Blog
DY Begay’s retrospective show at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC opened in September. She has been working on the show for years or perhaps we should say an entire lifetime. I haven’t seen it yet, but the catalog that accompanies it is wonderful. Calling it a catalog is a little misleading. It is a celebration of a weaver’s life, the places she comes from, and the experiences she has had that have shaped her work.
September has been a marvelously creative month for me and that is largely because two of my dearest tapestry colleagues came to visit a week apart. Cornelia Theimer Gardella was here for a week-long joint residency and then Sarah Swett and her adventurous dog Beryl stopped for several nights.
Having fiber friends is important and these visits remind me why that is. Both Cornelia and Sarah have had a big influence in my own tapestry life. I met Cornelia 20 years ago at Northern New Mexico Community College where we were both students in the fiber arts program. And I got to know Sarah through a little fan-girl following and then an American Tapestry Alliance retreat in Colorado almost ten years ago now. She wrote the forward to my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving.
In August I took a couple weeks off and went car camping. My intention was to do some backpacking the second week but the thunderstorms in Colorado have been fierce this year and there is nothing worse than camping at 11,000 feet with lightening hitting all around. In fact, the big piñon tree behind our house got hit a few weeks ago. I thought the strike sounded frighteningly close to my bedroom.
So car camping it was. I had some on-foot adventures and some driving adventures where I pretended my Subaru Crosstrek was a truck and I definitely did some weaving. Between all that, I read quite a few books since I was stuck under the awning or in the tent for quite a lot of time in the rain.
I spent some time weaving Mt. Hesperus.
If you’re a tapestry weaver who does smaller format work, you’ve likely at least heard of Mirrix looms. I’m guessing you probably have one in your studio. The classic looms that are rectangular in shape and have a shedding device also come with a funny-shaped handle to shift the shed. If you’re new to this sort of shedding device, the way this handle works can be a little mysterious.
I was getting out of my car at the library yesterday and I had the two dogs in the car. They like a ride sometime and I didn’t have to stop anywhere for long so they got to come along. Sal was barking at some unidentifiable thing and a woman walking down the sidewalk turned around and asked if those were dachshunds barking. She said she’d know that bark anywhere. She also said they’re great dogs. Which they are. They’re smart and they love to help, especially Sal. She is bright and learns fast and she gets into all kinds of trouble.
I was searching for some tapestry teaching video footage on some old hard drives recently and came across the recordings from my senior recital in college. Most of you probably don’t know that I was a music major as an undergrad. I played piano and clarinet while attending Lawrence University in Wisconsin. I was a liberal arts major among a conservatory of bachelor of music majors. I knew I didn’t want to be a performer, but I was interested in teaching so I took a lot of piano pedagogy classes. My senior thesis was writing a piano pedagogy curriculum for preschoolers.*
For all the decades since I graduated from Lawrence I have avoided listening to that recording. And that is because of what happened in my piano playing before the recital.
