All the little tapestry diary pieces: a roundup

All the little tapestry diary pieces: a roundup

I’ve been weaving what I call my tapestry diary since November of 2016 when I did an artist residency at Petrified Forest National Park. I’ve had many posts about this practice over the last almost four years and I wanted to gather them all together here. I’ve also added category tags to many posts and these are tagged and can be found from the list on the blog. That list is on the right side on a computer and larger mobile devices (iPad) and is at the bottom of the blog list on a mobile phone. The tapestry diary posts are categorized Tapestry Diary and if you’re looking for something in another category, say, Looms or Yarn, that will help you out!

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The tapestry diary has been a place for me to play, work through events, remember places, and mostly just mess around with small looms. These pieces have all been small because that is part of the point. I sometimes call the practice sketch tapestry and have taught workshops about it. But you don’t need a workshop to quickly understand the concept. Weave something from an idea or a quick sketch that is simple and aims to evoke a place, something simple you saw, or an emotion. I like to keep these very small so they are finished quickly and I don’t get hung up on making them perfect. Ditch the perfectionism with this practice. It helps let go when things matter more.

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Reckoning with Myself: Part 2

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Reckoning with Myself: Part 2

“Reckoning with myself” is just my way of saying that I’m working on stuff. In Part 1 I was musing about space to work and a few tapestry designs I’m still working on. I still don’t have an answer about the big tapestries, but I can say that I spent a fun weekend enlarging the cartoon for one of them using my projector and a roll of paper my grandmother had labeled like this:

Using our "special" yarns

Using our "special" yarns

If you’re anything like me, you are a bit of a yarn hoarder. I’m sure there are those of you reading who only purchase or make yarns for one project at a time, but I can hardly imagine such a world. Nope. I have shelves of yarn and a growing stash of spinning fiber. I wrote THIS blog post on a similar subject on March 19th, 2020. The yarn I was going to use during the few months of pandemic lock-down. Little did I know we would still be here in late August expecting it all to continue for the foreseeable future.*

I figure all that stash was waiting for this moment. Lock-down. Stay-at-home. Social distancing. COVID has given me more time in the studio. It is time to consider those “special” yarns and whether I need to gift them or use them or continue to save them.

I put the word special in quotations because the reason they’re special is almost entirely not because they’re expensive but because I have some emotional or sentimental connection to them. As the tapestry by Alex Marriott at the bottom of this post says, I am so blessed. Not only do I have the funds from time to time to purchase more yarn than I can use, I have equipment to knit or weave them on and some time to do those non-essential tasks.

Still, many of these yarns are special to me and I thought it would be interesting to dig them out, share them, and think about why I’ve been saving them, sometimes for years.

Tapestry diary: Weaving about the Cameron Peak Fire

Tapestry diary: Weaving about the Cameron Peak Fire

Thursday, August 13th, the Cameron Peak Fire started near Chambers Lake way up the Poudre Canyon. This area is about 50 miles west of Fort Collins and is most definitely the outdoor playground of this city. In a year full of grief, this fire was a big personal hit. I know all the rational things: that there are far bigger problems in the world than wildfire, that the forest absolutely has to and would have eventually burned in this location, and that some of my grief stems from the loss of the privilege of actually enjoying such places on a regular basis. Still, it is a deep personal grief and I have done a lot of crying over the last week. . . .

I think the hardest thing is thinking about all the places I love and how they will be forever changed. As I left the Rawah on my birthday last week, I thought, “I can come back soon. This place will still be here.” But I was wrong. That place will not be the same in my lifetime. It will be years or decades before trails can be rebuilt if they are at all.

Reckoning with myself: Part 1

Reckoning with myself: Part 1

I know all of us feel it in some way. There is a lot of chaos around the world and certainly in the USA. I find it hard not to take that chaos on emotionally and have been struggling to find calm spaces. As you might have noticed, this summer that has taken the form of frequent short backpacking trips. But I also think I’ve finally reached the point of no return with my studio space. The chaos has overwhelmed me and brought any forward progress in weaving large art tapestries to a grinding halt. The chaos is even on full display in my Change the Shed episodes—that is how far gone I am. I have ceased caring that thousands of people have seen my disaster of a studio on YouTube for months and months.

Time to fix that. Maybe cleaning is a normal response to chaos anyway. . . .

A few weeks ago when I found myself crying on the floor clutching a badly bruised foot after tripping on the video backdrop support in a cramped space, I decided it was time to fix the problem as much as I could. Moving isn’t an option in the world of COVID and neither is renting another space, so this one will have to become more user-friendly. I’m working on that and my goodness but it feels good to move stuff around, give some of it away, sell some of it, and gain more space to work. Maybe in the end, I won’t need a bigger space after all.**

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Making tapestry designs from nature

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Making tapestry designs from nature

I have a t-shirt that says “Weaving saved my life.” I’m not sure that is actually true, however, the amazing Sarah Neubert gave it to me and when I put it on I think of her courage and work in the world of weaving and it makes me smile. What I do feel this year is that backpacking has saved my life or at least my sanity over the last couple months. I was feeling mighty anxious and a bit frantic last weekend for reasons I can not pin down, and three days in the woods made an incredible difference. Sleeping outside, watching moose through my binoculars, seeing osprey and marmots, and watching the full moon rise over my tent in the middle of the night* provided space, perspective, and calm. . . .

My backpacking kit includes a small loom and there is nothing I love more than sitting somewhere high in the mountains weaving or spinning. I’ve talked about my “tapestry diary” many times on this blog. I weave these little pieces as a way to keep myself working and processing ideas in tapestry but also as a way to remember places and events. It is quite effective actually. Spend a couple hours weaving a tiny tapestry about something and that memory comes back when I see the piece months or years later.

Need to know how much of that mystery yarn you have? Get a yarn balance.

Need to know how much of that mystery yarn you have? Get a yarn balance.

Mystery yarns! We all end up with them eventually. There are ways to figure out what sort of fiber it is which I won’t cover in this post, but if you simply need to know how MUCH of a yarn you have, there is a simple tool to tell you. It is called a yarn balance. I’ve had mine for decades and it does come in handy if I need to know how many yards I have of something calculated from the weight of the ball of yarn.

Long ago in my fabric-weaving days, someone told me about the McMorran Yarn Balance. I pulled it out recently to calculate yards per pound of a tapestry yarn I was testing and thought you, dear readers, might not know this simple tool exists.