Category Archives: tapestry

>Nuppdom

Posted on February 23, 2009 | 5 comments

>I spent the weekend deep in nupps on my current Swallowtail shawl. This is my third Swallowtail, and I was certain I had mastered nupps. On every right side row I diligently slowed down just enough to ensure that my ‘K1, YO, K1, YO, K1 in the next stitch’ was decidedly loose, so that on the next row I could more easily insert my needle for a P5 tog. Well, it’s still not a walk in the park for me to do that P5 tog… There are only 10 rows of it, but they are slow going, and I must be nearing 300 stitches on the needle where every 10th stitch is a nasty nupp!

Actually, I’ve finally graduated beyond ‘nasty nupps.’ They are just annoying nupps now! Oh, but I do love the little drooping lily of the valley blossoms they create! I hope to be blocking this shawl by tomorrow or Wed!

Look what came in the mail! Oh my! I’ve promised myself that I will divest myself of a great deal of Paternayan in order to add this treasure to my stash….

I am completely flumoxed about creating a design for some aspect of the Hudson River (to celebrate the quadricentennial). Although I do not like to be tied down to a subject, there is so much leeway here I can hardly say I’m being ‘forced’ into a particular design. I’m so frustrated I’m seriously considering just warping up and weaving with no cartoon. ….just to see what might happen. Obviously I want water and sky. This is not about not liking or caring about the Hudson River…I actually think it might be just the opposite. I’ve lived near the Hudson for most of my life now. I love the view of the Palisades that I see almost every week in my local travels.

Well, I can’t weave if I’m not warped, so I will at least get that done…..

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Posted in knitting, tapestry, weaving

>Fallen Woman

Posted on February 12, 2009 | 4 comments

>I’m a fallen woman! I only made it 6 weeks before falling prey to a yarn purchase!

What would you do in my situation? I read on my tapestry list that Weaving Southwest was discontinuing its fine singles tapestry yarn. ….never to be had again. Oh, I wish I could post the colors I ordered, with luscious names like Chokecherry, Ganado, Red Willow, Caramel, Pinon and Spruce. I can’t wait to open that box!

And I have to say this has been a particularly hard 6 weeks. I’ve spent too much time trying to think of ways I could get yarn without actually buying it! I asked my husband to buy me yarn for Valentine’s day (he said, “why don’t we just go out to dinner instead.”). I offered to send my sister money and a list of yarns I wanted. I’ve been getting more and more uptight as the weeks go by. Deep down I knew I’d never last a whole year… truthfully, I don’t feel that guilty!

I worked on Rob’s hand at Soyoo’s today. Finally all the ‘dotty’ shapes turned into a hand! I like it! Here are two of Soyoo’s rules: when shading within a shape (in this case, Rob’s hand) always include most of the colors from the previous colorway. And to unify a piece use one color throughout. In this case the bright and deep golds of the background will be used anywhere there is light to give a sense of the wonderful golden light of sunset falling on everything.

A little project making a temari ball. I made a few more than 25 years ago (where does the time go?), but decided to join a group of friends to make a few more. Our time together is a great learning session, because we are following a plan, starting with the first exercise in the Diana Vandervoort book and working through the different techniques in order.

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Posted in tapestry, weaving, yarn

>What’s going on here?

Posted on November 12, 2008 | 2 comments

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I just returned from a six day trip to San Francisco, where I indulged in a trip to Art Fibers and Britex, along with the typical sightseeing: the seals on Pier 39, Union Square, Chinatown….


Dyeing with weld has been on my mind since early summer when I realized my second year plants were going to flower. This is my first attempt at dyeing weld. It was a multi-day process. First I chopped up the dried branches from plants that I harvested back in July. Immediately after covering them with water I realized I meant to cut the branches into much smaller lengths, like 1″ – 2″ lengths, but it was too late! Sometimes I wonder at my lack of ability to concentrate! The color I got after simmering the weld did not look promising, like weak tea. I let the pot cool and sit for a couple of days and then heated it to a simmer again. I never did let it boil, and both times I simmered for only about 1 hour. I strained off the liquid from the plant material, gave the plant material a good pressing to extract all the liquid I could before disposing of it. The dye liquor was an unappealing dark tan. In went the wet yarns, most of which was my handspun romney and one 250 gram skein of fingering weight Palette from Knit Picks. This simmered one hour for a very awful tan. I then let the yarns cool in the pot and sit overnight for a second try the next day. Still very boring tan. I then resorted to my very expensive, $37/oz. powdered weld from Earthues. I had one ounce which I dissolved in a small amount of water before adding to my dye pot. The color got darker, but no better. Back in with yarn to simmer for about an hour. The color of tan got considerable darker and had an olive tinge to it. I still hated it!

I then consulted the internet on weld dyeing and what could be done to shift the color. The recommended additives were ammonia or sodium carbonate. I opted for ammonia since I could get that locally. I do wish I’d taken a ‘before’ photo! I removed the yarn from the dye pot in order to ‘glug’ in some ammonia, and the color change was instant and shocking! When I added the yarn it also changed right before my eyes to something quite lurid! It’s a lot more yellow now, but that olive cast is still there, making for a bright “French’s” mustard with an olive tinge. I rather like it! It’s certainly shocking.

I’m looking forward to over-dyeing with indigo, though this time I will only dip my little 1/2 oz. skein for a test before submitting all my precious handspun to what could potentially be a really nasty color!

I’m thinking about how to write up what I’m doing with my ‘Cardigan for Arwen,’ but can’t seem to make myself sit down with the graph paper to document my changes. I’m much more of a design-on-the-needles knitter, who struggles to then document what has already been done….

I bought some silk/mohair (76 % silk, 19% mohair, 5% merino) called Sylph at Art Fibers and had to immediately start working on a Clapotis. I was knitting everywhere in San Francisco, and obviously not paying attention well because I’ve now come to the fourth set of dropped stitches and those stitches won’t drop all they way to the bottom. It appears that I did a k2tog quite a fews rows down that is interfering with the dropping. I discovered this last night at almost midnight, while watching tv since I couldn’t go to bed when my body was still on West Coast time. I threw the whole mess into one of my knitting bags and hope not to think about it again too soon!

In the past couple of weeks I have worked on both the historical tapestry and H. Rob, but with no real progress to show for it. Baby steps are better than nothing though, and I have also done a small sample for my Hudson River Quadricentennial piece. Slow and steady…..

I do not understand why certain photos get sideways when the original was not!

Can you see here that I’ve drawn in the shape of the boat that will get woven next?

Ah, and I’ve just remembered that I promised an article to my study group at Complex Weavers….so I’ll sign off now to take care of that!

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Posted in dyeing, knitting, tapestry

>Wedding Shower

Posted on June 13, 2008 | Leave a comment

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I finished the cover kimono from Knit Kimono in time to wear to my future dil’s shower tomorrow. I’m not happy with my photos, but I’ll try again. Bob and I are still hurtling ourselves around, and I had to find the camera in his packed bags in order to take this photo! I’ll be camera-less for the weekend….

He’ll be sailing in the Shelter Island area of Long Island, and I’ll be on the Connecticut River at the shower and then visiting my sister. Hopefully we’ll be buying a flower girl dress this weekend! Poor mother of the groom is going to be the last one to get her dress!

Tapestry is beginning to seem like something I used to do. I’ve started a new warp for a small sample project while I have two larger projects in various stages of woven incompletion (my neglected historical piece and ‘Handsome Rob’), and there’s a Hudson River design that is dying to get out of my head onto some paper. sigh…..

My weld is huge, and I’m ready to dye. I’ve got some handspun single-ply Romney for tapestry, as well as some commercial merino/mohair and some commercial wool, both of which I’d probably use for knitting. All I need is some time at home!

My dog Riptide continues to take up much of my time on weekdays. He’s not failing yet, but he needs to be monitored fairly regularly to see if his liver function can improve enough to get him back on his chemo therapy schedule. If he doesn’t improve soon it will become too late to accept him back into the program. It’s a clinical trial being done by Abbott Labs. He’s done very well on it for nine months before chemicals began to build up in his liver. He still acts perfectly healthy, although a bit more subdued than he was before getting lymphoma.

On that note….I have to get ready to take him for his blood work….

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Posted in dyeing, gardening, tapestry

>Found Time

Posted on June 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

>It feels like I haven’t had a moment for anything spontaneous in months. I’ve done lots of outrageously wonderful and fun things lately, but it’s been all pre-scheduled and hurry, hurry, hurry! This weekend was to be no exception. It’s both my 31st wedding anniversary and my husband’s birthday. We had family come down for CT to have dinner Friday, and it was wonderful to sit in the back garden among the foxglove, peonies, iris and cranesbill as the evening turned to night.

To celebrate our anniversary, we spent Saturday at the Cloisters as you’ll see below. It was ‘garden days’ with special tours planned every hour, some focusing on medicinal plants, plants for scent, and general tours. We arrived in time for one of the general tours, which included a stop inside in the room with the ‘Hunt for the Unicorn’ tapestry series. (I’d already gone in there to make sure I had my own visit since I never go to the Cloisters without visiting the tapestries!) I had not expected the tapestries to be included in a garden tour, and it was a pleasant surprise! The docent did an excellent job talking about the works. Everything she said about tapestry weaving was very accurate, although not terribly detailed (after all this was a garden tour), and she did a very credible job talking about the plants depicted in the tapestries and the sacred/secular underlying meaning of unicorns in medieval lore. It was an unexpected highlight! We finished the day with dinner at our favorite restaurant, which just happens to be in our town!
Today I was busy making plans for the another round of relatives who were coming for lunch, when we realized that we’d all misunderstood each other about where lunch was taking place! I was waiting for them to arrive for lunch in the garden, and they were waiting for us to arrive at our typical half-way meeting place on the shore of Long Island sound in Rowayton. It was too late for either of us to jump in the car to get to each other, so I’ve got an unexpectedly free afternoon! The first thing that comes to mind is spinning! And secondly, doing a little research on how to use the weld I have flowering in the garden this year, and the woad seeds I’ve just managed to obtain (not willing to admit where I got them just yet…..)…..
So….without delaying anymore….I’m off to spin!

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Posted in gardening, tapestry

>New Ideas Brewing

Posted on December 19, 2007 | 2 comments

>I’m feeling rather smug that the presents are wrapped and the house is decorated. After my annual panic about whether I remembered everyone on my list, whether have I been fair with everyone, and whether are there enough goodies for the stockings, I am pleased to report all is well and I’ll be sleeping soundly for the next few nights!

So that gives my mind time to pursue other tasks, like a lineup of possible future projects. There are a lot of wonderful shots of desert in Nevada from our recent trip. There is a large pile of linen tow singles in luscious colors waiting to become dishtowels. There is a little warp left on a Theo Moorman project that wants to become a stylized image of sunflowers. There is a warp on my table loom waiting to become a silk scarf in my own design network twill (from aBonnie Innouye class last fall). So what am I doing HERE at the computer???

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Posted in tapestry, weaving

>Here’s Buddha

Posted on November 7, 2007 | 1 comment

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Here’s Buddha, not quite ready for prime time. I took a load of pictures of him today and didn’t get a good one yet. I’ll keep tweaking and replace this when I have a better one. Well, with help from my camera savvy husband, here’s a better photo.

My younger son called today in a bit of a funk. A friend of his from school was walking home to her off-campus apartment last night when she was hit by a car. He doesn’t know too much except that she had head injury with internal bleeding and needed surgery. She’s a physics major, like Chris, and this is her senior year also. Chris does problem sets with her and a few other students in the library each week. I hope she will recover. I can’t get her off my mind…. If you see this please say a prayer for her. Her name is Sarah.

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Posted in family, tapestry

>Another visit to Tapestry Exhibit

Posted on November 3, 2007 | Leave a comment

>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.

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>Time Flies

Posted on October 29, 2007 | Leave a comment

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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

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Posted in sheep, tapestry, travel

>Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor

Posted on October 26, 2007 | Leave a comment

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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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Posted in tapestry