Winter Soltice and tax season

Yesterday was the winter solstice. Merry Christmas family and friends. It's 4:30 and the sun is almost down. Night for the most part equals day. The sky is all soft pinks, lavenders and grey blue clouds I love this time of year. Chene', Spencer and I walked down by the river today. It was a nice winter walk. Chene' kept getting lost in the grass that was taller then he is. At least it's better weather then Shane's and the grandkids 3 feet of snow in Maryland. Asa and Kathy get home to Maryland from their tour of the Mediterranean on Christmas eve. They have pictures of tapestries and weavers for me. I like the solitude of my studio this time of the year. Pat is in Washington visiting family for Christmas. I can work with my music full blast without disturbing anyone or I can have absolute quiet and peace for my thoughts and weaving. We did have a little snow up on Marys Peak a few weeks ago. I don't know who was more excited about the snow Spencer or Chene".

My cartoons are now sewn to the looms. Chene' kept inspecting the cartoon every time I laid it out flat so I could see it before I sewed it on-big help. My selvedges are finished. I redid the cartoon for the black leaves in the small Kona piece and I am ready to begin weaving the big piece. The selvedge is done. Colour is next. This is the biggest piece have woven in a while. It is 58 inches by 48 inches- 20 square feet. The big Shannock will be getting a work out. I'll see how long before I crave working smaller on a major piece. I am not so sure this piece might not have made me happier weaving it at 20 epi rather then 10 epi. It would have been almost 24 inches tall if I had and 15 inches wide-really big for a small format/small scale piece. Hopefully the wool piece will feel right and I won't end up reweaving it in sewing thread which has happened before. I started the Kona orange over because I lost the colour in my head and I wanted to start over with the colour in stead of trying to make the colour conform to an old palette that I created in my head to weave the piece. I am glad I did.
Pat will be out of the studio for about a month. She is having foot surgery and 2 weeks later wrist surgery. A big major event that will happen in this time period is a good house cleaning, organizing, clutter removing, and reorganizing the yarns and threads around my looms. I am so tired of the chaos in the studio. I will also be pulling ivy down because we are getting new windows in the up stairs studio in January. The new windows will be nice, energy efficient and will be heavily UV protected to spare the textiles. I have an east and west window that allow a tremendous amount of light into the studio. All while weaving as many hours a day as I can.

Pat and I spent several days photographing warping procedures-bouts, figure 8, circular warping. Warped a small Turkish Old Believers belt loom with a tapestry warp, which we also photographed for the book. I had almost forgotten how to do the heddles. I had forgotten picking the cross of all things. The So Warped book is moving right along. I think the layout and photo stuff is 33% finished. While Pat is laid up she will be working on another major junk of the photo's and layout. We are going to have a working copy of the book by the time i go to Las Vegas to teach. They Will be the first people to read it. Hopefully by CNCH it will to the printers. Pat is convinced it takes 9 months to do a book once you start it. Much like having a baby-Sometimes almost as painful.

Chene' is being a quiet comfortable presence as he sleeps behind me on my chair waiting for me to move to the loom so he can sleep and gnaw on his black pillow to the side of the treadles. There is no peace in the house Rya has seen to that this year. I have chosen not to put ornaments on the tree, but have a tree for the smell. Rya is too untamed and Chene' feels the need to steal everything before Rya can tear it up. The training squirt bottle is working overtime on both of them. Rya has a kitten's energy and we are all his toy from dawn tell the middle of the night. So we hide in the studio silently doing our thing.

Then their is Christmas vacation race to see and do everything before tax season starts and Spencer has to work 12-13 hour days doing taxes. Of course, this all so produces good things in a great hurry. We went to opera on Saturday to see Tales of Hoffman. Loved it. I really liked the muse and the thoughts about doing art-the rebirth of art. etc. Today we saw Avatar. It was incredible. The Naby were so Lakota like and in a way reminiscent of half a dozen movies about plains Indians and a healthy dose of Joesph Campbell mono myth. Wes Studi played the father. AND then you see the credits and realized the movie was made in New Zealand. Talk about universals-or not. -I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had taken my other path as a cartoonist and animator when I was 20.

Christmas we will see Sherlock Holmes and then spend a couple of days at the coast. Then with the new year I will work long days because Spencer will be working long days and often 6-7 days a week. I do have a couple of students coming to the studio for instruction to break up the long days of waiting for the tax season to end.

I have been spending my spare time trying to get a handle on my soumack and brocade stuff-handouts. I have decided I am going to put them into the form of a monograph that I can sale. I have so many people asking for more information on the lines and soumack that I do. I am including some pictures of what I have been studying lately. I want to do diagrams and pictures. It just seems like at times so much information to get ready for the handouts. Way too much for people to take notes on in a workshop, but not so much to take home and look at another day once having been introduced to the techniques . All this should be ready by the time i teach at at the Northern California weavers conference. Turkish brocade

Brocade Afghani bag and more patterned soumack

Line Soumack-vertical

Brocade or inlay

Guess that's all for now. The last sunset was taken about 10 minutes after the first sunset picture at Yaquina Bay on a perfect Winter day.

Celebrate the solstice!

Between and Betwixt

Between, in the middle of, at intervals, in the midst of, among, betwixt, interjascence, etc, etc, etc. Things barely started and nothing near finishing or even begun enough to have a definitive personality. ..which always seems to morph into waiting, biding time, attend,anticipating, mark time, delay, tarry, lurking, hovering, dangling, wait in suspense,be left hanging...boredom and depression. Well, guess that pretty much covers my feelings for the last week or so. Think I better leave the thesaurus alone for a while. Just another way of killing time is to play the curious game with a book, but so much fun.

Now that I have written the words it feels almost humorous or possibly ironic. They sounds so static and lacking in energy-lackadaisical-almost. I still put in 8 hour + days. I have just added things like holidays, company, shipping times, cooking, Doctor appointments, research and writing.

I decided to start over on one of the Kona Balcony sunsets. I love the photos and the colours I took while setting on the veranda/balcony. Last Friday the electricity went out for about 5 hours. Fortunately, i had finished cooking our Friday Thanksgiving dinner eating in the dark was interesting. I was able to get out my collection of kerosene lamps to helpwith the darkness. My Father-Grampa- couldn't come on Thanksgiving because of a very long standing commitment to deliver Thanksgiving diners to the Elderly and infirm. He's 84. I am not quite sure when he things elderly starts. So, we changed diner to Friday. So when it got to cold we went to see the movie 2012. I kept laughing about valcanos and sky. They really needed a better colourist.
I had been away so long finishing so many chances I had lost the colours in my head. So I am resetting up the warp to start over. I'll need to finish it in the next week or two, because we will be photographing warping the Shannock loom for the So warped book Pat and I are writing.
Part of my research for this week has been the warp weighted loom. When i was requesting photo's of various tapestry looms Fireside Looms offered me a photo of the Sami warp weighted loom. The photo on the left is actually from wikipedia and is a Icelandic loom. I have had a sort of background low key fascination with warp weighted looms since I was at OKAC formerly known as OSAC doing undergraduate work. Marlene Kerrigan who taught Craft history showed slides of Greek pottery with warp weighted looms incised and or painted on the vases. Of course their is also the story of Penelope and Ulysses and of archaeological finds of viking loom weights and weaving. Pat who has a a really good background in Scandinavian weaving informed me that the warping begins with a rep weave that stabilizes and creates the top selvedge. The wefts of the rep become the warps for the tapestry or other weaving that can then be rolled around the top beam with the weighted warps hanging down the front of the loom. I am going to set up a small warp weighted loom. The process is totally fascinating to me. Beating is done with a two handed batten, so, any tapestry would need to be woven straight across the fell line and not up or down in this case.
Adventures of a Beginning Silversmith

Well this is as far as I have gotten. It's starting to come together. The top is laid out. One side is finished and the two sides are ready to sew together. My way of getting around pieces that are two large for me to handle. The pieces will be stitched together with gold thread/wire.







You can sort of make out the letters of the word miracles on the right side of the black paper. The green looking stones are Peruvian Opal and the other stones are died agate. These are the two tapestries that will be inside the box when I finish. Today almost became a little two exciting. I learned several valuable lessons. One, always work with shoes on. Two, always check the torch fittings and make sure they are tight. Three, Remember where the shut off valve is and reach for it first. Four, move fast, panic later. Five, Remembering, it's a good thing to keep Chene' in the house and not the studio when working with silver. No matter how much he wants to be in the studio.

Other then a melted floor, a few flames and scaring myself half to death nothing bad happened. A fitting on my torch head came loose and exploded/popped off the supply line in my hands and I dropped the flaming torch and pieces of the torch on the floor. Andy is going to check my torch for me to make sure I didn't damage anything and I am good to go. Probably not necessary for any reason other then my sanity. Valuable lessons learned without a lot of damage. Andy checked it a few minutes ago and taught me a little more. Helped me mark directions on the tank for turning off the valves. Gave everything a clean bill of and health and I am good to go again.

I am making great strides on a new monograph on Soumack and tapestry. I decided that my handouts for my class at ASCH 2010 were getting to be so many that perhaps they would make a good monogragh. I think I may also be teaching a variation of the class at the Eugene Textile Center. I have had several students come to the studio wanting to learn how I do my lines which are soumack and lacing. This week I also finished writing the chapter on the Old Believer tapestry loom. We just need to photograph the process for So Warped. Pat completed several major sections and layout on warping.

I had two small mentions in national Magazines- Fiberarts for an ATA award and An article about Small Expressions. There is a photo of one of the 3 pieces I had in Small Expressions.
Guess that's all for now.

Bye for now!

"If I could save time in a bottle..."

The beginning of my new tapestry. It's based on a quote from a folk song that Peter, Paul, and Mary made famous. The line is-"And, he who tells a bigger tale will have to tell a lie. That and the Jim Croce song.Time in a bottle. The two songs have been torturing me for the last 2-3 months. they are like a cycling rhyme that is always in the back of my mind. So i decided to design a wool tapestry that is going to be at this point 59 inches by 30 inches and be woven at 10 epi. The cartoon seems to be a little elusive to put on paper. It's been a sound in my head rather then an image. I had fun drawing and cutting up the images of one of my Grandmother's doilies for the corner and surrounding one of the peonies. The falling corked bottle with numbers or times is an old magnesium bottle I have in in my studio for years. The bottle glass starts out clear and when left in the sun they turn purple. There are more puzzle images and a banner that i adapted from a 17th Spanish tapestry. The clock face is the back of a raptor in flight. The peonies 3 of them are adapted from my drawings and photographs that I have taken over the years. The sunset pictured here is the probable backgound for my new piece. I took this photo at Mary's Peak just outside of Philomoth Oregon on a very cold evening.

I should be further, but I have been working on my book So Warped. Pat Spark and I are writing it together. Pat is one of the few people I would trust to write this book with me. She is incredibly knowledgeable about anything that has to do with a loom. Before she was a felter she was a tapestry weaver. I am working on a very special section about the loom that the Turkish Old Believers weave tapestry belts up on. It's been a few years since I have used the loom. Let alone tried to remember all of the steps to warping and weaving on the loom.The belt to the right is a Turkish Old Believer belt that is woven in tapestry. The loom is a type of backstrap loom and has interesting heddles. The belts are woven 3 at a time and are highly symbolic and are identifiers of the church members. The belt designs no longer designate a place or a village-only what the weaver thought was a beautiful design.They are given as gifts, requests for prayer, on all special occasions including birth, weddings and death. They symbolize the wearer as being wrapped in the arms of the church and of Christ. The more common type of belt to be woven on this loom is a warp faced warp replacement pickup. On the left are is the more common style of belt woven on the loom. In the center is the loom without the weaver in the center. The loom is made to hook into or onto the belt that is always worn by the Old Believer.

I am still studying soumack. i have been reading everything I can find on it by Marla Mallert. She has an incredible web site that is just stuffed with information. I also have used her book on woven structures as a resource. The other book that is very helpful in my studies of soumack is a book written by David Fraser-A Guide to Weft Twining... Soumack can be broken into two categories one is a construct that creates a ground fabric and the other floats over the ground fabric, but is always controlled directionally by the placement of the warps. On the tapestry list some one called it a surface design as opposed to a ground fabric. So my question is --can a tapestry that has soumack lines be entered into surface design competitions?

Chene's new kitten Rya/Wry and her facial markings and for the knot because he has tufts of very long white fur mixed with shorter black soft Persian hair. He is half Persian. Ryaa was raised with a doberman pincher. At this point he weighs close to 4 lbs and Chene' has topped out at a slight bit over 5 lbs. Pyewacket ways 13 lbs. Rya has huge feet and we expect him to be 2-3 times bigger then Chine' . Chene's still in shock that Rya doesn't behave like a cat should and run from his kingly majestic self.
I am not sure that Rya doesn't think that that Chene" is an over grown rat that's the way he treats him. They wrestle and chase each other all around and up down our two story house. Chene' is totally bent because already Rya can get up on things such as the bed with out being lifted up like he has to be lifted. It's pretty hilarious.

Yes we did see Turandot Saturday. It was live feed. We loved it. Still have never figured out why Calipha didn't find away to dump Turandot for her evil nasty ways and keep the Liu the slave. Put Liu was at least compensated by having the best lyrics and best arias. So maybe there is a little justice. The costuming and sets were wonderful and designed by the same designer and producer as the movie Romeo and Juliet in the very early 70's.

Okay, This seems to be enough for now!
kathe

I am finished two weeks later then I wanted to finish, but 7 of those days were tied up in very long silversmithing classes. It is so good to be finally done. I'll leave it on the loom for a few days and keep looking for threads and missing lines.

I really enjoy silversmithing-novice that I am. FFP purchased a smith torch so that I can work a little larger, if I want. Putting it into the studio is a big scary step for me. It seems like a really big step. Acetylene torches burn so much hotter the the small torches we have been using. The tank is larger-much larger and has many more pages of stuff one should be aware of and not do. In the culture and age that I grew up in so much of what I am doing now was not in the job description we were taught was the right thing to emulate-like using tools. I was supposed to marry a husband that would take care of that aspect of my life. I am married, but not to a man who can handle tools and or do any of the whole tool thing. So as I stumble on-hopefully- I won't blow up the studio or remove a finger or two in the process of learning. The next step is to buy a Fordham grinder before I wear out my Dremel-another step up. BUT, again as always I am more interested in how I can apply and combine the silver designs with tapestry. I am such a beginner!!! The next snaps are the pieces I have designed in class with Don Norris when he comes to Albany. With the exception of one pennant that is a piece I did on my own that contains a piece of broken china from my favourite set of dishes that I love. It seems the odder the shape the more I love the design. I have never gravitated to or felt the pull of using small oval stones.

In another day, hopefully, I will be ready to start my large format wool piece. I am not sure I can get it done by the deadline at the end of the month. I want it to submit it to the ATA exhibit. The deadline is 5 weeks away from now. I already have a smaller sewing thread piece to submit, but would like to do a wool piece just to see how my small format images will translate to a larger format and scale-again. I seem to be continually testing and focusing on how the images will apply in the two formats. Scale doesn't seem to be an issue. I know that the smaller the scale the more detail I can have in a given area/piece. There is a balance in creating the format size that sometimes has to do with the scale of the rib structure that I find unendingly interesting and fascinating. I have no desire to weave a large format piece in a small scale or a small format piece in large scale.

With the silver I can't seem to design small uncomplicated pieces. Every design I have done so far-not that there have been that many-has felt the need to be larger with more complicated elements not smaller. The opposite of my tapestry weaving with the exception that i keep adding more elements and complexity to the designs. Most of my silver pieces are bearably wearable because of the size of the piece. Too large to be practical in everyday settings. I guess it could be that I am not really wanting to design jewelery that will be worn or adorn the body, but architectural pieces-well-small boxes and reliquaries that can be closed, locked, used for concealment or concealing the tapestry images. Again for the same reasons that I put many of my tapestries in wooden boxes that could/can be locked. The nice thing about doing the boxes in silver is that I will be able to do my own boxes and not have to depend on someone else to do the work on the boxes I design. When I research metal working I find that I am focusing on pieces from the the 3rd century to the 14th century. Most of it is gold. I prefer silver. I wil probably be using some of the same elements, but in silver. Many of favourite are Russian, Viking and Celtic-not- surprisingly-American Indian. Another case of nuture vs. environment.


I am still researching soumack and its various structures that can be used in tapestry. This is a Turkish piece that uses a very interesting vertical and horizontal soumack to create a grid. The background surrounding the soumack is tapestry.

These are shadows from the City of Refuge that I think might make good a good soumack study. I took these while I was in Kona this last summer.

Cheers and all,

kathe

Almost there, but late again- once more.

Sometimes I just want to be done with a piece. It's usually the last week this happens. Invariably I get slowed down because something takes 4 times longer then it should. It leaves one wondering such mundanes things as why on earth did I put one hundred peddles in a chrysanthemum when maybe I could have it done it with 30 and just been done with the flower. I know because it felt needful. I need to reread Needful Things by Stephen King to reinforce the thought that needful things are not always what one should do or have. Somewhere in the process of setting my deadline to finish I forgot that I would need to soumack around each of the very small petals some only a warp or two wide. Somewhere I forgot that I wasn't just weaving a big shape that I could knock out in a day. Somewhere I forgot that bookkeeping in the studio would be full of personal and personnel challenges I needed to correct and deal with in the last week. Chene' would hate the neighbor cat that torments him and I would constantly need to retrieve him. In the city of Albany he can only bark 10 minutes in an hour. I am so ready for more rain that keeps him in. The poor thing hates having wet feet. Pye would decide it's cold and demand to share Chene's bed. He finds his baby

much easier to deal with and easier to share his bed with.

I forgot that finishes on dressers dry slowly in Oregon so everything is backed up waiting for it to dry-more chaos as things can't be put away. This stuff only seems to happen when I am almost done with a piece. Somewhere I forgot that the world goes on out side my studio while I am lost in the zone that I create when I weave where time doesn't exist. Only, unfortunately, the end of the day comes and I realize that life has gone on and I still am not finished. Okay-that's the end of the pity party. I wil, be happy I get to weave tomorrow that is enough for me!

These are some flowers- Asters- that I bought because I get so tired of the oranges and fall colours. Fall colours always seem over baked and dried out to me. These asters are an incredible blue red-very cool with cyan green leaves, totally intense. They will probably show up in the next tapestry I am weaving. I am hoping to capture the same intensity in wool. The next tapestry is probably going to be 2 feet by 5 feet. It's becoming more and more a study about how much of the intensity, detail and contained chaos of my small pieces in a large wool piece.

Pat Dunston kindly sent me 23 jpegs of a soumack rug. I received it a day ago and haven't even had a chance to thank her for the jpegs- yet. Ifn you read this Pat thank you, thank you so very much! The details are wonderful and I will be spending the next couple of evenings analyzing the technique from the front and back photo's that she sent me. It's larger or grosser in soumack size then the small sample I had in the last blog. Seeing both sides makes it easier to see how the technique is being done.



















The left side is the front side and the other is a detail of the back. One can see that each row of soumack is countered with a half pass. They only do the detail design in small areas with small floats. It also looks like they are using 2 different sizes of twiners. They are also using vertical soumack to do the verticals or perhaps and more likely just wraps rather then vertical soumack. It's all very intriguing.

Pat and I put up a file on the finefiberpress.com web page from the Shaped Tapestry book on weaving a box. Weaving and thinking about boxes are a memory that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, because I wove these boxes with my Grandmother. I was small and would sit on the old pop cooler weaving when it was so hot or sometimes in a corner by the bread that was brought in from Rogers Bakery every morning. What's very coincidental to the discussion that was going on the list was the fact that I will be teaching in February a workshop through the Corvallis Guild a workshop on making boxes. One of these days I'll ask Sarah Swett who taught her to weave boxes.


I have been thinking a lot about how boorish and disrespectful and just plain mean our culture has become. Often times I just tune things out because I can't deal or don't want to deal with the bad mean jokes and rude behaviour that is becoming so prevalent. I now have a better understanding of the roots of the problem thanks to this editorial peace. It makes me feel sad to think that perhaps we can't go back to a nicer kinder time. I have spent most of the week thinking about an oped article by Tim Rutten called The politics of Incivility-A Crash course on our descent into coarseness. It's copyrighted through the LA Times. It's an article well worth reading. To quote- "The growing culture of assertion and the death of persuasion, rather then the loss of civility, are what we ought to fear about our politics. Because there is no insistence on a common set of facts, we're perilously close to the point at which we stop talking past each other and the language of politics dissolves into mutually unintelligible dialects." It's well worth reading.
Guess that' all until next week. Hopefully I will be able to say my piece is finished!!!
Cheers and all!

This and that and always more!

One more week gone-or a little more. I am pretty sure I'll be done or very close to done by the end of the weekend. The most difficult thing to weave was the playing card. It has such a limited colour range-blue, red, yellow, tan for skin, and black. I am so used to having huge amounts of colour and technique to choose from. The second playing card is going much faster. It's only a jack, but having done the one this jack is going quicker. Bringing this in under 15 inches is going to be difficult. It feels like I am going to need another half inch. Hope not. Don't want it to be to big for Small Expressions entry in a year.
I am beginning to list all the ways I use soumack in my tapestries. I am also trying to collect all the various soumack techniques from every source I can fine. I have an Afghan rug and a Turkish rug to draw some techniques from. I am still trying to find a sample of a rug done wholly in soumack. I have seen this technique in museums but you can't touch and turn in a museum. Marla Mallett's book-Woven Structures is a great help, but not nearly enough. Her web site is also very good. Soumack needs to be thought of in two different ways-1. Structurally and the other as a design element. There are some soumacks that become the cloth body and others that are used as lines and dots to create the design. So the list would began with....next week.

I am hoping to have a rough draft of my class handouts ready in another month so that i can weave the sampler for my class I am teaching in San Jose. The notes are becoming so thick I am thing about writing a monograph on soumack as an addendum to my Lines in Tapestry.

Kathy S. got me to thinking about parks this is a photo of waterlilies at MT. Hebo an old CCC lake in Oregon that is a park that I love to watch the eagles learn to fish in. The last time I was there this baby eagle kept plopping way to low. It sounded like an explosian everytime he belly flopped into the lake.

Wednesday class at the assisted care home has now moved to Friday afternoons. Marge is doing a tapestry of sand dunes and a sunset for the ATA small format show. Evelyn has finished hers. Edith piece will be too big, but her work is always large. Her sail boat is a little further along then the picture of the piece in my blog. I fully expect it to take first prize in the county fair like her last one did of the barn that had been her family for a hundred or so years.
Evelyn's piece for the small format show is from a picture that she took from her backyard of Mt Hood in a fog bank at sunset. It's only 7 inches by 4.5 inches in wool and 10 epi. She did a nice job with the soumack branches and using the tiny hatches as landscape elements. She's very excited that there is a catalogue with the show and that it is a non juried show.



Dee and her fancy glasses slumped and weaving. She's now switching to a low warp loom. Should be fun to teach I sa seldom use la warp looms for tapestry. It's actually been about 10 or 15 years since I wove a tapestry on a low warp loom. Guess it was a good thing Rebecca was in my class this summer.









Everyone in this class is 90 years old or more. They are an amazing group to teach. I am so glad to have them back. I learn so much from teaching them. Edith has been having problems with her forgetfulness and Evie is recuperating from a fractured hip, but now they are all back.



Tommye's attempting to use krogbard in a tapestry brought back a lot of ideas that I have shelved for years. Things I want to try. I really want to use brocading in a tapestry to create designs in the background of a tapestry. I experimented with overshot and double weave-turning 10 epi into 5 epi. While I was back east I bought an overshot pillow and a rose overshot from coverlets. Xenakis many years ago wrote an article in the Prairie Home Companion on using overshot as tapestry. One removes the shots between the floats. Of course on a two harness loom this would be a whole lot of picking, but suppose one only did small areas of the overshot patterns. One needs to build the pattern higher to square it up because of the loss of the passes between the floating threads. The other thing I have been studying is a very old Norwegian weaving that was given to Marge when She married which is 75 years old or there abouts. Then I have an Oaxaca weaving with a float pattern that is really pick and pick and doubled up wefts. Perhaps, when I finish the next two pieces I will begin to experiment with them again. Like I said I am really interested in doing smallish areas of brocading. I have always thought it would be interesting to weave frames for tapestries.
Several weeks ago I took a a class in peyote beading which lead me to revisit loom beading something my grandmother used to do. The idea that lead me to this was again frames for my tapestries. I am also thinking about doing peyote stitch around the felt and twill tape surrounds of my Small format tapestries. Will be interesting to see where this leads. I think I can bead weave and do tapestry at the same time on the same warp so that there will be no sewing.
Time to end the blog. I think I may have gotten a little cared away, but I had fun writing and trying to add the pictures. The last shot is another sunset that I took in Durango from the college IWC was held.