week in the house, eating in Mabel’s dining room, watching the fire in her living room, and sleeping tucked snugly into small adobe rooms….

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The Tapestry Discovery Box

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The Tapestry Discovery Box

I’ve been working on a fun project in collaboration with Gist Yarn. And this week, it is ready for the world. The Tapestry Discovery Box has launched and I’d love to share it with all of you. If you’ve ever wished for an ongoing community of tapestry weavers to talk about and troubleshoot technique and design problems with, this subscription course might be exactly the thing for you.

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Learning design skills and having fun in the process

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Learning design skills and having fun in the process

Have you reached that point in tapestry weaving where you feel you have a decent or even excellent grasp of technical issues but you are unsure how to design your own images? This happens to almost all of us, so you’re not alone. Designing is simply a skill and it can be learned.

There is a lot of pressure in the art world. How many messages do we get telling us that you have to be born with some sort of special talent or that you have to go to art school to make “good” art? Those messages are everywhere in our culture and it is easy to let those messages keep you from creating.

The truth is that designing for tapestry or any art medium is simply a skill and that skill can be learned.

Fyber Monday: My once-a-year sale happens on November 28th

Fyber Monday: My once-a-year sale happens on November 28th

On Fyber Monday, November 28th, 2022, all of my online courses are on sale. This happens just once a year.

The Monday after Thanksgiving weekend in the USA has been deemed “Cyber Monday.” It is a day for businesses to sell digital products. Though I care not for holiday hype, I do want to offer at least one opportunity during the holidays for people to purchase my online courses at a discount.

I have dubbed this day “Fyber Monday.” All of my online courses are on sale. And yes, you can purchase more than one! Treat yourself, or give a gift. Gift certificates for all of my courses can be found in my shop HERE with discount included.

I have courses for beginner and intermediate weavers in technique, a course about four-selvedge warping that features the marvelous Sarah C. Swett, a course teaching you to dye your own yarn, and a couple design courses.

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The joy of learning: online? or in-the-flesh?

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The joy of learning: online? or in-the-flesh?

THE LIFE OF A FIBER ARTS TEACHER

As most of us return to teaching workshops in person, I’ve seen several musings on some of my colleagues’ blogs about their feelings and experiences of going back to teaching post-covid, not that I believe we are actually “post-covid”! I have been reticent to return to classrooms full of people due to health concerns, but this October the covid numbers were low, I was able to get the omicron booster, and it was time to face my fears and return to the classroom.

It turned out beautifully. Spin Off Autumn Retreat (SOAR) was a wonderful conference. I wrote about it last week including a run-in with a 12-foot skeleton and some beautiful fall weather in Wisconsin. This week I’ve been thinking more about returning to teaching in person as I’m preparing to teach a retreat I run myself in Taos, NM.*

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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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Summer of Tapestry. Let's take a good wander.

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Summer of Tapestry. Let's take a good wander.

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.