tapestry – Page 12

>Maine Fiber Arts Studios Day 2

August 20, 2010 | 1 Comment

My second day of studio/farm visits was just as fun as the first! Maine seems to be a great place for inspiration and creativity. I’m so impressed with the places I’ve visited the past two years. If I lived here I really enjoy having more exposure to these creative people!

Hope Spinnery: How lucky for me to finally visit this mill that I’ve heard about for years! It’s in a secluded spot just inland from Lincolnville, nestled in the woods with a rambling garden surrounding the mill. The upper floor is a wonderful showroom, while the mill equipment is on the lower floor. I did not get to meet Bill Huntington who runs the mill since he was off-site teaching a workshop. His mother was on hand to welcome visitors and answer questions.

In the showroom I enjoyed looking at the rovings and yarns, all colored with natural dyes. Stunning!

Weaving a Life: Susan Barrett Merrill Another gem of a studio, hidden in a lovely secluded spot! Susan is an artist worth knowing! I must find a way to bring her to NY/NJ so others can experience her charisma and her artistic ideas about weaving and community!

She does amazing things will pulled warp tapestry, creating these marvelous masks.

Some of the masks have an entire community of figures surrounding the mask, and are fascinating creations in themselves! Susan’s ideas and her active involvement in bringing weaving into everyone’s life and managing community weaving projects is very exciting! She generously gave me a copy of her book, Zati: the Art of Weaving a Life, and I am so touched by it.

Susan has accomplished quite a lot toward her goal of bringing weaving into communities through making Journey looms we’ve all seen in recent issues of weaving magazines as well as writing this book and making several DVDs. Somehow she still finds time for doing her own weaving and creating these incredible masks.
Her method of weaving ancient pictographs or keyforms is the core to her philosophy about understanding our own journey and inter-connectedness.

I hope I can bring her to NJ to share her knowledge and creativity with weavers from my own community!

>The Price of Eggs in China, aka Talking Pears

July 9, 2010 | Leave a Comment

I did finally take an afternoon to weave while we were anchored in Hadley Harbor, on the Island of Naushon just across from Wood’s Hole.

I’m working on a small tapestry that was an assignment from a workshop that Archie and Susan gave to the Wednesday Group several months ago. They called the workshop “Talking Pears.” For the workshop we were to bring two Bosc pears, our sketchbooks and pencils, and a variety of colored papers.

For the morning, we arranged and drew our two pears several times. After our lunch break, we took the sketches we liked best and used them as ideas for making several paper collage designs. The nature of the paper collage designs being so graphic led to other ideas.

At the end of class we lined up our paper collages and discussed shapes, arrangements, and color choices.

This may be more than you want to know about the “price of eggs in China,” but I’m certain that Archie and Susan carefully chose this workshop as a clever way to make us start thinking in the language of tapestry rather than in the language of pure image. Many of us are often intrigued by an image first and foremost, and we attempt to make a cartoon that will be weaverly.

Here, the relationship of our pears as two shapes coming together, along with the relationship of the surrounding area, and the colors we chose to use took precedence over the image itself. The simple paper collages we made prevented us from creating shading and contours.

This simple exercise has allowed each of us to focus on how to create the shapes of the pears and the surrounding areas. I’ve never paid so much attention to my curves and slopes! I’m usually too busy also trying to create light and shadow. I had a lot of fun choosing the colors for this little project, and with only six colors I really concentrated on the relationship between them.

Here you can see the frame that Bob made for me to hold my copper pipe looms. This frame allows me to adjust the loom up and down so I’ll always be weaving at a comfortable height.

One Wednesday Grouper has already woven eight small tapestries! Several others have already woven two. This is my first one, and I do hope to weave another. I’m so slow that two will probably be my limit!

>Where will you weave this summer?

June 14, 2010 | 3 Comments

Yikes!….I wrote this two weeks ago and somehow didn’t post it….

A successful few days of weaving while on board our sailboat, Pandora, has me thinking about where other weavers work during their travels. What comes to mind first is a wonderful travelogue tapestry by Susan Martin Maffei that chronicles a train trip she took from New York westward across the country. It’s a multi-panel work with 2” x 2” tiny tapestries mounted on the panels, depicting the landmarks and landscapes of her trip. Susan has also brought small copper pipe looms on airplanes and woven while in flight!

I imagine many weavers must bring looms on vacation (floor and table looms as well as frame looms for tapestry), and I’d like to know where you will be weaving this summer! If you read this, please consider leaving a comment of where you plan to weave while you are away from home! I’d like to picture all the wonderful places where weavers will be working on their projects. I might make a map (if I can figure out how!) showing all the vacation weaving places I hear about. Or if you plan to blog about your summer weaving, send me a link!

I have just returned home this morning from a trip along the Chesapeake. It started in Williamsburg (by car!) with a visit to my parents and some friends, and ended with a week of sailing in the Chesapeake. For my part in this summer weaving list, I can say that I worked on my current tapestry in St. Michael’s harbor, Maryland, and at a lovely anchorage off Gibson Island in the Magothy River, also Maryland.

St. Michaels harbor on the eastern shore of Maryland.

>Ah, December…

December 8, 2009 | 6 Comments

It seems every holiday is balanced with a share of grief. Perhaps winter celebrations were established to balance our sufferings through these dark months.

This is a study for a larger tapestry I still haven’t made. The bigger idea is not ready yet, but at the time of the study I made a list of mothers I know who had lost their children. I just added one more name to that list.

And yesterday I found this poem mixed in with my cache of knitting patterns:

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours though

the open living room windows because the heat’s on too high in here, and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

—Marie Howe

I promise to be more upbeat for the rest of the month…

>Late, as usual!

November 26, 2009 | 4 Comments

This Saturday will be the closing reception of The Wednesday Group’s exhibition “Henry’s Hudson” at ASK! (Artists’ Society of Kingston). I guess I’d better post some photos from the opening reception!

Archie, standing next to his tapestry, which is already sold.

Susan standing with Betty Vera, and hey!..that’s my little Hudson River piece right between them.

One of my favorite pieces from the show, by Annelisa DeCoursin.

Several pieces in this show are real knockouts, but my camera battery was dying so I missed getting some of them. The opening was well attended, probably our biggest crowd yet! And ASK! is definitely the best venue we’ve had. The space is perfect!

Eleven of the fourteen Wednesday Group members standing in front of Susan’s powerful work “Taxi!” (All those yellow spots are taxis!) Archie and Susan are back row, left side. Helen and Alta, who master minded this exhibit, are front row left. I am in the center. It was a fun evening!