Washing the fields out of the fiber

Washing the fields out of the fiber

There might not be anything better than turning a really dirty fleece into a white fluffy cloud of fiber. It never crossed my mind when I became interested in spinning that I’d actually purchase raw fleece. That is until I met Maggie Casey. I learned to spin from her in her shop in Boulder and she loves using fleece so she teaches her students to use fleece as a fiber source. Of course I still learned to spin using roving and top and whatever other commercially prepared fiber is available, but getting your hands into actual fleece sure taught me a lot about the material I weave my tapestries with: wool.

It only takes one time of seeing that pile of often grubby, sticky fiber turn into a fluffy cloud of curls and crimp to get you hooked. Apparently Maggie knew this when she brought fleece to her spinning classes at Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins.

,

Unusually spontaneous: Taos, churro fleece, and a textile show

,
Unusually spontaneous: Taos, churro fleece, and a textile show

I took a trip to New Mexico on the spur of the moment last weekend. It is unusual for me to decide to take a trip that involves 6-7 hours of driving each way at the last minute, but the stars aligned, and off we went. We had some friends who we wanted to see who were there visiting from Europe and the first weekend of October is Taos Wool Festival weekend. Yes, I know that this festival left Taos and was held in Santa Fe. I didn’t go to the renamed Mountain and Valley Wool Festival partly in disappointment at it leaving Taos, but also because I was tired of driving and didn’t want to go all the way to Santa Fe when Taos was so beautiful.

Instead, I haunted Taos Wool’s pop-up shop and gallery show. One of the highlights of the weekend for me was hearing Connie Taylor speak about churro sheep, wool, and uses for their fleece. Connie is someone I met in 2005 when I was a student at Northern New Mexico Community College in the fibers department. At that time she had a big flock of churro sheep and was making 14 different colors of natural wool. (That fact still astounds me, but I saw it for myself and know it to be true.) I purchased her wool for my saltillo project. In Taos, she had her shade card with her, pictured below, along with a wide range of natural churro yarns.

Staying pain free while you weave: Wellness for Makers

Staying pain free while you weave: Wellness for Makers

Missy Graff Ballone’s new book, Wellness for Makers: A Movement Guide for Artists is a book I’ve been waiting awhile for. It is finally out from Schiffer Publishing.

Many of you know I worked as an occupational therapist for 17 years in a wide variety of settings including adult inpatient and outpatient rehab, work rehab/pain clinic, SNF, home health, and I worked for many years in pediatrics in outpatient and schools. Ergonomics was not my specialty, but any OT has to know quite a bit about how to to adapt environments and habits for health and to adapt after injury or disease.

I hear many stories on social media about weavers who give up weaving because they have too much pain with the practice. I think a lot of times that is because they do not know how to adapt their practice and equipment for pain-free use as well as long-term health. It is sad when people give up activities they love because they think they’re too old or have too much pain due to other factors than age rather than learn to adapt the way they approach that activity so they can keep engaging in it. Before you give up weaving, please get a referral to an occupational therapist who can help you figure out ways to continue!

What makes a good tapestry yarn?

What makes a good tapestry yarn?

For many years when I first started weaving tapestry I used the yarn that my teacher used. After all, it was a great yarn, dyed well, and I was able to get most of the effects I wanted in my work using it.

When I started teaching tapestry, I began experimenting with other tapestry yarns and then with some yarns that are not specifically designed for tapestry weaving. It became a bit of an obsession and over the years of teaching tapestry weaving, I’ve collected and used something like 30 different yarns. Some were difficult and not suited to tapestry and I’ll never use them again for weaving. Others were yarns I loved because they suited the effects I wanted to achieve in my work.

I have a small set of favorites that I use myself, but there are many yarns made in the world that can be used for tapestry weaving. The question is, how do you know which ones those are?

If you’ve taken any of my online classes, you probably have some version of my Yarn Sources handout. As my list of yarns got longer and longer, I realized I might have a problem. I like to collect things and yarn is one of those things. In the name of research I have more tapestry yarns than I can possibly ever use. But the upside of that is that my students get to benefit from my hoarding collecting nature.

,

Weaving from the colors around me: the Mirrix Challenge 2022

,
Weaving from the colors around me: the Mirrix Challenge 2022

This week I am leading the Mirrix Summer Weaving Challenge. You can find my challenge on Mirrix’s website HERE. Those of you who have taken my Summer of Tapestry course probably recognize this challenge because I used a similar idea as the beginning of that class.

In the Mirrix challenge, I encouraged you to go for a wander somewhere and to take some time to enjoy really looking at what is around you. When you find something that grabs your attention, focus on the colors of that object or place. You can see the rest of the suggested instructions in the challenge write-up.

I wanted to weave another tapestry for my own challenge response beyond the one I show as an example. This month I was able to go camping with my family for several days in southern Colorado. It had been raining a lot and there were mushrooms growing everywhere. It seemed like every day there were new ones we hadn’t seen before. My nieces are budding mycologists and they took us on mushroom hunts where we identified many of the mushrooms we found.

Dippers

Dippers

Driving down the Poudre Canyon on my way home from a backpacking trip this month, I wondered out loud what the word “Ouzel” meant as I passed a popular picnic area in the canyon. A few days later after posting the video below, someone told me. Water ouzel is the old name for American Dippers. These are fascinating birds that I had just spent a half hour watching on the hike out from a 3-day backpacking trip.

The first time I saw these birds was in 2020 in a stream perhaps 20 miles away from this month’s sighting. We were again backpacking along a branch of the Poudre River and noticed these small gray birds throwing themselves violently into rushing rapids again and again. They’d come up many feet from where they disappeared and astonishingly we concluded they must be swimming underwater.

Researching what we had seen when I got home, I realized they were American Dippers. As Cornell says at that link, they are the only truly aquatic songbird in North America.

We saw them again along another tributary to the Poudre that same year and then this year we found them on Fall Creek just above CSU Mountain Campus in Pingree Park. They are recognizable from their funny dipping dance that never seems to stop until they dive into the water. I took some video and you can see both the dance and the swimming.

Take a few minutes to watch these fascinating creatures play in this rushing stream.

,

Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

,
Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

Making circles is a tricky thing in tapestry weaving. To weave a circle we believe is round, you have to trick the eye or make it really big. Tapestry is woven on a grid and to make a form perfectly circular means you basically take a square and cut the corners off. If your tapestry is huge, then this illusion is not as hard to make, though it IS still quite difficult to make a perfectly round circle given fiber’s propensity to squish and move about.

If your circles are small, it is all the harder because you don’t have very many warps to convince us that what is a shape with steps is really round.