Tales of a Traveling Weaver, Alamosa

... the next adventure...

Here I am living between Alamosa and Monte Vista Colorado. Again.
I didn't think I'd come back to the SLV (San Luis Valley), not because it isn't a beautiful place with great people, but because I really expected my trails to lead me other places.  But the way was clear for 6 months living near my sister, brother-in-law, and new niece. I moved here two days before she was born and already everything is changing before my eyes. Kids grow fast. And it seems my life does lately too.

I live in the midst of center pivot farms. There are cranes and skunks and sheep here. The neighbors behind me have a herd of some kind of big sheep which occasionally wanders toward my back yard. And the sheep dog made friends with my labrador Cassy the other day...

I'm moved into the new house. I started a new job "moonlighting" as an occupational therapist. I'm working hard on the weaving. I finished the commission this week, "finished" being a relative term as I just mean it came off the loom and all the tapestry weavers out there know how much more work is needed to get the piece to the new owner. 

I pulled out the LeClerc tapestry loom that was my grandmothers and stared at it puzzled for quite awhile as I realized I had never warped a large vertical loom like this one and I didn't know how to do it! Oh, I had some ideas, but none of them seemed quite right. I was looking for a way to put on a continuous warp like I do on the smaller vertical tapestry looms, but couldn't come up with something that would work well for a long warp. I unrolled the old linen warp my grandmother had on the loom and found that the top beam had gotten wet at some point when she had the loom as the warp was molded to the apron. This was minor damage and will be remedied fairly easily.  As for the warping, Tommye Scanlin came to my rescue and I think I now have a warping plan. All I have to do is dig a long enough reed out from under piles of book boxes in my storage locker 90 miles from here. If you don't hear from me soon, look under the books and loom parts.

Thanks to my father for putting the LeClerc back together when I was busy with other things, to my Uncle Carl for good suggestions of how to get the rust off the rods where they got wet, and to Tommye for warping suggestions. 

The Shannock loom of James Koehler

James Koehler passed away unexpectedly March 4, 2011. He left behind a studio full of looms . Two large looms remain and are now for sale. The 100 inch Cranbrook loom was described in the last post. The other loom is a 100 inch Shannock tapestry loom. James bought this loom in the last year of his life. He was considering a move to using a vertical tapestry loom. He had a machinist make a special rack for a reed to replace the larger-spaced raddle that the Shannock came with and was ready to warp the loom when he died.

Please note: this loom is no longer available.

I wish I had room in my studio for it myself! The loom is currently in James' old studio in Eldorado near Santa Fe, NM. Pickup is recommended. This loom is very heavy even disassembled. Pricing and other details available at the link below. Asking $6000 or best offer.

Please note: this loom is no longer available.

The Cranbrook loom of James Koehler

When James Koehler died March 4th, 2011, he left a beautiful studio full of looms. The smaller looms all sold quickly, but the biggest two looms remain.

This loom was the workhorse of James' studio and he created many of his tapestries on it over the 20+ years he owned it. It is in exquisite condition and now it needs a new home. This loom is still in James' old Eldorado studio near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Pickup is recommended. Asking $8500 or best offer.

Please note: this loom is no longer available.

A commission James was weaving for a hotel in South Lake Tahoe, 2009

The other loom of James' that is for sale is a 100 inch Shannock. Details of this loom will follow this week.

What I promised yesterday for today is for tomorrow...

In yesterday's post I noted that I was going to post the information about James Koehler's looms today. Unfortunately I am not quite finished with that posting because I got caught up in finishing this today...

That is the end of the commission still on the loom. I know it isn't much to see all wrapped up like that, but I am glad to have come to the end at long last. I did have not cut it off yet. Sometimes I am just not ready to see the finished piece for a day or so.  Often I'll cut the piece off and leave it rolled up for a few days before I'm ready to look at it. A little distance is often good for a relationship. I'll let you know how it looks later this week along with a few insights about weaving tapestries on small workshop looms.  Whew.  I have certainly missed my Harrisville rug loom.

As for the info on James Koehler's looms, look for that tomorrow!

And here is what I have been watching from my loom while I weave to a chorus of sandhill crane music.

James and the cranes

I woke up this morning not to my alarm clock playing the first few bars of Beethoven's Choral Fantasy in C minor but to the morning flight of greater sandhill cranes flying over the house and feeding in the barley field across the street.  (Of course the insistent whines of my dog in the corner reminding me that it was far past 6 am and she was hungry might have contributed.) The cranes have been amassing for 4 weeks now, the first arrivals coming just after I moved here the beginning of February. The experience of watching 1000 or more cranes feeding, circling, taking off, calling to each other, and dancing from my front window day after day has been magical.

I have lived in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado before. Four and five years ago I was here living first in the South San Juans in a mountain house 6 miles from my nearest winter neighbor and then on the flanks of the mighty Mt. Blanca on the other side of the valley--all off-grid, all an adventure. By the summer of 2008 I was trying to fit little bits of tapestry weaving in around the three jobs I was working as an occupational therapist. I had a sunny but much-in-need-of-repair apartment over a realty office as my studio and my Rio Grande loom was turning out some promising work, albeit slowly. But my therapy jobs were becoming difficult and my personal situation was also.

In October 2008 I took another workshop with James Koehler at the Taos Wool Festival. I watched the aspens changing colors at the Taos Ski Valley one afternoon and decided I was moving back home. The next day I asked James if he would still take me on as an apprentice (he had offered two years prior) and he agreed. So I quit my jobs, packed my Rio Grande loom (and my piano--this is a story for another day, but it is another reason my brother-in-law is on my personal beer-for-life program) and moved into a lovely straw bale house in Velarde, NM, 55 miles north of James' studio in Santa Fe. By February I was spending three days a week in his studio and there was a large tapestry in process on the smaller of his Cranbrook looms.

I studied with James as his apprentice until his death March 4, 2011, a year ago today. In the year since he left us, many things have changed in my tapestry world.  I started my own business in earnest, I sold some large pieces, one to the permanent collection of a college, got some commissions, and started teaching workshops. James had a large influence both on my art and on the course of my life.

James finished his autobiography less than a year before he died. In Woven Color: The Tapestry Art of James Koehler he talks about how he came to be the tapestry artist he was. As far as I know, it is only sold by Blurb Publications at this time.

And then there was the Bauhaus project. This undertaking consumed much of three years. I have written about the Bauhaus project a lot on this blog, but I have to mention it again here because it influenced my time with James. Cornelia Theimer Gardella is a good friend of mine and the project was her baby. The idea was to look at the influences of the Bauhaus, the early 20th century German art school, on our contemporary tapestry creation in New Mexico in the early 21st century. James signed on and the three of us read a lot of Paul Klee's notebooks as well as other Bauhaus material and eventually put together two shows entitled Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus. The first show was in Albuquerque, NM in the summer of 2010. The second was in Erfurt, Germany at Michaeliskirche in September and October of 2010. The trip and the project in general were monumental for me and pushed my thinking about who I was as an artist in the broader world.

I have sold the pieces I created for that show in 2010 and it is time to move on to new projects. There have been many times in the last year that I have wanted to ask James a question about a technique, a design, a teaching quandary, or even a legal issue. I have to rely on my knowledge of him and mix that with my own experiences, because the answer James might give me if he were here today might not be the path I would take. James taught me a lot of specifics, but he also taught me to look for what is important in myself and to follow that above anything else. His words from those years I was working in his studio still echo around in my head sometimes and they have definitely influenced the direction of my art and my life in one way or another.

Cornelia Theimer Gardella, James Koehler, Rebecca Mezoff Michaeliskirche, September 2010 photo: Hamish John Appleby

photo: Hamish John Appleby

James Koehler, Michaeliskirche opening, September 2010 photo: Hamish John Appleby

Tomorrow I will post some information about his two remaining looms, a 100 inch Cranbrook and a 100 inch Shannock. They were the center of James' tapestry studio and they are in exquisite condition as they were loved by a master for many years. They are in need of new homes.

James Koehler, September 2010 photo: Hamish John Appleby

The sandhill cranes in my front yard are both a blessing and a call to awareness. Life can be much shorter than we expect it to be. We are always on a journey and I, for one, want to pay attention to where I am in this moment, eat all the barley I can while the sun is out, and prepare for the next flight north. 

The skunk in the night.

There have been a few issues with this new rental house. By far the most distressing (after I realized propane was not going to cost me $40 a day but a much more reasonable amount) was this one:

(Note: I did not take this photo. Our yard is completely brown, and also, though I almost always have a camera with me, I did not have one at the moment described below when I was trying to keep my dog from getting sprayed at 11pm in my yard.) Apparently this is a common San Luis Valley problem. Emily's first night here (I was finishing up work in Cortez), she heard a horrible screeching and then smelled THE SKUNK BOMB. Apparently it was bad. So bad it probably temporarily addled her smeller because later that day she made the FedEx lady come in and sniff to see if it still smelled. "Yep, pretty bad skunkin'" was the FedEx report. We tried to get someone to come and trap the thing. Our landlord even rented a trap for a night, but we didn't catch it and he took the trap away and "plugged the hole" in this manner:

Now my landlord is a nice enough guy.  He is a laid-back New York Jew who somehow ended up in the wilds of southern Colorado. I'm not all up on my skunk etiquette, but I am pretty sure that this is not a good way to plug a skunk hole.  I could hear the skunks laughing when they saw those baking pans and other yard junk shoved in around that old electrical conduit.

About a week and a half later at the end of my parent's baby-staycation, we had another skunk visitor.  I suppose the laughter at the baking pan "plug" to his entrance should have awakened me, but no, it was the smell. First your nose burns a little bit and then you get this horrible nauseous feeling in your stomach and you wonder if you are going to throw up, and if so, will you make it down the flight of stairs and through the bedroom my parents were sleeping in to the only bathroom in the house before you lose it... or will you have to go barf in the yard with the skunk. Figuring there was absolutely nothing I could do at 2am, I pulled the covers over my head and tried to breathe through my mouth.  Amazingly the next morning all my Mom said was, I thought I smelled skunk! It was bad, but not, according to Emily, as bad as the first time (we suspect that first event was a mating/courtship sort of thing--apparently male skunks tend to spray during coitus... or perhaps it is just foreplay).

Our landlord was, by then, in Australia for an undetermined amount of time and we knew we had to take maters into our own hands. We were unable to get anyone to come and trap it and take it away. One Fish and Wildlife-type person said they could trap it for us but that the skunk would either have to be released on our property or killed. I don't need that kind of bad skunk karma and I didn't want to come that close to the little kitty. 

There was some new snow, so we smoothed it all out and waited. The first night... nothing.  The second night I didn't wake up until 3am. I put on my skunk-hunting pajamas and my coat (the valley is colder than Antarctica in July) and peeked at the hole.  There were tons of tracks.

And I didn't know what to do. If the skunk came out earlier and already went back in again, I didn't want to plug him up in the hole. And what if there were multiple skunks? What else could I do? I left the hole open, exchanged my skunk-hunting pajamas for regular pajamas, and went back to bed.

Emily gussied up the hole making the entrance nice and available with a sweet rock walkway, threw out all the yard trash from the last tenants, and smoothed more snow around the hole so we could tell when our visitors returned (or left whichever the case may be). Nothing. For days.

So we filled the hole in. With big rocks. And railroad ties. If I could have put one of the hulking rusted pieces of farm machinery from the lot out back on top of the boards, I would have.  Hopefully the wire and rock combination will deter any digging at this particular hole in the foundation.

A few nights after plugging the hole, I smelled skunk strongly in the bedroom on the east side of the house. I was sure we'd either trapped one underneath the house or he'd found another hole that I had somehow missed in my obsessive compulsive searching for ruptures in the armory. Coincidentally, at that moment Emily let Cassy my yellow lab and avowed skunk-lover out the back door. I screamed SKUNK!, Cassy shot out the door barking, and frantic pleading from both of us with promises of really good treats brought her back before she got sprayed. I did not want a repeat of the last dog skunking which lingered for literally 6 months (even after the peroxide/baking soda/dish soap bath which does work amazingly well--unfortunately I also ended up smelling like skunk and was completely drenched from the garden hose to boot).

The hole is now plugged. The skunks will need to find another entrance to visit this particularly warm spot under the heater in this house with no floor insulation.  I'm sure it was a nice spot for a skunk--except perhaps for the fact that I'm pretty sure the water from the washing machine was draining under the house. My awesome brother-in-law fixed that a few days ago as the Australia-visitin' landlord hadn't yet sent his "guys" over to fix the obviously frozen drain pipe for the washing machine, and it was unclear whether that would ever happen. It is so nice to have a relative that can fix absolutely anything. And it only took him about 10 minutes. (He is on my "beer-for-life" program... I am not taking new applications.)

Our skunk is apparently still visiting at times. These tracks were running along the dirt road at the side of the house this morning. But so far we haven't had any more under-the-house visitors.

Grief and change.

February 16th I was in Taos and made a little pilgrimage to the closed and empty gallery. It remains difficult and sad: the closing of the gallery space, the loss of a contemporary tapestry gallery of which there isn't another, the loss of income in the process, and the manner in which the gallery was closed.

I feel more grief about this than perhaps I should.  After all, it meant I got part of a body of work returned to me from which I can build a complete set of pieces to approach another gallery. There will be new opportunities, of that I am sure. I think I miss the idea of Weaving Southwest... of the vibrant idea that Rachel Brown had about art and craft in northern New Mexico and I feel all of that is gone with the closing of the last remnants of her work... and with her death.

I found out yesterday that a friend of mine from years ago in another city was diagnosed with severe breast cancer last week--so bad that she had surgery immediately upon diagnosis and is already on chemotherapy. She is in her mid-thirties and has little kids. She is an OT and a physician. She is a vibrant and amazing woman. She may die from this. Life is unpredictable and news like this reminds me again to live a life of gratitude and compassion.

The closing of a gallery is a small blip in the scheme of a life. And an empty space invites new breath and new ideas. I hope as I move forward I can remember this each day.

Gratitude.
Compassion.

Keep weaving.