Getting ready to take off for a week is so much work. All deadlines for the next week need to be done a week earlier. Everyone needs something now. Focusing on any one thing just doesn't happen. Everything is multi tasked. That said summer flowers are definitely here. These Japanese Irises are from my childhood. Every time I moved in the past I took these with me. A lot of my earlier wool pieces contained Japanese Irises. I think it's time to revisit them in sewing thread. The sun was so intense when I photographed these Irises the leaves and petals were almost transparent. It's amazing how washed out colours become in direct sunlight. These same irises by twilight will become a deep intense blue-purple. The yellows will glow. I will be out in a couple hours taking pictures with my new camera-a much more sophisticated slr digital camera then the small Nikon cool pix I have been using. Should make for some interesting comparisons.

Marking Progress for the Week
I am finally making progress on So Many Chances. I am about fourth done. I am going to need to do some speed weaving if I am going to finish this in time for the IWC conference in Durango at the end of July. I finally decided that I wanted my dice to be a little like the Mad Hatter's tea party. Just a little off. I decided that proper perspective wouldn't do them justice. The feather across the dark green blue mountains is being outlined in a glitzy grey black metallic sulkie thread. I was tempted to change the rib structure down to 10 to the inch to make the light reflect a little differently, but decided not two at the last minute because I thought it would look odd with only the feather being a different rib structure. I think I will be trying to weave the black feather again. I'd like to try some long jump soumack or brocading techniques to change the way the light is interflected and reflected just within the feather.

HOT DOG-Dog to hot for Demon Gnat behaviour

Should be a banner headline. It's a first.

Chine' and I both are finding the studio to warm to work in. Everything is dripping sweat. Of Course, if I wasn't leaving for Kona on Monday I would put the air conditioners in the windows.

Chine's vacation is to be with 6 year old Libby and run off tremendous amounts of energy playing tag and felony theft with her for the week.

I'll take a nap for a few hours and come work in the studio for a couple of hours in the middle of the night.

Picasa Web Albums - Spider

Picasa Web Albums - Spider

Kathe Todd-Hooker's-a Tapestry Weaver's Blog

This and that of a busy week or so

The last week or so has been interesting to say the least. Getting any weaving done was sometimes very difficult. The hand surgery is a total success. Now if the stitches and bruising in my palm would go away, I would be a happy camper, but the fingers work correctly-now. I am still trying to decide how to weave my black feather against the dark green mountains. Will start that tomorrow.

Thursday Jen, Sara and I will warp the new portable treadle loom that FFP designed and will hopefully be selling them by Midwest. Karen Pierosch wrote a very good article on making a portable table loom. It’s in the new handwoven. I love the fact it has drawers and a handle for carrying it. The height of the weaving is adjustable which is way cool. I have ordered one of the easels for use in the studio. I am looking forward to twain it with me when I go fishing with Spencer. I just go for the scenic sights. I am a vegan who doesn’t touch dead things.

I attended the Connections opening in San Jose. It was fun seeing and talking to old friends. I was extremely pleased with the presentations of the tapestries. It was a kick to see Peter’s work on the walls with the rest of us. Peter Rocci has been my student since almost the beginning of his tapestry weaving. Shelley Socolofsky had him first in high school. Maxima Laura’s work is breathtaking. I would really like to study is technique a lot

My feelings for a few of the pieces still boils down to a matter of what is appropriate scale, size and format for a well designed small format tapestry. Several pieces left me a wondering a bit. Sometimes the rib structure overwhelms the design in small format tapestries. Besides Maxima Laura’s work I was intrigued by Jean Pierre’s elegant Retablo and Joyce Hayes use of soumack.

Best of all I was able to pick up Jean-Pierre and Yael’s new book Water Song Tapestries-Notes on designing, weaving and Collaborative work. It’s not a long book, but it’s a total fascinating read. It includes Yael’s drawings and parts of her cartoon process. Her black and white drawings are elegant. I loved one of her sentences. A design, like a musical notation, is but a silent promise, yet you receive it as a gift.”

I am starting to play with the format of this blog and add things. Sometime before I leave for Kona I am going to attempt to put up a slide show and attach it to this blog.

My favourite Student-Marge Crueger and my weekly progress Report

When I look back over my years of teaching, I think that Marge is the student that I like, enjoy and admire the most of all my students. She never gives up and always finds laughter in problems and getting old. Every week I look forward to seeing her and teaching her. I am not even sure who is teaching whom. In the last year mostly I nudge her into doing what she already knows and helping her to remember her skills that she already has.

Marge is my all time favourite student in almost 30 years of teaching tapestry. Marge has been a weaver since the the very late 30's and early 40's. Marge is slightly over 90 years old and extremely frail. She is a member of my Wednesday class that I teach at in an assisted care facility in Corvallis. She tells the most wonderful stories of living in Alaska in Sitka during World War2. She decided to take up tapestry about 10 years ago. She studied originally with such weavers as Collingwood, Nancy Hoskins, and Marta Rogoska. She was an incredible weaver, but age creeps up and things change.

We have had to make many adaptations to tools and technique so that she could continue to weave. The Hagen loom is a great loom for positioning in to place for arthritic shoulders and necks. We don't use the shedding device because of problems with reaching and the strength it takes to move the shedding device. The loom is warped with the ties on at the top for ease of adjustment and keeping the visual confusion down that often resulted when the ends were tied at the bottom. The biggest problems is she's not very strong, has shoulder pain and tires extremely easy. Some days we only weave a pass or two. A square inch is considered to be a gargantuan amount for a days weaving. Weaving with a tight warp has been impossible. The tighter warps abraded her fragile skin. Because of the loose warp we are constantly pulling the tapestry out with ties to the sides and working on slit control. On some days we work with short term memory problems and directional problems.

The penguins are for her less then 2 year old granddaughter-an Alaskan Native American who lives in Alaska. We joke about confusing the poor kid. Penguins don't live in Alaska, but she's little and won't know for a few years.

I hadn't realized how colourful penguins actually are until Marge started weaving her tapestry. Their heads and beaks have the most incredible colour- oranges and gold. We used silk and rayon in the extreme whites and white colour areas on the adult to contrast with the woolen wefts.. The babies are mostly greys with white and black colouration on the head and around the bill. The area in the back are the Northern Lights which I have never seen and Marge is doing from memory. We are using sparkly multicoloured embroidery floss for the Northern lights.

My progress report for the week

The crocheted lace is really fun to weave. I had to figure out how to make it seem to float in front of the images. I changed the ratio of the weft in the soumack bundles in relationship to the weft bundles. Usually, I like a really flat surface to my tapestries-no added texture so that the soumack texture disappears in to the base weft. I (usually) don't like the shadow that can be created when the light hits the soumack. The soumack bundle or twiners are usually about 50 percent of the size of the weft bundle. This time I doubled the size of the the soumack bundle so that it appears to lay on the surface, creating shadowing and floating on the surface of the base weft or tapestry.

What wasn't fun was discovering I had mis-measured my cartoon and it was over the 14.5 inches. I usually try and keep my tapestry under 15 square inches because several small format shows that I enjoy entering have that as a size requirement. Many have have 10 x 10 inches, so I try and do both sizes with my small format weaving. I had to redo the top of the cartoon and subtract 2 inches. Evidently I added wrong when I was using my 12 inch ruler and measured an extra 2 inches onto the cartoon I was drawing.

The mask I am weaving in the right hand corner is a masque of becoming. The masque represents the chances we take as we try and evolve and control our existence. One side is crying and the other is laughing. The Lakota, according to my grandmother, said that the way to tell if tears are from laughter or crying is that tears that fall close to the nose are crying tears. Tears that fall from the corners of the eyes are tears of laughter. I have also started the spine of the feather. The feather will be black. It lies against dark hills and trees in the background. The water under the lace is sparked with orange as the water catches the last light.

The Connections catalogue is great. Kathy Spoering and all did a great job. I am so glad that I am going to the Connections show in San Jose and the Small Expressions show in at Hartnell. I am really looking forward to seeing Maximo Laura's work up close. The bad news for me is that I am hearing rumours that they have cameliad fibers in them of which I am extremely allergic and won't be able to get as close as I would like.

One thing I was left wondering is why people who do small format often let the rib structure overwhelm the design. I am also amazed at the choices that judges make in choosing pieces for small format shows. Then again I am also amazed that Lurcat is still influencing how people think about small format tapestry or tapestry in general.(Yes, I know I left out the tail on the c. I can't figure out how to make this program add it.) I sometimes wonder why we are even concerned with what he said so many years ago. As far as I am concerned there is so much that he was so wrong about. I thing that Lurcat has probably caused more harm to the tapestry world-especially small format tapestry then any other tapestry weaver/designer. Someday I would like to write or be involved with a discussion of Lurcat and his contributions to the tapestry world.

Better go the day is getting shorter and I still need to weave for a couple of hours.

Doesn't look like much was done, but it's taken hours of tearing out and re-figuring to create the crochet pattern in tapestry. Now that I have figured out the math and soumack density it should weave more quickly. It's a crazy think I could crochet this edging faster then the time it is taking me to weave and figure out the pattern.

This afternoon I weave with Jen and Sara. Hopefully while I am teaching them I can finish or at least come close to finishing the nautilus on one of the three shaped tapestry purses I am weaving for use and samples.

Lilliana Crespi (www.lilianafibers.com) sent me her website so that I could look at some of her newer work. Lillian is a friend-I rarely see- who allowed me to reproduce one of her tapestries in my Shaped Tapestry book. I really liked her tapestries with the exposed warps. There are two pieces that I think are so cool. She has a bustier with eyes all over the bodice. All I could think of was turn abouts fair play! I also really liked her crocheted spider webs. For weeks I have been trying to figure out how to portray Ikotomi's web. The crocheted webs she did sent me into a whole other direction of thinking about the webs. Pretty cool.

Beginnings-The intensity of getting started-again

I think that keeping a blog is a little like weaving tapestry. If you don’t adhere to a schedule it doesn’t get done and/or updated. The ancestors take over and you just never get back to it, OR, only back to it with great difficulty and only if one is really trying to be disciplined and only if one can control the multiplying distractions that can happen in a studio. Yes-I know that was a very long run on sentence, but sometimes a run on sentence is a needful necessity. I have been busy doing other “needful” things like teaching and getting lectures set into PowerPoint-one of those things that actually does –eventually-make life easier. If one can stay on task long enough to sort through 30-40 years of slides and enter them into the computer by scanning, resizing and labeling. So many excuses so little time.

And now the tapestries-I am working on two new tapestries’ at the same time-Finally.

I have just finished reading a book on Optical blending-Ellen Marx's book, Optical Color and Simultaneity which is leading me into reading a second book Color and Meaning by John Gage. I have decided to see if the concept of simultaneity really exists in the true since of Einstein’s theories in relationship to weaving two diametrically opposed tapestries side by side. This is what happens when one spends a whole weekend updating ones research on optical colour blending for a class on colour that I am teaching at IWC this summer. It wasn’t until the end of the day when my eyes were so blurred out from playing with simultaneous contrasts that I realized the play on words/ideas that were happening with the words simultaneous and simultaneity and how it relates to my weaving several pieces at one time.

Anyway-The two pieces are a colour study of a Kona sunset that was taken from my son’s balcony on two different evenings with the vog in play-really 2 pieces one on top of the other. Vog is a combination of fog and vapors from the erupting/venting volcanoes near Kona. The first evening the sunset is as red, orange and as violent as one can possibly see. The next evening as lavender and pink, soft and visually brilliant as one could wish for. The two colour studies are 5x 7 inches and the other is 10 inches by 14.5 inches.

And finally-the "serious piece"-a piece called So Many Chances. It has many different elements all having to do with chance and what if’s. One of its most interesting elements is a border taken from a scan of a piece of my Grandmother Schoolcraft-Todd’s filigree crocheted lace. There are elements from both Grandmothers with a lot of Ikotomi thrown in for good measure (for an explanation of Ikotomi-see-SPIDERS ARE MYSTERIOUS”: THE SPIRIT OF THE SPIDER IN LAKOTA ART AND LORE by Ron McCoy-Drawing on surviving ethnographic records, this article offers some observations about the use of spider symbolism in Lakota belief and art. Volume 34 Number 2 spring 2009)
I have always wondered about the elements of chance that have to do with determining ones fate. Life has so many small and large variables that can affect everything just like the butterfly sneezing in China. It seems that life and the quality of life often hinges on chance elements that aren’t terribly controllable. How do you stop a butterfly in China from sneezing in China and changing the outcome of the weather a thousand miles away? So Many Chances are about those elements and what happens. All these elements layer over an intense landscape of water and sunrise and/or sunset-life or death. Both can become either are often dependant on the chances and choices one makes by chance.

Beginnings 2-6-09

Okay-It’s been another week. I am documenting where I am at on my new piece(s). Not Far!
The loom is almost warped and spaced. I will be weaving a sunset on one side of the piece “So Many Chances”. The sunset will be fun because it will be taken from one of my Daughter-in- laws photos of the vog in Kona. The vog creates the most wonderful colours. I am not quite sure how healthy it is to breath, but then again the color is wonderful and so far the volcano is only spitting vapour. I use the sky pieces as colour studies. I learn a lot from them. I think on this one I will work on making clouds appear to be soft and whispery in lavenders and soft pinks.

The other tapestry” So Many Chances” is being developed from the notes and an Idea map that I did at the ATA retreat with Jane Kidd a few years ago. The retreat helped me refine and add to the Prokoff journal techniques that I have modified for developing ideas and various design problems. I was first introduced to Prokoff by one of my design teachers (Louise Klemperer) when I attended OCAC in the late 70’s. I have used and refined the Progoff technique for developing ideas and focusing ideas in my art work for years. You can see from the pictures of the cartoon in process that I am using a collage like technique that I like to design with from my snaps and drawings.
I am finally ready to attempt to weave “the piece.” Has it actually been 4 years since the retreat? WOW! But then I did turn 61 yesterday. Once I finish the cartoon! My Grandmother’s Irish filigree crochet in the borders and my other Grandmother’s string piecing and geometric designs. The technique has to be different in one direction. Should be interesting how I figure out the techniques so both directions of the border look the same, seems a little daunting to weave.
The biggest design problem is how to combine elements from both Grandmothers because they were so different in every way and define the way they both perceived chance. The tapestry is being a real problem in several ways. It seems to have a mind of its own. The amount of elements and objects in the design are becoming a little chaotic, too tight and too claustrophobic. I envisioned a plains scene with ledger book horses and or ghost dancers and falling images from the sky. Nothing wants to stay where I want it to be and it is evolving quite distance from my original idea. There is so much stuff that needs to be in the design that it’s crowding out the landscape. Perhaps it needs the claustrophobic feeling.
I was beginning to thing I had a ghost in the studio rearranging my cartoon pieces until I discovered my studio helper had discovered how to climb from the floor, to a book crate, to a chair, to my design surface. I caught him rearranging my pieces while I was taking orders on the phone. He definitely has his own idea about studio time usage. I have been teaching him to fetch his yellow felt ball. Guess Chine’ decided after the third climb that if he brought me his ball and waited where he could be found we could go play fetch. The day before today he learned a hard lesson about double sided tape by tyeing himself up and then trying to pull it off with his feet. It wasn’t a pretty sight. Chene' has so much hair between his toes-well all over- really. The yellow thing hanging from his neck is a house leash he wears in the studio so that we can catch him when he's in speed demon dog phase and has stolen something to get attention.

Anyway
Until next week