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During my New England trip, I had a weekend where I drove completely around the state of Massachusetts. I’ll call it circumnavigation though I think that only applies to boats. We were shooting photos in Harrisville, NH on Friday and I stayed in a hotel on the border of MA that night. From there I headed south of Boston for some time with Sarah Resnick who owns GIST Yarn and Claudia Chase (owner of Mirrix Looms) who made the long drive from her home in New Hampshire.
One of the days of the photoshoot for my upcoming book, the team went to Harrisville Designs in Harrisville, NH. We wanted to get some shots outside the studio that also included some of the yarn and tools that I use in my work and teaching. Since Harrisville is only about two hours from North Adams, MA, it was a feasible day trip. Nick Colony and Sasha DuVerlie were fantastic hosts and we were able to take photographs in many areas of the Harrisville campus including the store, classroom, workshop, and mill. I am sure some of the marvelous photos Mars, the Storey photographer, took will end up in the book.
My Vermont retreat is always a time full of exploration, good food, and the sense of camaraderie that comes with people staying in the same big house for 5 days. This year was no exception and I enjoyed the five days with another exceptional group of people immensely.
The retreat was about color use in tapestry weaving. This is a huge topic so of course we only scratched at it a bit in the course of 5 days. But many great questions were asked and we played with many potential answers.
I like to start these color retreats by having people look at value. It is one of the most important concepts in design and I find that people disregard it so easily.
If you’re in my online classes, you might by now be used to me saying that tapestry weaving takes practice. As adults, I actually think this fact can be a little hard for us to wrap our minds around. Many of us trained for a long time when we were much younger to become good at whatever we spend much of our days doing. We forget that back then, we practiced.
When learning tapestry weaving, we have to understand with our heads how the structures work and we have to teach our hands to manage the physical materials we’re working with.
In college, I trained to be a piano teacher. I knew I was never going to play in Carnegie Hall, nor did I have any desire to be a performer. I loved my pedagogy classes and ended up writing a piano method for preschoolers as a senior honors thesis. In the process of testing that book, I taught a little group of 3 and 4-year-olds to play the piano from my method. I was astounded at how fast these little tykes could gain the physical knowledge of pressing particular keys. They were not, however, so quick at understanding how reading music worked.
I made a video while weaving some of the tapestry I talked about in my last blog post. It shows me weaving for about 13 minutes on The Beckys. This is a tapestry diary piece about personalities and perception. This version of the video starts with me talking for a moment in my campsite and then the rest of the video is me weaving. I’ve added music in case you get bored, but feel free to turn the volume off after I stop talking if my music choices are not yours.
I made a second version of this video with real-time commentary about what I was doing and why for the Weaving Tapestry on Little Looms online course. If you’re in that course, you can find that version of the video in the Answer Vault section of the class. It describes how and why I am making the choices I’m making while weaving. If you haven’t taken it yet, now is a great time to do it.
I’ve been going to Rocky Mountain Folks Festival in Lyons, CO since 1996 when I was gifted a ticket for the weekend. Later I dated someone who not only went for the full weekend but also for song school the week before. Now I choose who I want to go hear and this year it was Ani DiFranco. She was headlining Friday night and there were a few other bands I wanted to hear, so off we went last Friday to Planet Bluegrass to sit in the sun and the rain and hear some music.
It turns out that festivals are also good places to weave. I brought my tiny copper pipe loom and finished the tapestry diary piece just before it got dark.
Emily was off speaking at a conference on the east coast last weekend and I decided to take myself camping. I loaded up the car with all my favorite bits of camping gear, a cooler of random stuff that was in the frig, and looms + yarn. I had multiple small projects in process and somehow I thought three days in the woods was going to be enough to finish all of them.
Instead, I started a new one.
This little idea was in my tapestry diary idea book and I decided to weave it while testing out this new Handywoman loom.* The piece is called The Beckys and it is about the way I mostly see myself versus how someone else in my life sees me. I’m pretty much the eternal optimist, so you can guess which side is the one I think expresses something about me.** The yarn is wool and silk from weaversbazaar with 20/6 cotton seine twine warp. The campground is pure Colorado.
