busy! Busy! Busy

Busy! Busy! Busy! Running in circles. I cannot believe how much time I have spent in front of the computer in the last couple of weeks. The good news is I have been weaving and weaving  a lot.   I should finish my new or next piece by tomorrow evening.

Bedazzled -Asa's Rocks

So sought after-Small Expressions

I'll get my Bedazzled and Small Expression pieces off tomorrow to Convergeance. then all I need to do is decide if I am going to try and do another piece before my Small Things at Village Wools. The next piece is thought and drawn out. It's a simple background of mixed blacks and dark colours with hazmat symbols and a broken Nautilus shell-the future. I am working on prehistory right now. Sego Lilies and earthstars. The oldest of things.

Received the new ATB8 catalogue  today. The Catalogues seem to just keep getting better and better. Of course,  I am probably going to be the only one who notices I left off my MAIS in Craft Design, History, CTRA and economics degree. My fault not theirs.

                                

So Sought After                               So Many Chances  

Lucked out and found   an Oaxaca rug a few days ago. It's background colour is a lovely turquoise. I really like this detail of the band in over shot and floats.

Sometime in the future I want to weave a design that is poly chronic and related to Einsteins theory of relativity mixed in with  or related to the philosophy of  non  backgrounds of the truly horrific cutsey-ly designed tea towels  each with a crocheted border that both of my Grandmother's had me embroider endlessly.  Were they truly about the love for home  and of decorating ones home and making it a home  or were they really about killing time-literally?  I always wondered if that tiny dinky needle could be pegged through the art of the vampiric designer of those cutesy thingies that seemed to be so necessary to ones survival as a  "good homemaker".  Or maybe the act of creating was like having bound feet.  A show of not needing to do anything-a show of wealth and upper class ism. Even though "it" was needful to always keep ones hands busy at all times. I always wondered why since both Grandmother's encouraged me to run a muck-but always tastefully and with mindfulness.  This stuff or statements of my skill at embroidering mindless things without backgrounds were  always meant for my hope chest. In real life with 3 males in the house it was always a battle to keep them pristine and not turned in clean up rags. I keep thinking that there has to be a relationship to the non backgrounds that  my native American Grandmother was so fond of  and one sees in Native American art and tea towel art and  or fribbles.  Which in  some ways  has influenced me not to think that back grounds are terribly important to a design. AND, I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have something to do with my horii vacuii that often invades my designs. Perhaps in protest of voids.  True paradoxes.

It is no wonder that I that artistic statements  are anything but a creator of confusing  and disbelief for me. I wonder about there worth unless they  are very very long-too long for the average person to wade through. They always feel like such an invasion of privacy to me. Why can't the work stand on its own.  How does one write about the lunacy and all of the elements that influence us to do a medium as slow as tapestry. I always seem to end up humming excerpts from West Side Story such as Officer Krupke. Yet, on the other hand I can spend days and weeks writing in my journal about why, how and what a tapestry is all about. It's not that I don't like to write. I think-maybe- it's about putting something so personal out there for everyone else to see and read. Perhaps giving up a piece of myself.

 

Black Hawk Lakota ledger Art-definitely not a fribble, but  the style was  influential to my Grandmother- This was on Wikipedia and for this particular piece copyright has run out.

It is amazingly warm in the top part of the studio today-around 92 degrees and barely 70 in the bottom floor of the studio and around 80 out of doors. My garden is finally starting to look like it might survive-about time. A lot of the plants are really rather battered looking. Do bad it brings out the sticky bind weed. Chene' tried to chase and attack a pit bull the length of the fence and became so entangled that by the time I tried to retrieve him he couldn't move. Served him right and me hours of picking burrs out of all that fur.

Had lunch with Kathy on Friday and attended the "drunken barbecue"   for a few hours.  Yes, it was at the Off Center one of my favourite places in Salem. On Saturday we attended the "Drunken Barbecue." Perhaps the other stuff happened after we left. It was really fun see Arjay, Scott, Star and the rest of the crowd.  I so miss not having them all closer. It was all rather mellow-not quite like the past and many more children. What is it they say nothing like reformed...So tamed now. Guess that's what happens when the children begin to out number the adults or supposed adults.

Haven't done much  actual silver work for a while. Unless one calls chasing down and purchasing tools for my upcoming classes silver work. Did clean and polish one of my garage sale finds. It was an opal and gold ring that I bought for 10 cents at a garage sale. It had these funny  dark little balls on each side of the opal. While I was cleaning the ring with a pick I discovered that the two small balls on each side were incredibly dirty. When I finished I discovered at the center of the balls two small diamonds. Talk about magical when I picked at the ball and tried to shine it. So suprising.

Couple of days ago we had a lunar eclipse I was all jazzed  to wake up and take pictures. But,  decided when the cloak bellowed while trying to wake  me up up and get at it  that I would rather sleep through it so I did.  So much for adding those photo's to my weaving.  Funny what working 12 hours a day on paper work and weaving will do ones goals and good indentations. Meant to say good intentions.

Okay it's time to weave.

Cheers,

kathe

Waiting for rain to go away!

It’s been an interesting 2 weeks. Filled with highs and lows-frustration, depression, happiness and accomplishment. 42 years of marriage to the same man is a pretty big accomplishment.         The weather hasn’t been very cooperative on the days I can work in the yard it rains. Plants are drowning in the ground because there isn’t enough heat to compensate for the over abundance of liquid. My laissez faire style of gardening isn’t doing well. Cuke plants are collapsing and rotting. My tomatoes and peppers are still in the nursery sleeves. The plants were yellowing so badly i took them to the nursery to see if they had some type of weird virus. Chene’s path construction has been called do to mud-Maybe tomorrow-or not. The good news is as long as it’s raining he isn’t chancing the Great Dane by the fence and I don’t have to try an capture him before he totally annoys the huge dog and ends up minus something or finally does figure out how ooze through the fence. Thank god he’s not capable of manipulating time space and atoms. He’s still in the running at the fence and bouncing off stage.

The good news!!! I finished Kona Pink. The more I weave with black or sort of blacks the more interesting it becomes. Blacks are such an interesting colour to work with. There are so many different blacks. All have the ability to change the look of the colour next to it-Warm blacks, cool blacks, blue blacks, red blacks, indigo blacks and of course shiny blacks and matte blacks. Then there is the textural difference in sewing thread, rayon, embroidery floss. Combining this all with the pink, purplish colours of the vog has been really interesting because there is a softness that easily greys out when the black colours of the foliage overlay the soft colours and in the centre of the piece without the dark. Contrast of hue and light and dark contrast extremes are not something I usually to prefer to work with. I have a tendency to use warm and cools to create my perspective in complex pieces.

    This mirrix is so great for weaving. I love it's treadles and how smooth it works whenI am weaving. I want to put another top bar at the bottomto stablize the warp in position when I travel with the loom. I am also going to but the texsolve heddles and prey that tthe are small enough  for 20epi.

The more I use soumack for lines the more I like it. It’s amazing how different the lines can look just by varying the amount of yarn in the weft bundle. It still is about half of the size of the main weft bundle that gives a flat surface and not a raised surface. I really like using just one thread to create really small lines. I think on the small sewing thread tapestries it’s really important not to create a ridge on the surface. Light creates too great a shadow if the proportion of the soumack to the base cloth is wrong.

Another thing that I became really aware of on this piece is just how much detail one can get in a small piece if you use half of the size of the normal wefts. This really allows one to pack more turns hence more hatches and hachures into a smaller space.

I still can’t figure out how to photograph the small pieces with all of the black. There is a shine or something that the black takes on that looks like lice. I am thinking it might be the flash that is causing the problem. Normally I try and photograph out of doors on a cloudy day. I think it’s time for another photography class on taking pictures of small things. I am fairly comfortable with large stuff- mountains, sky etc, but I think I get way to much detail and perhaps non-existent detail in my small stuff. I seem to miss the point of the photograph with too much detail. Just because you can do something doesn’t always mean that one should.

Marge has been ill. I miss weaving with her even though I still visit her. She’s almost finished with her desert piece. We have finished the cartoon for her Tyger and piglet piece. The loom is warped and waiting. Empty warped looms are so depressing. It’s like it’s time to out to play and no one to play with!

With the completion of Kona Pink--- Kona Pink really needs another name. Pink has so many negative connotations. I have hated pink and all of its hidden agenda’s since I was little. I was forced to wear pink because I have dark hair and my sister who is/was blonde was always dressed in turquoise-My favourite colour. I keep looking for frills to sprout out the side of the tapestry and change it into something besides a colour study.

It’s definitely time to do another piece. I think I’ll use the colour study of the Las Vegas night scape to clear my mind for my next piece(grin, disbelief, and a little LOL to boot). I have this idea for my photograph of sego lilies, feathers, earth stars, whole nautilus, and a broke nautilus shell that has been in my studio for seems a hundred years. I need to journal about it because I want it to say something about the probable circular continuum of past present and the future we seem to be destroying. Each day seems to produce a pending cataclysmic event-whether real or imagined or reinvented by those people we call reporters. I can think of better names, but probably shouldn’t. How long before the Motel of Mysteries by David Macauley becomes an actual happening? I already feel buried in paper and digital bytes.

The size  of the new piece will be about 10 inches by 10 inches, because I want to keep it in the range of 100 square inches. The other thing I know is this piece will not have a landscape in the background, but chene’s and melanges. Some of the reasoning with this is that I can weave the background faster. A greater part of it is because when I am not filling the background with as much chaos as possible I like the relationship of the images to a void. The images will then seem to float on the surface of the void. A little, like the first five verses in Genesis, this has been defined partially by the following quote.

“Creation or the act of creating is merely the exploit of bringing about the existence of that, which initially was not. It is to make something be when prior to taking form it was nothing...which in truth is a manipulation of a certain volume of void separated from the undefined void subsequently possessing a density of its own nature to be separate from void.” Borrowed, stolen and or liberated from a commentary on Genesis 1-5 by prefprefprefhori

On another level as a “between” I have always been fascinated with the lack of backgrounds in traditional and not so traditional Indian art. I have often wondered what the correlation to those backgrounds might have to do with the lack of backgrounds in the tea towels and pillow cases that I embroidered as a child for hours at the feet of both Grandmothers.

And, Yes, Wednesday mornings for silver work is working out. I am signed up for 4 silver classes at the Puget Sound Bead Festival. The four sides are laid out and mostly souldered. The Peruvian Opal is beautiful and very complex in there silver bezels. It's easy to see what is souldered and what isn't. The brightt so pretty stuff is the unsouldered pieces. The dull souldered silver before its polished.

On that note finally it’s time to go weave and with a fervent prayer for several days without rain!!!

kathe

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").