Only a little later but the Nasties are blooming

bobbns
I am having such a great summer. I am 5 days later then I should be in writing my blog. But, I have a great excuse-For once it wasn’t my problem or procrastination. My husband Spencer had a rather sudden  burning desire to go see his brother Mike in Great Falls. So we did! Didn’t bother me in the least. I love talking to Maggie(sister-in-law)Lolo pass and 4th of July pass, the emptiness and wildness.  So we went for a long weekend.
I Love Great Falls
in the summer, because it reminds me of my childhood summers in College Place. But, not so much in the winter. I am fascinated by the turn of the century brick buildings, wide streets and old houses, Art Deco Fair buildings and weird finned swimming buffaloes AND, of course, we went to the State Fair. I was able to keep to my goal of learning how to use the camera effectively on my i-phone. Still keep cutting off heads with it. So, I have some great pictures to work into tapestries-if I ever finish the piece I am working on.  


Being on the edge of nowhere
and looking out towards the dry grass and wheat  lands. The sky really is bigger and brighter there. Oops, also saw a forest fire near Rogers Pass.  Summer has it’s own particular smells.  I hate it in the winter- cold AND SNOW--come to think about it I didn’t much like  College Place in the winter-either.  It’s a trip we used to make in a day-each way-now we make it in 2 days. We brought home Walla Walla Sweets for onion soup and Gramma’s Lakota  pot au feu that goes on for days, blackberries for cobbler and fry bread with honey. And Antique metal work frills for the remodel that I hope to be done with by the last of September

Unfortunately, reality eventually has to bite. Reality meant that I lost 5 days of weaving and will loose another 4 days to what was to be my reward for finishing  “..and HE...” 4 days of intermediate level  silversmithing classes with Don Norris, but I am not such a glutton for punishment that I’ll deny myself the pleasure of the classes just because I missed a deadline. I’ll  just work a few more hours everyday weaving-“right,” she said sarcastically to whom ever would listen. 
So I’ll need to add another 5 days to my schedule. I think after I finish the lettering I’ll be about 90% of the way finished.  Which means I am still not finished with “…And HE…” This is the piece that I was going to do 5 feet wide 6.5 feet tall on my large Shannock. The design seems to have gone on forever.  It set on the loom for 3-4 years until I had an epiphany about needing to weave it in sewing thread and no wool. It lead to me selling my large Shannock. It just needs to be done!! I keep asking myself if I could have broken the design into smaller pieces or a series of small format pieces. Second guessing doesn’t seem to help it go any quicker.  I don’t think it could have been. It’s definitely not a decorative piece. It tells a story. It has a narrative. Something I need to say to myself.  There was a time that I though I could have broken the piece in half and still had a beautiful floral piece, but it would have lost all/ most of it’s impact, power and meaning. This quote keeps running through my head and journal and today it showed up on face book.-“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”Carl Jung It keeps be stubbornly not wanting to give up on it.
So what’s new in the piece. I have started the scroll and am using linen thread to give it a different texture then the sewing and embroidery threads. I have started the gold  soumack arabesque on the right side of the scroll. Gold threads can be a tad difficult to deal with especially those done in the style of aurum filatum. The weft bundles wear very easily, because it is generally a paper or gold foil wrapped around a core of line cotton or polyester. It seems to be best not to us a bobbin tip or beat down to hard on the weft soumack  twiner because it takes very little to wear through and unspin the gold. I am using 6-8 inch lengths of weft.  I am also knotting the weft every 3-4 inches with an overhand knot to help keep it under control when doing the soumack twists. The letters are much easier. They are vertical soumack done in the smaller perle cotton-The up rights are one warp wide.

The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines,[1] often combined with other elements.- def. liberated from Wikipedia

Ridging in tapestry.
There are two different types of ridging in tapestry-one good and one not so good...
1. The ridge structure is actually a rib structure that is created by changing the shed and weaving multiple passes one on top of another. The valleys between the higher part of the rib is caused when the weft passes to the back of the warp. The rib or hill is created when the weft passes in front. The rib and valley structure run up the length of the warps. Rib structure and size is controlled by the size of warp, the size of the weft and the distance between two warps.Please note in this example the rib structure is woven at both 10epi and 5 epi by doubling up the warps to change the rib structure.
Generally tapestry is considered to be an unbalanced weave structure more weft shows then warp. In a perfect world the warp size equals the distance between two warps and  warps equals the size of the weft bundles-sort of. There are reasons you might wish to unbalance one of the elements.  To give an example-If you are weaving at 10 epi you can generally use a 12/6 or a 12/9 cotton seine twine with a bundle of 4 needlepoint yarns or paternayan.,5-6 Norwegian Elv yarns or Australian 20/2 wool. 12/6 will generally accept more passes in an inch allowing for more turns or hatches or hachures then 12/9. Because a 12/6 is smaller and there is slightly more weft in an inch of weaving the tapestry is more drapable. The 12/9 because it is larger and thicker will take fewer passes and be stiffer. The hand of the fabric is less drapable. You could work 2 warps together as one to change the weft and warp structure for texture or to allow a larger weft bundle with many more elements in the weft bundle. The hand of the fabric will be softer the when it is woven at 10 epi.  Another reason to unbalance the weft bundle is suppose you are working in a very detailed area you may need more passes in a given a space for detail or may need to have more hatches or hachures in a given area. Note eyelashes, chin and collar for very small hatches that were less then half the weft bundle in order to double up the amount of hatches in a given area. By making the weft bundle smaller you can get more passes of the weft bundle in a given area.
The rib structure can be and often is  flattened by pressing with a damp cloth. I prefer to not mess with the rib structure because in doing so you mess with the natural properties if inter-inflection and reflection of the light and colour that is inherent in the wools and fibers used to create tapestry that give a sort of inner glow as the light is captured in the hairy properties of the weft and the rib structure of the tapestry.So this type of ridging or rib structure is a good thing.
The second type of ridging or organ pipes is caused by adding to much weft in a pass or half pass
Notice the organ pipes in the grey background.on the  right. I now know that all I would have had to do to get rid of the pipes would have been to use less weft in the  bubble and tighten my warp so the piece would have woven without the wefts shifting. Often times tapestry weavers will have a tendency to add more weft or a larger weft bubble going in a specific direction creating pipes. If you know you do this you can always watch that particular half pass closer and correct as you go.


Hopefully, by looking closely you  can see that there are 2 distinct areas of pipes on this piece. The first set is just basically organ pipes caused from using too much weft in the sleeve or cape above the hand. This could have easily been cured by using less weft in my bubble.
In the upper right hand corner is a type of organ pipe that is caused by weaving to close to the top bar that had been warped in a figure 8 pattern. As the warps or shed warps became further apart it took more weft to cover the warps because they were pulled further apart by the shed.
There is a fairly easy solution that I didn’t understand when I wove this piece. Completely loosen the warp, twine from side right above the fell line. use a fork pick the twining up and move it to the top of the loom right under the cross bar. You could also pick  a shed and  place a stick or batten  in the closed shed under the twining and push the twining up to the top bar of the loom-effectively keeping the shed closed. Retighten the warp and weave the tapestry to the top. On a small loom you may need to needle weave the last passes. A small aside- This piece pulled in because I tried to weave it from side to side with one bobbin. If I had broken up the area into several smaller areas and wove them in the same colour using hatches or lazy lines the tapestry would not have woven in. Adding bobbins in a plain colour area shoves the woven areas out ass the turns place more weft in a smaller area rather then pulling in.
Illustrations and pictures are copyrighted images from the book Tapestry 101 and were created by Pat Spark.

Guess that’s all for now. Hopefully in 2 weeks I can say and he is finished.
Cheers,
kathe
PS. These are wild Hollyhocks and usually stand 6-7 feet tall, but have decided to creep along the edge of my new herb garden, Who would have guessed.

Dogs and all

As usual today started out innocently enough with a need to catch up my blog and finish an article on Optical Blending in Tapestry. Mainly editing from way too much to what always seems to be way too little.  Every time I do this I know why  the editing process  emphasizes  to me why I prefer to write monographs.  I have just lost 6 weeks of my life to being ill with a cold(?)and then a cough that keeps returning and hindering my work patterns-etc, etc, etc.  Well, that is defiantly  and rather definitely enough of why the dog ate my  homework-moving on.

cutting it out

Anyway, I have stopped and started this poor tapestry-colour study  that I seem to have been working on forever and endlessly. I have had to relearn the colour combinations at least 4 times.  I am surprised that there isn't a line of demarcation for each new beginning. Granted I did put it on hold while I wove and finished Too Little-Too Late. It has the  maybe/possibility of being extremely interesting colour study, but the urge to call it a dog and cut it off the loom or weave it square and start another piece has been/is an intense on going discussion in my mind. Yesterday was close to being the last straw. I was soumacking lines that were suppose to be fragile-tiny life lines of a small almost hidden town in among the mountains  and evening  fog on Lolo Pass in Idaho.  I looked and realized that what should have been small small fragile lines of light were actually big out of proportion lines floating on the surface of the tapestry-not integrating well at all. I couldn't bear the thought of finishing the piece that was obviously AWFUL and a HIDEOUS waste of time. I had thoughts of leaving out of proportion  lines since the piece was obviously destined to be ostracized to a deep hidden and forgotten place somewhere in the studio where I would never have to look up on it again just to get it done. Never a good thing.

I have always maintained if you have a dog on the loom-apologies to Chene, no insult meant to the little guy, but idiomatically I haven’t been able to come up with better phrasing-sometimes it is just better to cut it off the loom and move on.

Shelf Surfing 

 I once attended a lecture while in grad school in the very early 80’s  where the professor said  and it has always stuck with me, “One of the nice things about the English language is that there has over 25,000 idiomatic phrases with more growing into and being used almost daily so live long and live to create idiomatic speech patterns to drive Grammarians crazy-if you don't who will.” Too bad his name didn’t stick with me or I could actually attributed this correctly to  him. With impressive sounds like something from the old Dragnet TV program and Law and Order- glockenspiels hammers and all for emphasis.

box of colour to lighten dark days

 So a dog is a dog, but when and how does it become a dog? So for the sake of procrastination and the expedition thereof(My Favourite saints-even though I have never belonged to a faith that had saints, but envied those who do. I Just think everyone should have one or several in case of need. St Expeditus of Melitene or Elpidius of Melitene; Possibly legendary. Unclear whether his name led to his association with expeditious matters, or the other way around. This association led to his becoming the patron of people who had to deliver things on time.St Jude; the patron of hopeless cases, and of things almost despaired of) This blog entry seems to be my way of burning sage-a cleansing ritual- and tying feathers to trees a releasing ritual for the last 6 weeks of what seems like a wasted lifetime

Sage for burning and clearing 

Sometimes  the feeling of having a dog on the loom  is the design that one ends up hating for one reason or another, or perhaps the colour palette isn't right,or a new thread didn't work, or it’s just been on the loom too long, ones skills weren’t up to doing it,

et al, et al, et al, et al, et al.

 Sometimes it’s just a feeling that may or may not be grounded in reality. It just sometimes happens.

So I love to procrastinate by searching out the meanings of idioms, before I start to write.

Red Primroses

    When I was in Grade School and

Academy and to certain extent while attending WWC,  I was not allowed to use slang or idiomatic language, because my parents felt that it was used only by uneducated persons and showed ignorance.  The school system I was in felt it made one too worldly when one should be set apart from mainstream culture. One Grandmother felt it showed bad taste and poor manners.. The other never thought of such things as being or having the least importance except as an explanation of where one was from and ones place in society and if it got the point across as quickly as possible.

So the first definition wasn't to my liking and a little too gender specific.

Dog; (derogatory) A dull, unattractive girl or woman. Wow, that’s bad I refuse to even acknowledge this definition, just doesn’t work for me especially in the context of a tapestry or anything-too rude!!

 So,  as the Queen of Hearts would say off with their heads and the procession moves on. (Alice In Wonderland)

      I still had not and  haven’t found the perfect idiomatic definition to define a dog on a loom that isn’t offensive, but perhaps that is the point. Ones cultural and location often applies a different meaning  or variation to a phrase. I went to  an on line Thesaurus and made for me some very enlightening discoveries. Every time I think or weave on this poor piece it gives me an attitude about not having finished something that should have been quite easy-a week two weeks at the most of work.

Main Entry:		dog
Part of Speech:		verb
Definition:		chase after; bother
Synonyms:		different, but the same bedog, haunt, hound, plague,pursue,shadow,tag,  tail, track,   trail,trouble
Antonyms: "It is ill wakyng  a sleapyng dogge." [Heywood, 1562] "Notwithstanding, as a dog hath a day, so may I perchance have time to declare it in deeds." [Queen Elizabeth, 1550] “…Cause Every Dog Has Its Day. Like every woman, she gets her own way…”Quote from a Slogging Molly’s song	leave alone, let go       Which led me to wonder, if out of shear  frustration with what was happening  in my  life that it wasn’t the piece , but the process  that I was reading into the  piece  and perhaps  it led me to another  Wikipedia enter(To work at the slowest rate  that goes unpunished. A surprise inspection of the night shift found that some workers  were dogging it. (intransitive, transitive)”        So, I am putting the scissors away  I am burning sage and tying the feathers to the  trees. It’s me not the piece. I cut out the soumack  and will do needle soumack to replace the  really awful clunk soumack with something  more into proportion with the idea I was trying to  achieve. I am back to being able to finish it and  move on by the end of this week

Dogs and such a side I don’t think that I wasted the time researching and procrastinating. I have always been drawn to both the written language and symbols for words, tarots with their opposite meanings and their definitions. 

         According to Wikipedia-“an idiom is an expression,word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made.”

Chene's kitten Wry escaping the rain. Who weighs 5 lbs more

Chene.

 Or in a slightly easier form to understand-at least for me-Maybe because I wrote it and meandered on  in my thought process-I don't even know if its correct, but it is a puzzle and a conundrum for me as a Between. an idiom is an expression, word, or phrase or a symbol that stands for something that is unknown and that cannot be made clear or precise whose sense means something different from what the words literally imply. It can also be something hoped for and not seen. 

 The importance of all of this is that one needs to have an understanding especially if one is a between that one can speak a given language, live in the same country and still be a between, When my life became so totally different from the one that I was raised in I fully became a between on three different levels of understanding-culturally and all it implies, iconically and its identifiers and symbolically both in language, music, philosophically, sometimes idiomatically, and…just between. 

      When an idiom is translated into another language or cultural its meaning may be changed and not understandable or meaningless to the new cultural or language. Idioms can be literal or opaque. The meaning can be changed or it can mean nothing, or retain a transparency or meaning when literally translated to the new language or cultural.

They can also be polysemes, the common use of the same word for an activity, for those engaged in it, for the product used, for the place or time of an activity, and sometimes for a verb. We do this all the time in English by just turning a noun into a verb.

      What I find really interesting is that they are culturally or sub culturally specific specific, not understood by outsiders,  and  are often based on conceptual metaphors and symbols that can be fluid in their understanding over time, stay locked and culturally specific or become deeply symbolic and iconic.

Chene Playing dare with fetch stick!

         And with all that aside, I am still trying to catch up and do all the terribly mundane things such as choose lights for a bathroom, clean a closet  the for new access for the attic and heat pump,  which I ended up buying a porch light for, because I hated all of the available “vanity lights” available,  keep up with Chene's training, find weaving time, write, work on studio, cook meals-it is till tax season, rebuild walls-where heaters are leaving, car repairs-some one backed into my new Prius and left while I was visiting my Dad in the hospital, ffp orders, 

et al, et al, et al. ad infinitum. 

But, best of all, I have a new soumack piece I have been studying. I picked this up at a flea market- Piccadilly in Eugene.  They don't seem to be the least bit faded. 

border is probably twined

Soumack patterning the direction it was
woven

      

   Speaking again of dogs--
Quote from a Toby Keith song that I love to read, but hate the sound- I just can’t quite do country western, but at least he finished it. It makes me laugh, which is a pretty good thing.

....One moment in the sunshine when the ducks line up in a row 

lucky dog gets a big ol' bed, stray dog gets the porch 

every dog has it's day dog, but today dog just aint yours 

fat dog, skinny dog, little itty bitty dog, hot dog, kurd dog, weenie dog, bird dog, hound dog, cow dog, bow wow wow dog, wonder dog, barkin' dog, chasing' parked car dog. 

every dog has it's day dog, when the big dog throws him a bone 

one moment in the sunshine, when your ducks line up in a row 

yeah lucky dog gets gets a big ol' bed, stray dog gets the porch 

every dog has it's day dog, but today dog just aint yours 

every dog has it's day dog, but today dog just aint yours."

Toby Keith

Camellias that are just blooming, but will be ugly tomorrow

once rained on. 

       Leaves me wondering what Schubert was trying to say with his very beautiful unfinished Symphony in E major (D 729) in August 1821 1340 bar is structurally complete, but he only orchestrated the slow introduction and the first 110 bars of the first movement-wonder if he thought it was dog and cut it off to soon or maybe not soon enough for him. 

MayFlower or helleborus blooms in Feb. an added respite
from drab!

O, well at least my blog is done,

Cheers,

kathe