The James Koehler videos from the Denver Art Museum, Part 1: Color

A few months ago I did a long interview with the curatorial staff at the Denver Art Museum about my tapestry teacher, James Koehler. The interview, broken into five parts, is part of a display of one of James' pieces in the current tapestry show at DAM, Creative Crossroads: The Art of Tapestry.

I'd like to talk a little bit about each of the videos here on the blog. Of course I have background stories about all of them and I thought you might like to hear some of them. If not, I'm sure I'll be back to my regularly scheduled salad of tapestry information soon.

In this first video, Barb Brophy, another Koehler student, and I talk about James' use of color. We talk about his ability to create intense colors in his hand-dyed yarn. Many of his very intense colors were created for student use however. James' work was more subtle than that and the colors he used were toned or created with some complimentary colors mixed in.

James Koehler, Harmonic Oscillation LXI

As many of his apprentices did over the years, I spent a lot of time watching the dye pots. He would not let us measure the dyes. His one secret in relation to his work in tapestry was his dye formulas. He even (and I'm not kidding here) had cans of dye in which the labels were covered with duct tape. I have a few suspicions of what was in those cans, but we'll leave his secret where it is for now.

In the dye process, he measured out the dyes himself, dumped them into water baths which he heated, strained, and stirred on his dye kitchen stove, and then let me take it from there.

He had three huge dye pots just outside the studio heated by propane burners. He could dye three pounds of a color at once with acid wool dyes. He only did one run a day. So for most of the summer, the pots were running. Nine pounds a day. Much of it for the workshops he taught constantly.

In the video I make it sound like making the colors James did was a mystery. There were a few colors I have been unable to create in my own dye studio (see prior comment about mystery ingredients), but for the most part, a good dyer with a solid knowledge of color theory can create amazing things with acid wool dyes. Yes, James had a special ability to produce lovely evenly dyed yarns. But many of you could do it too if you wanted to. I bet James would tell you that himself if he could.

The piece that the Denver Art Museum owns is one of the Chief Blankets series. This is what James has to say in his book, Woven Color, about those pieces:

But the images I really liked--that had an aesthetic of simplicity and were efficient in terms of my being able to weave them--were from the Navajo Chief Blankets. . . . I looked at the Chief Blanket as though it were a triptych. There were three areas of color that were separated by very broad repetitive bands of black and white. The stripes could be woven with relative ease, and the color areas could be done with tapestry techniques. So it was like weaving three smaller tapestries as part of that large format. I approached the creating of design elements for the colored panels as if I were designing a triptych.

Here is the video:

As always, you can view it on YouTube by pushing the icon in the bottom right corner of the player. If you are receiving this blog post as an email, you have to visit the post on the internet to see the video. Just go to my blog here: http://rebeccamezoff.blogspot.com.

Here are the yarn balls Barb talks about in the video.

And here are some more photographs of that Chief Blanket piece. You can visit the show to see it in person. It runs from now through March 6, 2016. It is a great excuse to visit Denver.

James Koehler, Chief Blanket with Blocks, in the collection of the Denver Art Museum

One of James' trademarks was subtle use of color. Get a close look at the diamond shape in the center of the red squares. The violet and blue are so close in value they are difficult to tell apart, but there is a blue square in the center of the violet diamond. I suspect it is the same blue as you see in the three intermediate squares though the violet shifts the color somewhat (simultaneous contrast!).

James Koehler, Chief Blanket with Blocks, detail

If you are interested in more of the story, here are some blog posts about the time in my life I was apprenticing with James.
/rebeccamezoff/2015/03/a-chief-blanket-inspired-tapestry-of.html

/rebeccamezoff/2011/03/james.html

I'll have more about the other four videos in the next week.

Yarn lovers unite!

I received an email this week that made me gasp a little bit.
Village Wools is closing.

This is the yarn shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico that my mom brought me to as a kid. It has been open for 44 years. I love the smell. I loved hearing Franzi call, Hello! when we walked in. I was a little afraid of her because she seemed so on top of everything and was so assertive. She knew everything about yarn. But when I got older and had questions about patterns and yarn substitutions, I sought out Franzi every time.

I loved touching all the yarn and flipping through the patterns and finding a new book to go home with. I loved this place because it was always a destination. We're going to Albuquerque [with some dread faced with the two hour car ride and uncertain errands at the other end, turned to anticipation with...] Let's go to Village Wools!

I was talking to another yarn store owner friend of mine awhile back and she was telling me how she is afraid that brick and mortar yarn stores are all going to disappear. I understand that fear given the different climate of internet sales and marketing. But I think we need brick and mortar yarn stores. We need a place to go with shelves of patterns, employees who know the difference between sport and worsted weight yarn, and the needles for any project right there. We need the community that yarn creates. And we need them everywhere.

I wish more yarn stores sold weaving supplies. I've lived many places where I had no alternative other than ordering on the internet. But if your local yarn store does carry your weaving yarn and tools, buy them there for goodness sake! (The Recycled Lamb in Golden and Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins in Boulder are two great Colorado options.)

I do not think that brick and mortar yarn stores are necessarily on their way out. I think that things just have to be different in this marketing climate than they were two decades ago. Seeing things on social media about your local shop is helpful. Blogs with stories, presence at local fiber events, lots of great classes all draw people in. I'm not a yarn store owner, so I don't know if any of that can overcome how easy it is to buy the exact yarn a pattern calls for by pushing a button on the internet, but I can hope.

There are several fantastic yarn shops in Fort Collins. I love them all for different reasons. I was in My Sister Knits the other day just to get a size of needle I needed for a project (yarn and book purchased a few days before at the Brown Sheep Company mill) and left with yarn for two new projects. I'm super excited about both of them. I bought it all because they had marvelous samples of things I really wanted to knit and wear and Theresa who was helping me, recommended some combinations I would not have known about if I hadn't listened to her experienced voice. (And well, I'm a total sucker for yarn. I have wanted to try some Habu for the longest time and of course they carry it and had a marvelous sample scarf knit with it... sold.)

Believe me, I am familiar with the internet. I know you can buy large quantities of yarn at big discounts from online dealers. And maybe sometime you need to do that. But for your average project, consider the experience you get by going to your local shop. Thumbing through the pattern books for a pattern or asking the shop staff for appropriate yarn substitutions for that pattern everyone on Ravelry is knitting. Pay attention to the hottest new fiber or ask them what their favorite yarn is and why. I've discovered some amazing new things by asking these questions.

Go to a knit or spin night. Take a class (what could be more fun?). Life is for experiencing yarn. Live it up!

And for Village Wools, please remember,

(Photo taken in their very bathroom.)

The world of Instagram and Pinterest? It isn't real.

Yes, I do like and use a few social media platforms on a regular basis. Facebook is a habit. Pinterest is a great way to feed my obsessive collecting need without actually collecting things that take up space in my home or studio. Instagram is a fascinating scroll through the lives of the beautiful. The images are for the most part gorgeous. But don't you think there must be a pile of crap just out of the frame? I mean, does anyone really have a studio that looks like it stepped out of a high-budget Hollywood production? (If, say, there were art studios in high-budget Hollywood productions...)

Nope. I am absolutely sure there is a bin of unentered receipts under the desk and six empty tea cups on the bookshelf just out of view of the camera. And that etherial, white, floaty-feeling is created by a filter slapped right over reality.

I have felt a great deal of distress centered around Instagram in the last few weeks. It wasn't really an identifiable "I'm upset because this is not what I believe about the world of art" kind of distress (though there was some of that too). It was an amorphous unrest that started when choosing my photo for my daily post and intensified when I scrolled through my feed. I finally had to stop and ask myself what the heck was going on.

The truth is, Instagram is fiction. (Thanks to Kim Werker for giving me those words, only I think she said, "Pinterest is fiction"). IG photos are lovely. The worlds they represent are shiny and happy and people are having fun making things (or cooking or raising sheep or whatever you are interested in following). I just want to remind all of us myself that this world is created with Photoshop and that there are piles of unfinished projects behind the closet door, a drift of un-inventoried tapestry tools in the corner, and a pile of receipts that you haven't entered into Quickbooks because you haven't figured out how to categorize them (and you feel like a complete freakin' failure because of this little fact).

I think the truth is that we learn the most from getting it wrong first. Maybe for a very long time. Why can't we, as humans, admit that this is true? Is our culture so much about being perfect that we have forgotten we are human and we need each other? The pressure I put on myself to do massive amounts of work and to do it "perfectly" is intense (maybe even insane). I do not believe I am that far from the norm of small business owners/entrepreneurs in this country. Instagram is not helping me in my twelve-step program to overcome perfectionism. Not one little bit.

So I will continue to try to keep the piles of crap out of my Instagram photos, but if some creep in, please celebrate them with me. And for goodness sake, don't forget that even those networking geniuses with 57k followers have hairballs the cat coughed up under the dresser. I am just sure of it.

Love the one you're with

Perhaps that blog title should be:

Use the fiber you have

I have a bit of a stash. Knitting yarn is confined to my clothes closet. I figure that is a good way to limit both the amount of clothes (never a problem) and the amount of knitting yarn I am tempted to buy (always a problem). And I consider the weaving yarn a business asset though I have tried to use up the undyed yarn stored in huge plastic bins this year (before buying more of course). I am not even going to mention the hand-dyed tapestry yarn stash. That is sacred.

In the interest of cleaning out the dark corners of my closets of UFOs (UnFinished Objects), I pulled them all out last weekend. I was a little shocked. I mean, I knew that there were four sweaters that needed finishing, but seeing the pile was kind of like staging my own intervention. I found these almost-finished projects:

• 3 baby hats (and I suspect 8-10 more are hiding in the stash)
• 4 adult-sized sweaters, one a long-promised gift
• 5 scarves needing only ends sewn in and blocking
• 7 elf sock Christmas ornaments
• 1 shawl (ends and blocking)
• 1 felted bag missing only a lining and the handle sewn on
• 2 kid toys (monsters missing most of their vital parts still!)
• 1 bath set (ends sewn in only--and there were only 4 ends)
• 1 pair of socks 
• 1 friend's sweater from which a dog had chewed a button and left a hole the fixing of which was an exchange for some awesome spinning fleece (I clearly got the better end of this deal)
• 1 organic cotton baby blanket needing only the lining sewn in. Lining fabric is present.
• 1 woven baby blanket with pick-up text that says "Giggle"

It took me the length of one movie (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) to sew in the tails of a large percentage of these projects which are now in line for blocking. The big projects remain but I have hope that I will be able to plow through all of them in the next few months.

So all of this brings me to what I did yesterday.
I took a little field trip to Mitchell, Nebraska. Why Nebraska you ask? Because the Brown Sheep Company is there. What do they make?
You guessed it. Yarn.

I was only going to buy the wool warp I wanted to try. Really. But then I found out that their mill store sells their seconds yarn (the skeins with more than one knot in them) for unbelievable prices... and then there was the brand new knitting book from Interweave with the very cool patterns and the yarn was right there... and, well, I brought home two bags worth. I know it won't fit in the closet stash with all those UFOs. So it is back to doing the finishing.

Unfortunately (or fortunately for you, dear readers), Brown Sheep Co. doesn't allow photos in their mill. So you are spared the lengthy photo/video tour of the facility (if this is disappointing to you, you can visit my prior tours HERE and HERE and HERE). Just believe me when I say that it was wonderful and I had a fantastic time.

Here are a few of the things that interested me:

• They source their wool locally. They get their wool which is Rambouillet and Columbia from local sheep farmers in Nebraska, Wyoming, and the front range of Colorado. I like this a whole lot.
• Their process is worsted (as opposed to Harrisville which is a woolen mill).
• The raw wool is processed in South Carolina. They get it back as lovely combed top.
• All the wool is white. They spin it first (except for some of the heathered yarns they do where they dye the roving first), steam it, ply it if it is not a single... there are multiple times they have to skein the stuff... and then they dye it.
• The roving was coiled in four-foot tall cylinders perhaps a foot and a half in diameter. The ones that had a mix of white and black created an especially lovely pattern--all that lovely top coiled regularly in a mix of black and white. Really you should see it.
• I haven't before seen the huge dyeing machines they use before. They use acid wool dye and they do have a hand-dyer for some of their lines. But the solid colors go on trays in one of the huge square dyeing machines. Their largest will dye 200 pounds of wool at a time. (!!!) They recycle the water and what they can't use again is treated and evaporated from a large lagoon.
• The skeining machines were super cool. Boy do I wish I had one of those!
• There is a very cool label machine that puts on the labels for many of the kinds of yarn, though all the paper labels you see on their lines are applied by hand. 
• In case you're interested in weaving tapestry with their yarn, I would recommend Brown Sheep Waverly for this purpose. It comes in hundreds of colors and you can buy it in 8-yard skeins which is great for small-format work.

I loved it. I will go back. Someone might have to hold my credit card when I do though.
There is a fiber festival in Scotts Bluff in September that Brown Sheep participates in heavily including offering classes and factory tours. Let's go!

We also stopped at Scott's Bluff National Monument, took a hike to the top of the bluff, and had some fun with the Oregon Trail replica wagons that were there. How much yarn do you think I'd have if I had to move everything I owned across the west in one of these?

I am going to try again to love the fiber I have. I do think a stash is absolutely vital to the life of a fiber artist. I'm just not sure how many skeins of hand-dyed sock yarn I can realistically knit in the next 40-50 years.

The super nerdy things I do...

You all know I love doing things like visiting fiber mills and wool festivals. I suspect those things are understandable given my life in fiber. But apparently my nerdiness extends to non-fiber pursuits also.

My 15-year-old niece was visiting last week. We had a fantastic time camping in one of my favorite campgrounds (No, I'm not telling you where it is. I usually don't camp in campgrounds, but no one goes to this one and I want to keep it that way.). We saw a moose in Rocky Mountain National Park. Emily and I tried to be hip aunties and did a darn good job I'd say.

But I suspect our tour of the Celestial Seasonings plant in Boulder was the highlight of the trip for the niece.

Unfortunately photos were not allowed inside the factory. This is especially unfortunate because everyone was wearing hairnets. But it was fascinating to see how all that tea goes from the huge bags of ingredients from all over the world into these little plastic-wrapped boxes. We even survived The Mint Room.

Of course there is plenty of tea you can take home with you in the shop. I brought a whole basket home and will go back for more.

Right after I take another tour.

And lastly, I love a world that includes Google Sheep View.
http://www.googlesheepview.com/
...a blog dedicated to finding every sheep on Google Street View.
Thanks to Cheryl from The Recycled Lamb for bringing it to my attention. My life is now complete.

A safe place for learning online

As most of you know, I teach tapestry weaving online. I've been doing this for over a year now and have enjoyed all of it. I love creating a space for learning that is safe, fun, and that changes with the questions students ask.

If you took Part 1 of my Warp and Weft: Learning the Structure of Tapestry class and you are ready for Part 2, it started today. If this week isn't your week, never fear, the class is forever access and you can keep asking me questions as long as you need to. [Click HERE to register]

And if you're waiting for the new classes I'm working on, they'll be coming your way soon! I'll have a Color Gradation Techniques class by the end of the summer and a couple short surprise classes in the fall.

I am always humbled by the kind words I hear from my students. I hate to even call them students because they give so much back to me every day. But here are a few words from people who have taken the class:

I want you to know I am totally LOVING this class so far. Thank you for creating such a safe learning space!!!!   --Donna

This was the first time I've taken an online class. The experience could not have been better! Challenging yet clearly presented, I looked forward to each new step. Rebecca, I appreciated your comments and encouragement! I feel like I've found my way back to something I had lost... and it's a great feeling. Thank you!  --Faith

I applaud your determination to perfect your teaching videos--they are the best I've ever viewed.... Please continue down this path of teaching which you are passionate about - your approach is fresh and succinct - You have a natural gift and I for one am ecstatic that you are willing to share it with others.  --Sue

And if those three hadn't made me teary enough, this one really did me in:

Hi Rebecca,

What a delightful gift you have given us! I appreciate your generous spirit and delight in giving.

As I was sitting with a cup of coffee before heading to the loom this morning I came across this StoryCorps piece and thought of you.

It was a dad talking to his young son who had a lot of questions, including, "what do you dream I will be when I grow up?"

This is what his Dad said to him:

"My dream is for you to live out your dreams," Albert told him. "There's an old proverb that talks about when children are born, children come out with their fists closed because that's where they keep all their gifts. And as you grow, your hands learn to unfold, because you're learning to release your gifts to the world."

Thank you for unfolding your hands and heart and for sharing your gifts.

Lorilla

I do this thing--this teaching of tapestry--because I love it. I love weaving, I love fiber, I love making art that means something and I think it is important as humans that we continue to make things with our own hands. It might even be vital.

If you are looking for more information about my online classes or the workshops I teach around the US, start here: http://www.rebeccamezoff.com/

Video: Tapestry weaving, low-warp style

Many of you have asked me to shoot a video of me actually weaving. I shoot many videos for the online course, but they are almost always done on a Mirrix loom. Here is an example of me weaving my own work on my Harrisville rug loom. Never fear, if you get dizzy, you can skip to the end where I show weaving in real time.

In the video I'm working on some areas I am outlining eccentrically so I am not using the beater on the loom for the most part.

Tapestry weaving, low-warp style with Rebecca Mezoff

(As always, you can go to my YouTube channel by clicking the YouTube icon in the lower right of the video player. While you're there, subscribe to my channel for future tapestry weaving videos. I have some new ones planned for this summer!)

Rigging up a video camera to shoot on a low-warp loom isn't easy! I'll have to give it another go without so many views of the top of my head.

This is the loom I was weaving on.