What came in the mail today...

I came home today to find this in front of my door. I live in a condo in Santa Fe, and my patio is very small. It was completely full.

That is almost 500 pounds of Harrisville Designs yarn. Fortunately, most of it is not for me (though I will admit more than one of these boxes is mine). Also fortuitously, most of the new owners of this yarn are picking it up in the next few days. I don't know where the box and a half that belongs to me is going to go, but I suspect I had better start dyeing and weaving it soon because tapestries can be sold and yarn is just going to take up space in my dye studio (which is really just my garage but "garage" sounds way less sexy than "dye studio").

And in other exciting mail-related news, my new issue of Fiber Art Now showed up today. I did a little jig all the way from the mailbox. I love getting a new issue of this magazine. And though I have only flipped through it briefly thus far, I noted an exciting article about one of my tapestry heroes, Sarah Swett. I adore her work and her vivid imagination. Her story-telling ability is wonderful and I so wish I could just curl up with a cup of tea in the corner of her studio and watch her weave for a few days. Check out her website and definitely read the article in FAN.

Another article features a fellow Santa Fe tapestry artist and friend, LaDonna Mayer. (You should check out this blog post about her series after you read the article in FAN.) From the Fiber Art Now article (Spring 2014, Volume 3, Issue 3, page 33):

LaDonna's images serve to capture themes of America life. She likes to contrast the old with the new, the secular with the religious, the peaceful landscape with the bustle of city life. To LaDonna, the series as a whole represents America....

All I have to say is, can you imagine weaving a city from every state in the US and Washington D.C.? The series is called 51 American Cities and it is quite impressive to see the whole show at once.

At the risk of sounding a bit too gushy, this issue of Fiber Art Now is completely gorgeous. I highly recommend it!

And one last thing before I sign off for the night, being quite tired from lifting 50 pound boxes of wool. I have big news coming soon about my new online class, so if you don't get my newsletter, now would be a great time to add your name to my mailing list. You can do that by clicking HERE. Thanks so much! I promise I won't send you more than two a month unless there is a dire fiber-related emergency that just has to be announced.

Kristin Sæterdal's web exhibition at Nordic Textile Art Gallery

I strongly recommend a visit to Kristin Sæterdal's web exhibition The Tale of Three Tapestries at http://ntagallery.nordictextileart.net/. There are many photos and three videos in this exhibition and they are all fascinating.

She begins by talking about a project she worked on while she was an artist-in-residence at the Australian Tapestry Workshop. Force Field is a large tapestry commission for a primary school in Norway which takes the form of a capsule. Her explanation of the tapestry in the first video is wonderful.

The second section of the exhibition talks about Remembrance of the Sun, another large-scale tapestry with some exhibition photos that are stunning. Imagine a large tapestry of an underground space with light bouncing off cave-like walls hung in the middle of a large gallery space painted black. I know. Go look at the photos. The video about this piece has great details of her loom and shows her cutting it off.

The third section talks about The Red Capsule, a tapestry that addresses matters of technology and choices. Kristin Sæterdal says:

The Red Capsule expresses a world without nature, everything is artificial. The panels displays many options, and it all comes down to pushing the right one.

The consequence of pushing the button is unknown.

In her depiction of alien worlds, she opens up a lot of questions for us earthlings. Don't miss this online exhibition. And you can see her piece, Scared of the Dark in the American Tapestry Alliance's tenth biennial this year. Her website is HERE.

Her artist statement at the top of her website says this:

I make tapestries with motifs inspired by sci-fi scenography and computer games. I am searching to express archetypical human situations and states of mind. My works are commenting on different aspects of society today. For example: Is Technology our new religion? Can it save humanity from an environmental catastrophe?

Tapestry is anti-superficial and anti-collage. The work is consistent all the way through; the front is identical to the back. It is constructed thread after thread by hand. I find this disciplinary process fruitful for expressing essential insight.

I find this work inspiring. Don't miss this web exhibition and make sure to watch the videos.

Crazy Monkey! A new skein winder arrives.

I ordered something new for the studio in January. Crazy Monkey Creations made me this awesome skein winder. I have wanted one of these for quite awhile. I have been using a niddy noddy to skein yarn and I can tell you that it is just tendonitis waiting to happen... plus it is way too slow.

Here is how it showed up...

And once I got it all put together, the mounds of skeined yarn appear faster than I thought possible.

It has a counter so I no longer have to guess when I have reached a certain number of ounces. It counts for me. The arms are adjustable so I can make different sized skeins and it does three at a time. All beautifully hand-made in Loveland, Colorado.

Here is a little video blog that shows this baby in action.

Seriously, yarn flying around the room.

Tapestry Looms: What do you use?

I get many inquiries about tapestry looms. I usually reply that I actually weave very little on "tapestry looms" and instead use a floor loom for my weaving. So I feel like I am not the person to make recommendations for large tapestry looms. So help me out! I would love to hear from all of you about which tapestry looms you use.


I have one large high warp tapestry loom that used to be my grandmothers. It is this Leclerc and it doesn't have a shedding mechanism (I learned to make leashes from the Archie Brennan-Susan Martin Maffei videos. Great videos by the way!).

I have only woven one piece on it, Cherry Lake. Since the piece is 8 x 13 inches, you might wonder why I used a 60 inch loom instead of my Mirrix. The answer is that the loom was there and warped and since the wedding tapestry became THIS, I had the warp ready to weave something else... (and I was weaving Imagine on my Mirrix.)

So the only true tapestry loom that I feel really qualified to recommend is the Mirrix.

I use them for teaching workshops and for doing the samplers I make to demonstrate while filming for my online workshops. And now I rent them to students when they come to my studio to take a workshop.

I have written before HERE about my Harrisville rug loom which is my preferred loom for weaving tapestry. If you want to know my opinion about the use of floor looms for weaving tapestry, I'm certainly up to that!

What I am really interested in knowing from all of you is, what high warp tapestry looms do you use and why?


Leave a comment below. And leave me some contact information or email me HERE. I'd love to post photos of all of your looms in a follow-up blog post. (I promise I'll email you... I just don't want to type my email address here for all the spam-bots to find. If you already have it--like if you get my newsletter--email me those photos!) Thanks tapestry lovers!

Three years passes in a flash.

And we move on. Always moving. Sometimes in circles, sometimes not so much. Before you know it, three years are gone and I am in a very different place.

I worked like a fiend for 10 hours straight in my studio in Santa Fe today. James Koehler tried for years to get me to move to Santa Fe and it wasn't until two years after he died that I did it. I don't honestly think living in Santa Fe versus anywhere else in the wide world has much to do with success or failure, at least not in the field of tapestry, but it is as good a stopping place as any for the moment.

The blog post I wrote three years ago is linked HERE. Many of the links in that post don't work any more. His website is gone along with most other internet traces... except here and there in corners of my blog. It is good to see those photos again and remember where I came from.

If you didn't know him, that isn't surprising, though if you wove tapestry, you probably did. His tapestries were amazing and he was just hitting his stride when he died. His passing left a door open for me. I think in some way I am just grateful now.

Students have told me frequently over the years to stop talking about James in my classes... that I had to teach what I knew and not what he taught me. I finally listened. I don't mean that I don't talk about his work or the fact that he was my teacher. I still do. But I also talk about what I learned in my journey after he was gone. The place I am now is different than the place I was in when he was alive. Of course it is. So I have to teach from the new place. We disagreed on many things, but much of what he taught me in terms of tapestry technique and the need for focus are part of my every day practice. And then of course there is the color.

Thanks James for getting me started.

James Koehler studio, 2009

Update 3/7/14: Here is a video I hadn't seen until I saw it linked on Robyn Spady's blog today. This is James probably in 2007 after he won the NM Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.

The video: http://www.nmartmuseum.org/governors/awards/video.php?select=231

And Robyn's blog post about tapestry (also well worth your time!): http://spadystudios.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/these-are-a-few-of-my-favorite-things-36-tapestry/

Missing an A.

Yesterday evening while Emily was running the blender (milkshakes!), a large plexiglass tile fell from a small skylight which is (and I never thought about this before) situated right over my computer. My laptop was open and the thing fell point-first onto the keyboard. The result was that I lost my A key. In fact, if I wasn't really cognizant of pressing the little rubber button where the key used to be, my typing would look like I ws missing  finger or t lest n importnt vowel.

But we live in a digital age, and even without the A key, I have muddled along. Turns out you can order a new laptop key quite easily. Within 5 minutes I had seen a YouTube video about how to replace keys on a Mac and found a place that could replace the broken key. I do wish the falling plexi had landed a little north or south. It is a lot easier to type without a Q or a Z. And it is amazing how quickly your body adjusts to a different configuration for one finger... or maybe that is all the years of weaving coming to the rescue.

Happy Monday! May your plexiglass remain in your skylights.

Stay tuned for an upcoming post about my new fiber tool!

Tatting in the woods: the backpacking fiber craft

I learned to tat in the late 90s from a wonderful woman named Barbara. Tatting is one of those "dying fiber arts" and Barbara was keen to pass it on to a young soul (I was fresh out of graduate school, not even thirty). I hear people tell me tapestry is a dying art all the time (I choose to think they said dyeing art), but I don't believe them. [I'm] Not Dead Yet!

The story goes something like this. My boyfriend had left me in our house 50 miles north of Reno, NV (yeah, I know--40 acres, 11 miles from the pavement, pack rats big as my dog, no neighbors to speak of) while he went to New York to visit his mother for Christmas. Being new to the area, new to my rehab hospital job, and fairly pissed that I was alone very far from anyone else with just a dog and a neurotic cat to keep me company (well, there were the pack rats), I volunteered to spend Christmas at the hospital visiting with the patients. Barbara was one of my patients during the week. She was in her 90s, lived independently, and had broken her hip. On Christmas there was no therapy so all I did was sit in her room and talk. Turns out we had a lot in common and she taught me how to tat.

Barbara's tatting

 We had quite a few conversations about fiber during her stay at the hospital and after she went home she invited me to visit her in Carson City. I drove down to see her and she sent me home with more tatting patterns. Over the next few years I left my boyfriend and got a dog of my own. I visited her a few times, and to her eternal 90-pound-soaking-wet credit, she loved my huge clumsy shedding labrador who must have been a rambunctious puppy at that time. Her vision decreased quickly due to macular degeneration and she asked me to visit so she could give me some of her fiber art supplies. I did and she showed me her new vision toys which helped her read but didn't allow her to knit or tat any more.

Not long after that I received a letter from her niece that Barbara had died and had wanted to give me all of her remaining fiber and yarn. I was happy for her collection but mostly sad that my friend had passed on.

I recently saw some beautiful tatting being sold on Etsy. Tatting is not a dead craft, though I'd say it might be struggling more even than tapestry. The tiny shuttles and thin thread require good eyesight and a lot of time. But the results can be beautiful. I like to take tatting on backpacking trips. There isn't a lighter smaller project to be had. I took my tatting along on a day-hike last weekend. Here is a little video in case you've never seen someone tatting.

Thank you Barbara for your generous gifts of teaching and love.