travel

Let me recount the amazing experiences of the past 3 weeks before they disappear into distant memory!

In the past 3 weeks I have had the good fortune to spend a week….YES! a WEEK….studying with Joan Baxter, who came all the way from Scotland to share her knowledge and her wonderful sensitivity in tapestry design with a handful of very lucky students across the US.  I was part of her first workshop in Rockport, Massachusetts.  Then she headed off for a week of teaching in each of three additional locations:  Santa Fe, San Francisco area, and the Atlanta area.  Lucky weavers all!

On the first day we spent the afternoon getting inspirational shots of Cape Ann to develop a design for a tapestry with images of the sea and/or the coastline.  This is the quarry at Halibut Point State Park.  You can see the Atlantic in the distance.

I took a lot of wonderful images that day….including some shots of the women in my class.  We are all members of TWiNE (Tapestry Weavers in New England).  I had not met any of them before so it was also a good experience getting to know women I’ve only seen as names on email lists.

Someday maybe these images will inspire something, but my tapestry design was already chosen before I got to class.  For me, this class would be about honing what I wanted to say with an image I already had in mind.

Joan certainly knows how to design works with multiple layers of images that create an entire story in one tapestry.  You can see her work here.  These are some of the samples she wove to blend colors for ideas for her designs.

She generously brought lots of yarn for us to try,  7/2 wool that she had dyed herself and every color of 18/2 wool that Weavers’ Bazaar carries.  It was a terrific way to get familiar with their yarns.

I started a little sample of a Portuguese Man of War.  I’ll explain why I’m intrigued with this in a future post, when I have more to report.

Less than a week after Joan’s class, I headed up the Hudson almost to Albany for the last regular meeting of the Wednesday Group.  It was a bittersweet gathering of the entire group.  Some people really had to jump hurdles to get there, but we all managed it.  Archie made a very touching farewell to all of us, but I don’t think most of the group realized what he was doing.

He brought in one of his recently completed tapestries, one that we’d all seen in progress some months ago.  Typical of Archie, this tapestry is an experiment in meaning….woven in code.  He was testing the human ability to read many different fonts and handwriting styles. He wondered if we could as easily translate letters into colors, so he wove a poem with a coded color scheme. I think he wondered how many of us could decipher the poem….or would even bother to try.  Naturally, this brought out the puzzle solver in me and in one of my good friends in the group.  In the long run, I had to take a photo of it after Archie had wrapped it up to take it home. Hence the very bad image! Just a few minutes after class, two of us decoded the poem almost simultaneously! Then three of us got busy checking to see if we were right…and we were!  And it was a sweet farewell message from Archie to all of us!

I would love to tell you what the poem is, but I know he wants you to see this tapestry in some venue down the road.  He wants you to have a go at figuring it out, so I’d better not spoil it!

Meanwhile, our little band of friends wanted to let him know how touched we were, so we decided to sing our own version of farewell to him at dinner that night.  I know it’s corny….when we arrived at our favorite sushi restaurant, four of us surrounded him and sang a little  farewell poem back to him.  It was clear that he knew we had broken the code, and he was very touched!  Our goodbyes could not have been any sweeter!  All things must pass, and I’m very thankful for these last wonderful days together.

The Wednesday Group also had a final project. Almost everyone has now delivered their chopstick weavings.  They are a terrific statement of each person’s weaving style!  For the most part we could all identify who wove each one!

This was Archie’s ingenious idea.  For several years now we have all stayed together after class on Wednesdays to order Chinese take-out to share.  The number of chopsticks used on these occasions was rapidly growing, and Archie wanted to find a creative way to recycle them.  He devised a little loom with 15 chopsticks for warps, and he challenged us to weave a face.  He made a loom for each member in the group, and some of us had so much fun that we made a few on our own in order to weave more chopstick portraits! This is my “Chopstick Triptych.”

One member did a series of six maneki nekos (or maneki neki?  Who knows Japanese?).  Are you wondering what they are?  Well, you can read the official report here on Wikipedia, or you can take my word for it.  If you go to any Japanese restaurants or sushi bars, you’ve seen them.  They are good luck charms, or talismans, in the form of little kitties, and they have one paw raised in a gesture of beckoning.  They are beckoning all sorts of good fortune for those who pass by.  How apropos that one of our group wove a set of them on chopsticks! (Now don’t you hope we display these treasures in public sometime?)….

On the morning after I returned home I had to get out early for my monthly lace meeting.  I’ll save writing about that…as well as describing my upcoming workshop with Diane Totten for another post.  It’s been crazy around here, and I have loved every minute of it!

Unbelievably wondrous knitting and weaving things have occurred since my last post.  Now that I’m sitting here at my computer I don’t know where to start!  I guess I’ll just take a deep breath and tackle things one at a time…maybe this will end up being more than one post.

So, why don’t I start with today.  It’s fashion week in New York, and that is a guaranteed siren call for me to read the NYTimes.  Today was my lucky, lucky day because there was even an article about knitting:  “Grandma Never Knit Like This” is an article about Josh Bennett, who has a line of knitwear for men. He has designed knitwear for Tommy Hilfiger and Michael Bastion, and he has a pattern book of his designs published by Rowan and using their yarns.  In his Rowan designs, he designed sweaters that evoked the flavor of various New York neighborhoods.  This one is Hell’s Kitchen.

The article referenced SamuraiKnitter’s online brouhaha with Josh, so of course I had to check that out.  But really, who cares about that, when there is a world of fun on this site! What cave have I been living in??  Ms Samurai Knitter is the perfect anitidote to dearly missed You Knit What?  I could barely tear myself away, and had a good half hour of gut busting laughter reading the author’s insightful reviews of various issues of “Vogue Knitting.”  There’s nothing like  laughter to start a day!

And speaking of publications (as I think blogs are firmly in that category), earlier this summer I got to catch up on all the periodicals I missed while we were off sailing.  In this year’s issue #1 of “Vav Magazinet,” which was entirely devoted to the color white, I read quite a moving article by Birgitta Nortstrom.  Ms. Nordstrom is Senior Lecturer in Textile Art at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where she received a grant to design baby blankets, with an outside layer  that would be a visually pleasing weave structure and the inside layer would be fulled to create the softest fabric to touch a newborn’s skin.

This alone would be such a beautiful idea for a project, but her idea went further.  Hang on to your hat…..  these blankets would be available at hospitals to be given to mothers whose newborns did not survive birth.  These blankets would actually be shrouds.

The moment I finished reading the article I wrote an email to Ms. Nordstrom, telling her how moving I found her project and that this project that should be done everywhere.  I asked if she might consider writing a book about the blankets.  It was late July before I heard back from her (she was away in the remote north for a holiday), and it turns out she did write a booklet as part of the process.  She asked for my address so she could send me one.

So now I feel quite driven to do something with this marvellous idea.  Anyone want to join me? Stay tuned….

Here is Birgitta’s description of her project:

Is it possible, by making shrouds for the smallest, to ask questions of grief, touch, and the wrapping of bodies?

Weaving, inch by inch, has been practiced for thousands of years.  Out of both need and desire.  It is a patient process, repetitive and deceptively simple.  In the end the weaver’s patience is rewarded, producing fabrics far greater than their humble beginnings.

We have aimed to weave a series of blankets that are soft, shimmering, unique, and quite simply the most beautiful blankets we could imagine.  In the process we have asked ourselves and others about the need for ritual and meaning.

Can a small, exquisite blanket be a language of touch?  Can it say something where words fail amidst the grief of the loss of a child?

Humianity has often understood both life and death through metaphors and references to textiles.  Through history and myths they have helped us understand and navigate these moments.  They anchor us, as threads, to both joyous and difficult times.  We have chosen to follow these threads.

I think I’ll stop here, except to include a bit of our lovely Connecticut River scenery.  I know this post has been a bit weird, going from snarky knitting reviews that had me rolling, to the subject of grief and loss…. well, maybe I’m thinking of summer turning to autumn….There are only 10 days left in summer, but since school has started, and since it’s past Labor Day, most people think it is already fall.

Yesterday evening, Bob and I took a dinghy ride up one of the estuaries near where we live on the Conneticut River.  It’s a narrow and winding stream with water hyacinth and tall grasses on both sides.  The grasses were full of red winged blackbirds that all took flight as we passed.  This swan family opted not to fly away….maybe the younger ones aren’t good flyers yet.  So their tensions were mounting as we all headed up this little estuary.  In the end the mother and cygnets turned a corner too shallow for our dinghy, but not before the father tried some diversionary tactics to lure us away from his family.

And didn’t it become obvious to me that we are all more similar than not.  The family made a phalanx as best they could to protect the cygnets, and when that failed the father tried to draw us away.

Along with the swans and the red winged blackbirds, we saw a great blue heron fly low and slow right above us to land at the edge of the marsh grasses.  It was a beautiful evening.  It’s almost time for our boat to head to warmer waters, so it will be another spring and summer before we see sights like these again.

 

In spite of the bad lighting at the Rhode Island Convention, and perhaps because of the smaller exhibitions of HGA events, I came back quite inspired to get down to work.  I had the much-awaited black 16/2 linen spool in hand to finish weaving the napkins on my lunch tote warp, and I got right down to it!

This was really a fun project!  Yes, there were comprises.  I needed to design a fabric that would be sturdy enough for the exterior of a tote bag, but also be soft enough for a napkin.  I thought I had struck a middle range by adding interfacing to the wrong side of the tote bag fabric for a little sturdiness.  Well, that worked out quite well…..but the napkin is a bit firmer than I’d like to use myself.  Hmmm…. they do say that linen softens over time with repeated washings, and the napkin will get washed a LOT more than the tote bag.  I guess that’s what I’ll mention to the recipient.  I am pretty certain she’ll like the tote, but maybe not so much the napkin!  I now have a set of four napkins myself, and I’m not sure what to do with them!

 Once again, here is the mug that this project was designed for:

I promised the 8-shaft group on Facebook that I’d share what the draft for this project was and how the bag was sewn.  Here goes!

Huck Fabric for Mug Lunch bag napkin 2

 At the moment, I am writing this while onboard Pandora in Narragansett Bay.  To say that there have been distractions does not begin to describe it!  First, we are having the mildest summer of my entire life!  Beautiful weather greets us everyday with cool breezes and deep blue  skies with giant cumulus clouds.  Then there are all the beautiful sights along this bay…. I plan to do a post in a few days that will have a smattering of the lovely sights we’ve seen.

I will try to post the actual wif file for the drawdown when I return home in another week, as well as some info on making a tote bag with a flat bottom.  Wordpress doesn’t like .wif files!

It’s a month later, and the summer has only gotten better!  I have been to Convergence in Providence, RI;  I have finished weaving and sewing the lunch tote and napkin for my guild project, and I have started a tapestry class for some of the members in my state guild.  All good!

Unfortunately, I have very few photos of Convergence.  Photos weren’t allowed at the HGA exhibits.  The photo I regret NOT getting most is me standing in front of my tapestry in the gallery exhibit.  In hindsight I’m certain the powers-that-be would have let someone take a photo of me in front of my own work, but I didn’t ask.  Sigh…

Here is my favorite piece from the gallery exhibit:  “She Can’t See the Forest for the Trees”  No, I did not take this photo since photos were not allowed.  But I can usually find images online, and this image is from Jenny Schu’s blog, where you can read about the processes she used to make this incredible wall hanging! (Wed. grouper’s first reaction being:  “after all these years of weaving on copper looms, why didn’t any of us think of hanging our tapestries from copper pipe???”)

Along with the HGA sponsored exhibits in the Rhode Island Convention Center, there were numerous outside exhibits to see throughout Providence.  The Complex Weavers’ exhibit at Brown University was quite a highlight for me.  And the best exhibit of the whole conference for me was the ATA sponsored “Small Format/Unjuried” show on the Feinstein Campus of URI.  Such wonderful small tapestries that covered the gamut of every subject imaginable!  Pure fun….there were small tapestries of bugs, small self portraits, small landscapes….if you can imagine it, it was probably there!

Two friends from the Wednesday Group came to stay with me during Convergence and we made the daily drive to Providence.  On the last day we drove to Brockton, MA, to the Fuller Craft Museum to see the two shows on display there.  First was “Game Changers:  Fiber Art Masters and Innovators.”  What an impressive list of well known fiber artists were on display.  It was a brilliant show!  And so was the other exhibit on display, “Small Expressions.”

Archie Brennan’s “The Lady and the Gypsy” greets you at the entrance to the “Game Changers” exhibit.

Susan Martin Maffei’s Silk Worm tapestry actually has golden silk cocoons woven into it and is embellished with crocheted caterpillars.  …so naturally, the weft is silk.

I have some great photos from “Small Expressions” as well, but I neglected to get the names of some of the artists!  So I will just share Barbara Heller’s recent work, which has a very interesting mix of techniques.

All in all, Covergence was quite an inspirational event.  There are always hitches to having a conference setting in a convention center, but I would still say the outcome of this year’s event was positive!