ArgoKnot

ArgoKnot
A journal of my weaving, spinning, and knitting life
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Author name: ozweaver

>Busy, Busy

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>Yesterday I visited the annual “Lace Day” of the Metro Chapter of the International Old Lacers. They have a course of study to learn Torchon lace which I started last year. I made the first pattern which is so simple it’s embarrassing! Even though there was not a course for the second pattern, the President of the group very patiently helped me set up that pattern and get started. It’s a lot more challenging than the first exercise!
This is not quite the pattern I’m doing, but it’s simlar. The scallop edge that I’m doing is an oblique interlacement, whereas here it’s vertical and horizontal, like regular weaving. I have very little “background” netting, and my sewing edge is also narrower than this. If I get proficient at this pattern I would love to make handkerchief edging. I’d have to learn how to turn corners.

I’m completely weak in the knees for lace hankies! How awesome to gain the skills to make one!

This afternoon I planted my garlic, total wishful thinking for next year! My garlic never grows into the large bulbs I get at the farmers’ market, but I’m forever hopeful that my garlic ship will come in next year! Most likely it doesn’t get enough sun where I plant it. Today I put the bulbs in a garden that a family of woodchucks has enjoyed all summer. I’m hoping the garlic is too smelly for them, but I guess I’ll have to wait and see. My weld is there, and they haven’t touched that. Absolutely nothing else has survived there!

>Hudson Valley in Autumn

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Today my husband and I took a ride through the Hudson Valley (western side) and visited a few vineyards. It was a lovely day. Geese on the water and a brand new orchard caught our attention.

Donkeys grazing on the outskirts of the Benmarl Vineyard which has lovely views of the Hudson from its high location.

>Another visit to Tapestry Exhibit

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>I managed to get another visit to the exhibit. I was hoping to walk through backwards, but I was with my husband who didn’t want to see it out of order. He can certainly dash through an exhibit when it’s not to his interest. I always feel I have to at least read all the plaquards hoping to learn something!
I’ve got pictures from the website, but none of my own. Of course my own would be quite different as I’d focus on what appealed to me. I loved one of the early works of a naval battle in the Netherlands. If I could weave just a small section of water I would be immensely pleased with myself! I’m so sorry I can’t show a detail of the water….believe it or not this is a detail even though not as tight as I would have done!

This is another detail from a much more involved work. These two men are in the foreground and so dramatic. I could barely walk away from this piece!


And this is one of my favorites. The apostles and Jesus are so sensitively portrayed, their reflections in the water are incredible, and the birds in the foreground are beautiful. The water is beautiful too.
An earlier version of this piece was in the Renaissance exhibit a couple years ago. I’d love to be able to compare the two pieces. I don’t think the earlier piece had such an elaborate border, and perhaps no border at all. But the central image seems very much like this one.

>Time Flies

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Ah, time. It’s the uniting aspect of the entire world. It’s the one thing everyone has, and would like more of – but no one can control it, manufacture it, or stop the passage of it.

Is it time for a change? Daylight savings time ends at the end of this week. I have to get ready for very short afternoons!

Fact: TIME is the most used noun in the English language!(don’t ask me to prove this as I don’t know where it was first cited…I’m only passing along what I read!)

Here are two photos from The NY State Sheep and Wool Festival that should have been posted last week. I don’t even know where last week went!
I tried to capture a sense of just how many people were there by early afternoon, but it was much more crowded than this photo shows!

And here are two photos from The Wednesday Group exhibition at the Two07 Art Gallery in NYC. I sat at the gallery yesterday and had the lovely surprise of meeting a woman from Washington State who’d come to the exhibit based on my recommendation through the Weave Tech group. She had posted asking what to see in NY, and she said I was the only one who answered. Of course I also told her to visit the exhibition at the Met as well as the Cloisters!
It’s such small world! Then a couple came in who were visiting NY from northern Vermont. I’ve already forgotten how they heard about the show.

This is a group of colorful tapestries doen by Carol Bitner (the lower right), Annelisa deCoursin (lower left, center and upper right), and me (upper left)!

This is our group project called “Not Gone for Baroque.” Weavers are Don Burns, Helen Gold, AnnaByrd Mays, Betsy Snope, Alta Turner, and me. I need to work on cropping this photo a little better

>Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor

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Tomorrow I will finally get to see the tapestry exhibit at the Met. Here’s the NYTimes review. I’ve missed all the hoopla that the rest of The Wednesday Group has gotten to attend: a full weekend of symposia last weekend, and tomorrow night’s lecture on Tudor tapestries. So at least I will get to see the show!

For the most part I don’t care for this period of tapestry. There are some awesome things going on, but I think the tapestry artist himself was lost at this point and became simply the craftsman/artisan who slavishly executed a painter’s image. I miss the freedom of expression that earlier tapestry weavers had. I miss the sense of making a picture do what weaving does best.
That’s not to say that I’m not totally “blown away” by these works and the weaving ability of the unknown weavers.

Here’s a quote from the end of the article that sums it all up for me:

But the real wonder surfaces when you stand up close. Then you see how one thread, placed next to another, which is next to another of different but related color, creates the shadow under the eye of a drowning man’s face, or the sparkle of a jewel on a ribbon on a shoe, or turns an all but abstract passage of color in a Rubens design into a brilliantly nuanced approximation of its painted source, which is itself the filtering of some sensation of the world through one artist’s eye.

In focusing on such details, you realize that the tapestry — so anonymous, so enormous, so specialized — really comes down to one person performing a task: the artist drawing the design, the spinner spinning the wool thread, the weaver passing one thread past another. If you want to regain the thrill of discovery that the Met’s first tapestry show provided, intimate attention to the riches in this one may be the way to do it.


The Wednesday Group show closes this weekend as well, so I will sit in the gallery on Sunday and take the show down at closing. It will be a long day, but my head should be full of images from the show at the Met and from visiting the Cloisters on Saturday. Not a bad way to spend a weekend!

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