Category Archives: tapestry

>When Life Gets in the Way!

Posted on October 5, 2007 | Leave a comment

>Life sure can throw some hard balls. I wish I were a good catcher, but my reaction is to cover my head and duck! Everybody’s health seems so fragile these days. I’m not going to talk about it here, but it’s a hurdle. Then there are the many joys of my volunteer jobs, which are great when everything runs smoothly and everyone is happy. It’s no fun at all when the best plans and hard work don’t actually come to fruition. Guess which one I’m experiencing now.

I’m also having my first experience at organizing a group show of handwoven tapestry. (This is why I’ve been trying to finish Buddha!) I’ve certainly got a lot to learn about running a show. I’ve had great help from really savvy people. One member made the postcard, and it’s quite an eye catcher, don’t you think? (And if you click on it you’ll get to see a lot more detail. My, we have some awesome weavers in this group!) Here are the details.

I just finished Buddha, literally put in the last pick. I want to celebrate, but I feel a little overwhelmed because I still need to hem and mount him. I can’t find the raw linen material I want to use for mounting. I’ve looked in all the easy places, so now it’s time to really start digging.

The garden is a mess. My dog has cancer. Every Friday I drive him to Connecticut for chemo treatments, but today my car has some serious problems so I’m without wheels for the weekend. I’m home alone since my husband is away on business, and I’m feeling weird. I need to run away….well, on the positive side, I just went digging for that linen fabric and found it. I’ll get to work now.

Leave a comment

Posted in family, gardening, tapestry

>Fixated

Posted on September 13, 2007 | 1 comment

>I’m getting fixated on Buddha. He’s come a “ways” this week. For me, a long way! I spent the whole summer worrying about his eyes, and not doing any work on them. Now I’m almost done with them! As usual, he needs the 10 foot rule. I’m a little worried about his very subtle eyebrows, but I’m going to tackle that in the coming week. If I delay I know I’ll end up procrastinating for another season or more. But I do solemnly swear: NO more pictures of Buddha until he’s finished!

Hmmm…the photo is odd. He doesn’t have such a dramatic gold line under his eye, although I did put a little gold here and there near his mouth and that eye. On the original sculpture I imagined some lichen causing that coloration. The other odd thing about my photo is the sharp line of contrast between the bottom of his face and the upper section. It’s more subtle than this shot portrays. Maybe I just had the camera too close. Right now my studio is SO messy I can’t back up to take a better photo!

Something that has been bothering me the past couple of days is my Etsy listing at the side of this blog. Having those pictures seemed like shameless commercialism so I’ve taken them away. Good riddance! There’s still a link to my Etsy shop if you care to look, but I just wasn’t comfortable having the items posted there with prices. This is my blog, and it’s not about selling stuff.

Lastly for today, I took a photo of the historical piece I’m working re-interpreting (re-inventing?). It’s from one of the Devonshire tapestries. This boat is such a tiny part of an enormous tapestry, which actually has more to do with hunting than sailing. In the extreme background at the very top of the tapestry there is the shoreline with boats sailing away. This one drew my attention because of the little man onboard. You’ll have to wait to see him….

1 Comment

Posted in tapestry

>Memorial Tapestry Group Project

Posted on September 12, 2007 | Leave a comment

>Diane Wolf, USA

Here are two images from a group project of tapestry weavers from all over the world who responded to the events six years ago. Monique Lehman coordinated this project, and you can see all the tapestries here.

Katarzyna Kordyasz, Poland

Leave a comment

Posted in tapestry

>Hey, Buddha!

Posted on September 11, 2007 | Leave a comment

>It’s been an odd day. It’s that sad anniversary, and this is the first year it falls again on a Tuesday. I’ve tried not to think too much about it, but I did stay home today and avoid any radio and tv exposure. My own memories and thoughts are enough for the occasion. For several weeks it felt like my whole town was holding its breath, waiting for some good news about loved ones. Then came weeks when I’d see funeral processions almost every day, and public grief…women meeting each other in the street or in the market and sobbing together. It was traumatic. In six years, not one day goes by where I don’t notice the change in our view of Manhattan. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it. Well, it will just take more time….

This photo doesn’t look like my typical view of Manhattan at all, even though supposedly it was taken right near me. I can’t believe no one has ever posted a photo of our great view from Rte. 17, or Craig Dr., or Overlook….I guess I’ll have to do it myself sometime. I see Manhattan MUCH closer, with the Empire State Building right in the center, larger than life, despite it being 25 miles away, and the WTC used to be to the right . It’s still odd not to see them.

I wanted to do something useful today, so I worked on photographing some of my scarves to list on Etsy. While I photographed them I took one of Buddha. As you can see I’ve been working, though it’s been almost two weeks since I’ve touched him.

We’ve been sailing again, this time to P-town and back, with stops at Bassett Island (lovely!) and various other nice spots. I hope to have pictures soon. Most of the week was breezy and cool, definitely a touch of autumn in the air. Now that we’re back, it’s hot, humid, and raining. I’m glad we are home this week!

Pictures of P-town, as promised. Our boat is just to the right of the steeple.

Leave a comment

Posted in serendipity, tapestry, travel

>Unfinished Work

Posted on August 18, 2007 | 1 comment

>Will I ever finish this piece? I’m beginning to think NOT, and it’s frustrating me. Quite some time ago I found a wonderful picture of a stone Buddha on the fridge at a friend’s house. Yes, it was a photo posted on a refrigerator!….yet it was the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen, and I asked my friend right then and there if I could make a copy of it. She gave it to me. I’m not doing anything artistic with it, I’m just copying it. I blew it up to the size I wanted, and I took a lot of time deciding how to convey a sense of the pitted stone in yarn. I’m happy with the mouth and nose. I’m actually quite a bit further along in the weaving than this photo shows. Yesterday I started the left eye. Well, I guess it’s really his right eye, but as I work on it it’s the eye to my left. I’ve woven it three times now, and it’s still not right. I love everything about this face! He has a beautiful mouth, and a perfectly shaped nose, but his eyes are truly moving. I can’t get the right expression. I’m trying not to feel like a failure, but I really do. I’m just a weaver, and if I could figure out how to portray this beautiful face I could weave it without much trouble. It’s portraying his amazing expression that’s going to defeat me…..

Okay, here he is in the photo. I wasn’t going to post this, but he’s too beautiful to leave out. How many times have I written that word, beautiful, in this post? I think I’m obsessed with his beauty!

(The colors I’m using are closer to the real photo than this photo would suggest. He’s much greener, like he’s seen years of moss and algae, and not at all golden as he looks here.)

1 Comment

Posted in tapestry

Posted on February 20, 2007 | Leave a comment

>
I spent the weekend weaving and crocheting, trying to escape some things that are weighing quite heavy on my mind. I am not in the best frame of mind these days, and the weather is not helping! Last winter I wove a small tapestry that was not particularly successful. The image was dawn in the desert, and the original image comes from a book my son gave me that has beautiful photographs of earth’s landscapes from many vantage points. This desert scene spoke to me on some non-verbal level. The image was so powerful (alas, mine is not!) and spoke to me of creation, and of something else. The idea that no matter what man does to this environment, it will be undone in a mere day. The winds in this desert erase all trace of us. Everyday is a new creation in the desert, and not in the “greeting card” sense.

I’ve been reading a good deal of Carl Sagan in the past few months. Dragons of Eden, Cosmos, and have just learned that his wife has published some of his lectures in a book titled The Varieties of Scientific Experience. I believe it will address his very reverent views on religion, for which he is labled an atheist. But getting back to deserts, I found some moving photographs on Sue Lawtry’s blog, as well as her insightful comments:

“Here there isn’t a single trace of man’s presence… The wind shapes the landscape as it likes. It is an unchanging landscape which is constantly changing.”
Gerard Lanux

Wind on desert sand; water on coastal sand… the rhythmic passing of time.
I am guessing that every single one of the resulting undulating patterns is different. Like every grain of sand, every star, every pass of weft over warp, every found stone on a beach… all the same, all different. (Ref blog entries: Nov 15 2005 “notes for the day” and Nov17.)

Desert breeze, beach tide: both erase the marks of our passing, our presence merely tolerated.
It is the order of things here… to be rendered as ghosts in the landscape.