Guilty, Guilty Guilty!!

Guilt! Guilty!- I am so late in getting this done. My last entry was April 4 over a month ago. The first time I have missed the every 2 week period in 2 years that are supposed to be my last two new year’s resolutions... I suppose I could let myself off the hook and forgive myself, but with me that might create a total withdrawal from being disciplined enough to come even close to writing every two weeks. Not a good idea. On top of all that, so little weaving done and so much to weave before the middle of July.

We mailed the first of the So Warped Monday. I would assume that by now people should be receiving them. It feels really good to have the prepublication books done and gone. Now a few thousand more and I’ll really be happy!

Summer and working in the yard is so seductive and distracting especially this week end the sun is shining and it’s in the high 70’s-finally! I am waiting on someone to show up at the studio. I would love to be out buying tomato and pepper plants and working on Chene’s path. Well, the path is really for my own use. So that I don’t kill myself tripping through the flower bed to save some poor Great Dane from Chene’s Napoleonic complexes, when I grab him to keep him from barking and trying to ooze out through the fence to conquer some dog that out weighs him by 60 to 100 lbs or more.. Anyway, just a while longer. .. Well-back on task.

Old Nancy- one of my favourite long time tapestry listers, who is someone someday I want to meet in person and share tea with!! Immediately sent me a note, after she received her So Warped about writing and finishing a book on colour and colour techniques. ”Old Nancy"(her words not mine) "realized her book might be at p o box since it had not arrived at home. i passed by the post office and am delighted in the book

HOWEVER, HOWEVER, HOWEVER now i want the book on color. please please please do not take any more detours etc. please give us the book on color next lest i die without ever being blessed by it. you always make everything so nice and straight forward, and i really appreciate it.”

      Now if that isn’t laying a guilt trip, Nancy!(gr) You better live a long time-Old Nancy. We still haven’t had a face to face!!! And, yes, I really want to begin working on the book on colour soon.

There is just no rest for the wicked or escaping guilt. I didn’t even get a chance to sit back and rest on Pat’s and my accomplishment of finishing the So Warped book. Thank you so much Nancy(grin)(grimace)(lol?)(and dozens of other emotions that I don’t know the symbols for!!!!!)

As my Grandmother would say and I really should remember it more often- What is-is and what will be will be. So deal with it and move on to the next is! Been there! Done that! Move on! So much for guilt!

(The landscapes are the mountains right out side of Las Vegas, within a 20 minute drive of down town Las vegas. I could have been spent days there taking photograpghs. They are one of the best reasons for going to Las Vegas besides the class I taught and the people I met.)

Since I last wrote, I have taught at CNCH2010 and in Las Vegas. I really enjoyed the trip to Santa Clara. Coming back wasn’t so much fun with the snow, but we drove out and spent the night up near Shasta Lake. I met a lot of very nice people including Laverne Waddington. I enjoyed showing her the Old Believer Belts sort of late one night after teaching all day. She photographed many of them and put them on her blog. Interesting about how small the world is and how coincidentally things can happen. Laverne just happened to sit next to Pat and I at the banquet. Small talk led to my showing her the belts that I had brought to illustrate my Seminar on Old Believer Tassels and discovering she probably has seen the Old Believers in South America. It was a very interesting way to spend an evening.

Syne of Weavzine gave an interesting talk on the net and it’s uses. I discovered her pod casts of interviews that she has been doing and am really enjoying listening to them. She has actually done 3-4 on tapestry weavers-James Kohler, Michael Rohde and Sara Swett. There are 52 or 53 of these weave cast and I intend to listen to all of them. The world has taken an entirely new turn while i was trying to ignore any new technology that was evolving. Something i try and do as often as possible. I am such a Luddite-eh-well-I would really like to be, but feel like I am being drug into it. If you listen closely you can probably hear my fingernails dragging and clawing as I am pulled screaming into the new age/ newer technology.

At CNCH I/we learned a valuable lesson to not trust hotel maps. It took Pat and I an hour and half to find a Greek Restaurant the Athena using the hotel map, but 5 minutes to get home with directions from Patrons of the restaurant. We got to drive home in the middle of a heavy rain storm that eventually as we headed North turned into snow and even heavier rain.

I think I am finally happy with my Soumack handouts, PowerPoint presentation and the sampler I am using to teach my soumack classes. I still want to add the technique of doing padded soumack, which is a technique I am adding to my own repertoire of techniques that I use a when I weave my tapestries. Used them at CNCH and for a section that I taught in Las Vegas in a multilevel way or introduction with a lot of other techniques.

Las Vegas class

My Las Vegas trip to teach was really wonderful. Thanks to Maurine Adrezin and her efficient ways and organization. She makes the most wonderful fascinating dolls. They are felt and then clothed in handwoven outfits. Thanks to Maurine and Allan, I actually got to see Las Vegas and do the touristy thing-doesn’t usually happen when I go places to teach workshops. I have wonderful pictures of the Mountains around Las Vegas and pictures of the night scape with all of the lights. She and Allan introduced me to Skype. I can now Skype with people and my husband when he’s in the house and I am in the studio and see them. I think it will have some long distance teaching applications. I really want to try teaching long distance with Skype. Samples and tapestries can be seen in real time and discussed in real time, which has always been one of the reasons I haven’t been happy with long-distance teaching. For me it takes too much time between the beginning and end of a given instruction by having to wait so much times between the parts and descriptions and instruction.

 The Las Vegas group was really fun to teach. Kathi Meisel who was in my IWC class in Durango had finished a tapestry.(see above tapestry) It was really interesting to teach a multilevel tapestry class. The looms were all warped when i arrived so there was very little peripheral stuff that needed to be done before I could get down to the nitty-gritty teaching of technique. That was so nice. The 3 day length for the class was really nice too I felt better about the amount of technique I was able to teach in the class a little less crammed.

I have been spending every minute I can weaving. I am almost half way done with the Kona Pink. I have begun to design the night colour study I want to do of the Las Vegas skyline. I want to make it even smaller 1.5 inches by 7 inches. Most likely it will be of Allan’s secret place. The photo’s from Maurine’s favourite place will need to be a little larger and will probably include the street lights leading down to the strip lights. I have been trying to figure out if i want to reweave the piece that was stolen. I am seriously considering it since it was one of my favourite colour studies. I am really hoping to be able to hang all of my sky scapes in the Show at Village Wools.

     I finally got to do some silver work on Wednesday. I stopped trying to put my silver time on Friday as a reward or fun thing after a week of hard work. Fridays were already too full. So I am now taking Wednesday mornings after my Bones and Balance class. Just a different way of seeing the scheduling done. Redesigned the top of the box I could never get it to really work. It never felt right.  I am working on and am adding a silver price tag with Viking knitting to hold the silver price tag. Pat had/has this wonderful round rose quartz cap that I have decided to use and I have this wonderful recycled piece that I am adding to the top of the box. I can relate it back to the trinity and still have my miracles for sale price tag. I am really looking forward to taking more silver classes the first of July. I need to remember to sign up for the classes or I won’t be doing that either. Will do it the first thing Monday morning. One of the sides of the box. I am now almost half done with the  4 sides.

Well hears to the development of sangfroid, which lately I seem to be losing and one last picture of the mountains.

Cheers,

kathe

One more thing...

Sometimes it seems like there is never enough time! Always one more thing to do, BUT, at least it all seems to be getting done. Most of the time it is a reasonable facsimile of wha I hoped to accomplish.  I am only a couple days late with doing my blog every two weeks. It feels almost magical when I get to cross off a line of my to do list.   I told myself I would do it-keep up the blog and chart my weaving progress  when I created my resolutions and goals for the year. One can see how little I have done on the Kona Pink sunset(definitely doesn't have the same flair as Kona Orange-needs a renaming!) and/or that I haven't started the piece for the connections show next to it-yet. In two weeks I will have until August to see how much weaving I can get done. I am really excited about doing an exhibit at Village Wools, but need some new work for it. I am also really looking forward to teaching and have programmed in time to actually do some research and visit people.   I did finish the sampler for my something -new something old class I am teaching at CNCH. Best News Yet!! I haven’t crashed into a corner-yet- in a despondent suicidal heap-Okay, Okay, so that is a little over the edge, but so is staring at several hundred, thousand, million slides and trying to put .them into a coherent useful thought pattern and scanning them into the computer. Okay-so digital images beats masking slides and remembering which is the front of the slide and is it upside down in the projector and will the order be scrambled before I reach my destiny. Best of all No more upset slide trays! I can wear the lecture around my neck on a stick. I can still remember teaching colour theory and tapestry in Atlanta, when someone decided an already crowded elevator could stand one more person if they got a running start to the crowd in already pact elevator. Slide trays flipping into the air and wafting not so slowly over all of  the inhabitants of the elevator and everyone helping me pick them up as the jerk ran off to is so important meeting. Perhaps he thought he was going to be facing a lynch mob for his rudeness. I was so grateful to Marti Fleisher for helping me get my slides back into the trays while I gave my lecture. Changing technology from old to new is always s-o-o much fun. I still thing that there is something to be said  for the old ways. I have spent the last several days converting slide lectures-mostly technical and adding new slides that I have done in the past into PowerPoint presentations. I love the process and enjoy creating the pages, but it takes time. Time that could be spent weaving I can understand why instructors are printing out the presentations in little booklets and selling them or using them for handouts. I had never thought about doing this until I was at Small Expressions in Grinnell and saw a couple that Daryl Lancaster had done. What a great idea!

I still have the great philosophical debate in my psyche as to whether I would rather be a Luddite or an Albertinian Monk. Wonder if Miller ever knew how influential is story would become to some after his death. I think it's the only thing he ever wrote-maybe maybe not. I should go to the internet and look it up-how funny. How ironic! How repurposed. 

      Could I live my Grandmother’s life? I would miss my music and my IPOD, but as long as I had my loom, books and journals I think I would be happy or at least content. The more the world increases the technology I need to keep up with and the instant -rarely deep conversations of the internet the more tempting it becomes. Everything seems to be getting into smaller and smaller bytes.  There is never enough quiet. Even at night one can hear the buzz of electrical circuits that power our life's. AND, YES, young family members, there really were typewriters and now they are being repurposed in to jewellery.

So what have I been doing for last two weeks? Very little weaving and a lot of “paper” work. Pat and I met our deadline to have the So Warped  book ready for the printer so that we could have a final galley to take to CNCH with us. I basically finished my Power Point stuff Soumack, Old Believer lectures and updated my 101 with images from the SO Warped book. I have perhaps 5 inches woven on my soumack sampler for my soumack class. Tomorrow I will speed weave and hopefully finish it Saturday, which is wha I was able to do.YEH!!! No more bits and pieces of disorganized soumack samples floating in and out of the suitcase. Sunday I will make a dozen tassels as samples for OB Tassel class. And then I am ready to pack. Pat and I will leave Thursday morning. It will take 9 and ¾ hours from here to there. As long as we miss the traffic slow downs in the bay area. One just has to love GPS’s. We will be home early Monday. No site seeing, no museums, no side trips etc. etc. A week later I leave for Las Vegas, which is looking like it's going to be a great class. Their looms are warped and ready to weave. That is so cool.   Hopefully, I’ll get to see something besides the airport. All of the above stuff is so  worth it when one finally gets a chance to teach it and someone "get it."

Last night I received an e-mail of the Fantastic Fibers 2010 show. I received-I am not sure if you would call it an award-a special Jurors Choice recognition. Pretty cool! I am directly under Maximo Lauras second prize award on the page.

"Sic transit mundus" ("Thus passes the world").

Announcing a new book from fine Fiber Press-So Warped

So Warped, Warping a Loom for Weaving Tapestry by Kathe Todd-Hooker and Pat Spark

ISBN 9780-9753698-6-9

After many years of teaching tapestry and weaving, the authors realize that it is sometimes the warping process that stops a weaver dead in her/his tracks. Traditional weavers often have horror stories about their warping experiences and while many tapestry weavers do not have a background in traditional weaving, they too often see the process as impossibly difficult. In this book we are covering as many warping methods and hints as our combined 60 years of experience have taught us. We have learned these methods through much trial and error. We are certain there are other ways of doing things, but we have hit upon the methods that work well for us and for our students.

To help understand warping, we present different types of tapestry looms, various tensioning and shedding mechanisms including several types of heddles, and the following warping methods: figure eight, circular, bout, four-selvedge, floor loom, and as an added treat, the method of warping the Russian Old Believer backstrap loom for weaving tapestry belts. There are 110 pages of information for warping your loom so you can weave tapestry. If you aren’t warped before you read this book, So Warped will really help you get there.

Pre-publication price is $32.00 plus $5.00 shipping and handling. This special price is only offered through Fine Fiber Press and is only available until April 30, 2010. After that time, the price will be $35.00 plus $5.00 s/h. Discount quantity prices are available for vendors. Order from Fine Fiber Press and Studio, 604 1st Avenue East; Albany, Oregon 97321 USA phone 1-541-917-3251 email: finefiberpress@comcast.net

http://www.finefiberpress.com/

Here is a teaser of a page from the book.  Enjoy!!!

WOW!!! and meanderings

WOW!! WE DID IT!!! SO WARPED IS WRITTEN, LAID OUT, AND BEING PROOFED!!! GOOD JOB, PAT, you are so good and getting better all of the time!!!!The book is now in/ready for pre-publication sales. We even have the cost and a discount for anyone who purchases it in advance. 35.00 After release and 32.00 for those who buy a prepublication copy of the book. The book has 110 pages of everything you want to know about warping just about any loom you can weave tapestry on with exception of the shaped tapestry looms which is in the Shaped Tapestry book. I am spending the weekend writing the press release and starting the announcements for the prepublication sales.
       Left is a picture of the cover of the book, but without the cool Mulberry coloured background.

BUT, first, it’s time to do my blog. It’s over due and nagging at my conscience to be done. This means I’ll never get anything done if I don’t take care of my goals for the year-Writing my blog every two weeks, keeping up my photo journal, and my weaving journal. Fortunately, for me I am having a very quiet day. Spencer is working at Block, Pat is off on a well deserved visit with relatives and the sun is shining but too cold and wet with rain burst to work in the yard. No one is aware that I even exist today. The phone is not ringing for a change. So, it’s me, my stuff, Wry, Chene and Brahms for the day with maybe a little Hans Zimmer to keep the energy level up.

One of the new things I have learned in the last few weeks is Viking Knitting. It’s really addictive. I can sit and do it for hours. Viking knitting is a type of looping that is done with wire to produce a chain that can be used in jewellery. After it is looped the knitting is pulled through a draw plate that extends it length and turns the rather ugly as in duckling thing into a beautiful sensuous chain. I have a bracelet that I have to wear all of the time so I created a bracelet from the chain. I had looped and attached the old charms to it and added cones and a pretty finding with a flower on it. It looks so much better then what I had been wearing. Pat is putting together a class on Viking knitting that involves using felt. It sounds really interesting. It’s a class I would take if I were going to a conference and taking a workshop.

I finished Kona Orange. I think I’ll leave it with that name. I am taking some teasing from family member’s about-Kona gold, Maui Wowie, and a few other such brand names. It was really good to get it off to the Enchanted Passages exhibit.

The studio has felt a bit overwhelming and imposing for the last month and perhaps a little sinister as in promoting guilty feelings. Everywhere I look; there are warped looms ready to weave on, but no plans to weave on them. It’s like someone gave into a warping fetish and obsession. Actually, they are looms warped for illustrations in the So Warped book, but it’s still intimidating. Let alone staring at the awesome sized space on my large Shannock with all that space ready to be filled for “and HE.”.

The Mirrix is warped and I’ll start the other Kona piece today and be able to stare at the blank warps for another piece that needs to be done by November, but at least I am weaving and not brooding over the other piece. The design still hasn’t come together, but when it does, I am warped. Boy, isn’t that the truth. It must be spring even the looms are waiting with a pregnant pause and the excitement of beginnings. There’s something so satisfying about the first touch of colour on a loom. Of course, another warped loom will be used for my Soumack samples I am trying to get together for my class in Santa Clara on soumack and the More! class I am teaching in August in Albuquerque. I am tired of all of the little bits and pieces of samples floating around the studio. If I get them, all together in one sampler I can lose it instead of just random samples that I need for the class and can never find while packing to teach a class. I keep telling myself this is a good deal! Also, one warp is on the Fine Fiber Press loom and Pat is making ranuu and pick and pick pillow tops so that’s her problem not mine-gr!  So I guess perhaps it’s not quite as sinister since many of the looms have a purpose other then making me feel guilty for not filling up the warps. I just need to find the time to fill up the looms.

These are samples  of soumack that I have been spending time getting ready to weave. It's not in my sample collection,yet.            The Linten roses, or Mayflowers or helleborus are blooming beautifully. Your choice for the proper name that you prefer. What I call them seems to depend on my mood at the given time I am discussing them. They are the one flower in the yard that doesn't seem to mind the heavy rain we keep having. I must have variations of 10 different colours ranging from greenish white to purple. They are fun to watch. They can't seem to make up their mind about what colour they will be. I am definitely going to use them in a tapestry.   I have almost decided that I don't like the upper right hand corner of "And He"  and may change it to the Lenten Roses, because they are so changeable and can be used to bring on dreams. Sort of an appropriate flower for the piece. Actually it would be the bottom right if turned it's final direction.

 This is where I wish I were today. Tomorrow It will be raining. It's already clouding up.  So enough about today and the past weeks.It is just so right that So Warped is finished! It's time to move on to the next project a book on colour and colour movement in tapestry and get all of those warps filled up with colour. .   But the timing to begin will probably be in September or later for the next book. So I get a few months of weaving and prep time for classes.  Cheers and all!  

It is what it is!

Kona Sunset-Orange is finished except for the twining and braiding. It’s done before the deadline for the Enchanted Pathway exhibit. YEAH!! All I can say is it is about time!!!! I was beginning to worry with all that’s been going on and not going on with FFP and the studio. It has a very boring name. ..Perhaps that will change after I look at it for awhile. Maybe it should just be Kona Orange. It has some interesting colour blends in the sky -oranges and purples mixed together on the bobbin and all through the hatches and hachures. I am not sure orange really describes this piece. I am very happy with the silhouettes’ of the trees against the blazing orange sunset. It’s a technique I will probably use again. The orange pushes the dark navy black to an intensity I wouldn’t have believed possible in a small format piece. The orange is warm enough and the blue black cool enough that it has substances with then appearing like a hole that black elements in tapestries sometimes create visually. Photographing my small format/small sale work can be difficult. There is a shine that happens that makes it look like the warps aren’t covered, when really they are. The rib structure in the photos has a tendency to moiré. The subtle blends are almost too subtle for the photos of the pieces. It’s a real frustration. They almost need to be viewed in real time rather than frozen in a photo. Time to stop moaning and move on! It is what it is!

And, now for the second Kona piece. By the way the
kona pieces are 5 by 7 inches at 20 epi. They are made of dual duty craft thread for the warp and the weft is composed of cotton and or polyesters sewing thread, embroidery floss and rayon embroidery floss. Thank you Jan for the incrediable oranges and the deep turquoise you gave me from your mothers stash. The all cotton oranges and yellows have a beautiful lustre. This is a picture a of the next kona sunset. Taken the next day on the same balcony 1500 feet above the ocean looking out across downtown kona. It is so opposite of Kona Orange in colour. I think the difference was caused by the vog and the erupting valcano.

Good news the So Warped book will be very closed to being finished this week with the exception of the endless proofing and the vast seemingly endless - minutiae that goes along with that such as Indexes, proofing and more proofing that can only be done once the layout is finished. It’s a little longer and stuffed with a lot more information than we thought it would be. So much for the small handbook on warping tapestry looms that we set out to write. We-Pat and I-built a copy of the old pipe loom that I used in graduate school-a pipe loom that was used pre-copper pipe looms. It brings back a lot of memories of sitting by the patio door and weaving obliviously for hours while a plethora of every kid for miles around screamed and created mayhem in the back yard almost silenced by the Debussy’s afternoon of the faun and a healthy dose of Rimsky-Korsokoff and Borodin. Now I have something much more effective my IPOD, but no kids. If you like pulled heddles it works really well for the Gobelin type of heddles. They are so adjustable in height.

Today I tackle the Mirrix. I am really excited about the treadles. I have never personally liked shifting the heddles with my hands, but... It eventfully makes the scar tissue in my palm sore. For most people this isn’t a problem. I also prefer the advantage of being able to use both hands when weaving with my slicker threads at 20-22 epi. But, I do love the Mirrix treadles and the fact i can fit it into a suitcase when I travel. I also like the heddle system itself. It is really fast. I noticed on Lynn Hart’s blog she’s using the heddle bar system on her Shannock, which is a very interesting adaptation. But, you know i don’t mind the tyed heddle system. What i do dislike is the hot glued heddles. Something eventually always comes loose and hangs one long and shortens another. Then when one has worn out the heddle the glue often pulls away part of the wood. Unless, it is really cheap glue and then one ends up at square one with a long and short heddles when the glue doesn’t hold over time.

The weather is odd. It is either beautiful, sunny, and freezing cold or warm, dreary and way too wet. The daffodils and Jonquils are out. My crocuses aren’t, but everyone else’s seems to be. The Camellias’ are blooming just in time to be browned by the rain. I wonder why we even try to grow them in Oregon. The downstairs part of the studio is/ was absolutely frozen and the the upstairs where I spend most of my time will be too warm. I want to lay out in the sun and read, but my fingers are too frozen to turn the pages. When the sun does shine and heat up the Daphne Odorata the smell is incredible as it gently wafts into the studio. Made a nasty discovery yesterday. The fasteners on the windows in the stairwell are in the middle and I am too short to reach them. Should be an interesting summer!

I am starting to think about my piece for the ATA small format show. I am beginning to collect the images. I want it to be about paradoxes. Perhaps, the paradox of the Alpha and the Omega a feeble attempt to weave what has been going on in my life lately and the thought processes that they engender. There is always the paradox of aging and youth as the body changes, fascinating to watch and examine, but difficult at times to live with. I am not sure whether it’s a paradox or an oxymoron-good and evil, old and young, fire and ice. The paradoxes involved in food and diabetes, Insulin and glucose

I keep going back to fragmented puzzles and puzzle pieces that aren’t really there. They remind me of quilting stitches-there, but not there. A combination of Coleridge’s Xandu and Stephen Cranes black rider.

Life is full of little discoveries such as coming home and finding out my neighbour can really play the delta blues on his guitar sitting in his front yard. Evoking memories of Asa sitting on the patio playing the guitar when he was a kid, or that the neighbour doesn’t mind Chene chasing his cats that are twice Chene’s size, or someone else also enjoys the opera. Another discovery I counted 7 different colours of violets on my 8 block walk to my better bones and balance class.

Discovered that Wry/Rya has taken to sleeping under pillows on the couch to hide from Chene. Can’t say that I blame him. I am about ready to lose Chene’s orange bone, especially if I have to throw it one more time, but first it needs a trip through the dishwasher. Discovered this morning while trying to sleep that he is still chasing flying geese and airplanes.
Cheers for now!