Blog
Ten years ago I left my job as an occupational therapist to be a full time artist and fiber art teacher. In that moment I didn’t know I wouldn’t return to healthcare. All I knew was that the job I thought was my perfect forever-job (pediatric outpatient OT), was ruled by a boss and a system I couldn’t stomach any more. I had only been at that job a year though it was my 17th year working as an OT.
Moreno and Mezoff. I think we might be a force to be reckoned with!
Jillian Moreno is so many things, but one of her outstanding skills is her teaching ability. She is an author, editor, creative, and someone who makes things happen. She wrote Yarnitecture but did you know she also wrote two books about knitting before that? She has so many tricks up her sleeve for helping newer spinners make the yarns they want to make.
This week we experienced that magic at a retreat she and I taught together in Taos, NM which we called Spinning for Tapestry. We played with different breeds, ways of spinning and plying, and color as we made some excellent and not so excellent tapestry yarns.
The participants came from all over the US and Canada and we greatly enjoyed our time at Mabel Dodge Luhan House. I’m quite sure we all went home a few pounds heavier and happier from the marvelous food.
I’ve finally made my first Instagram reel after years of resisting it and it did involve a fair amount of googling between the different software and platforms I was using. I have to admit that I did it in my video editing software, but it seems to have turned out okay. The reel (which is just a video on Instagram) is about the Tapestry Discovery Box that opens on Monday, January 15th. I’ve had such a lot of fun weaving the examples for this box. I hope you’ll join me for some tapestry play this quarter.
The week before last I was back in Taos teaching at Mabel Dodge Luhan House. We had a lovely week of tapestry weaving with a group of alumni, most of whom come back every year.
This retreat focuses on the design questions of the participants. This year I added another component and some of us looked at how to make vertical forms or lines in tapestry. Some of the participants used these ideas in their tapestries or samples for tapestries.
Making vertical forms in tapestry weaving is a challenge because we’re working on a grid and all vertically-oriented shapes have to go against that grid to build upward. That means that tapestry has a very stepped appearance. This is the nature of this art form and in a lot of cases I encourage students to embrace that.
But most of the time we want to make a stable textile and so all the regular factors of technique and materials come into play when weaving vertically oriented forms. During the retreat we talked about using techniques like double weft interlock, various other joins, sewing slits, using slits to suggest vertical lines, and other means of making marks that read as vertical lines.
It seems like most of 2023 has been devoted to looking for a new place to live and at long last, moving. My hope is to feel all settled in by the end of the year and feel some stability again. Moving is a royal pain. Our realtor said it best. “Moving sucks no matter what.” But it will eventually be done and we have new views and ideas to embrace.
I am most interested to see how this new perspective influences my art-making. This place is rural and very quiet. It is near Mesa Verde National Park which is a dark skies park and the skies are indeed very dark. Sometimes the Milky Way is so bright I have difficulty picking out the constellations at all. I am grateful to have landed in such a beautiful place with such plentiful access to the outdoors and far fewer people than the Front Range of Colorado.
Some of you will be surprised that tapestry weavers weave a line at a time at all! There are reasons to weave this way and I spend a fair amount of my own weaving time using this method.
How do you know whether you should weave a shape at a time or line by line? There are reasons for both and the truth is that you’re probably going to use both methods depending on your design and the equipment you’re using.
This is the topic of the Tapestry Discovery Box which opened on October 15th. The box is a collaboration between myself and Gist Yarn. Gist produces a lovely tapestry yarn called Array and every quarter they’ll send you 7 new colors of this yarn chosen by me along with access to an online course which uses the yarns to address a few tapestry techniques.
