ASIDE-I have decided that creating posts is a grand adventure into the unknown and ever changeable. My formatting never stays where it belongs, never does what it should. Buttons take over-such as the underlining button or the colour button. There is no stabilizing the format so every time one opens my blog page the layout is ever different ever shifting-much like life. So instead of fighting the whole thing and becoming frustrated. I have decided to accept what ever it gives me as an ever-changing piece of random performance art that changes with each performance.
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| "And He.." Last for the Shannock in my studio-finished 9inches by 24 inches maybe 11 inches if I decide to not turn under bottom Selve |
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| Fog and layers of ridges Great study for transparencies |
transparencies
Today and most of the week everything is or has been about waiting. Waiting to get stitches or at least the bandage off. Waiting for the loom to go.Waiting to buy tables and furniture for new looms and equipment. Waiting to warp two looms-again the bandages Waiting to leave for Arizona where I am teaching in Tuscon and Sun City. Waiting for packages. Waiting to finish handouts-still can’t type and I am definitely not going to do them on my i-phone. The screens way too small and the spelling variations can't be seen-at least by me. Waiting to start my new piece, because those other things I am waiting on might show up and interrupt. Waiting to take pictures of fog. I can’t reach the push buttons on the camera button on either camera. The slipping in and out of images into fog this morning was/is incredible. A real reason perhaps excuse for working with transparencies not that I need one. Sometimes reasons and logic help me to commit and get around to doing what I really want to do put have performance anxiety about whatever... I really want to design a landscape with ridges and trees and fog as a colour and technique study. I wish I could remember who wove a piece of trees in fog with silk and wool, fog and the softness and silence of fog. It was in a show I was in at least 10 years ago. It was such an incredible piece. Someone said it was stolen-so very bad. Been there done that.My typing and mouse usage leaves way too much to chance.
(This is just great. I have managed to hit another magic button that wants to save all of my typos and corrections. And I can't find it to turn it off. How embarrassing! Where is the sanctity of second chances without shame that the corrections one is able to do on the computer generally promote.)
Fortunately Most of the waiting is finite, just frustrating. Each minute seems a thousand minutes;lined up and disappearing into the future.
Waiting, waiting,waiting, more waiting.
Frustration, definition via the Internet; Part of Speech- Noun; synonyms: annoyance, bitter pill, blocking, bummer, circumvention, contravention, curbing, defeat, disgruntlement, dissatisfaction, downer, drag, failure, fizzle, foiling, grievance, hindrance, impediment, irritation, let down, non fulfillment, non success, obstruction, old one two, resentment, setback, unfullfilment, vexation. I really think it should have included the word waiting.
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| Surprise!! |
I need to create a hierarchy of waiting. Perhaps, I can organize what I am waiting for by the amount of time I need to wait for the waiting to end. waiting like Dante’’s levels of hell. I really need to reread the Inferno again just for the descriptions of hell. I am sure there must be something about hell, procrastination and waiting. Or, perhaps, surely, levels of limbo.
Limbo (Latin limbus, edge or boundary, referring to the "edge" of Hell) is a speculative idea.
Enough Diva-ness and word play for today.
WOW! What a difference a day can make!
Yesterdays attitude seems almost funny today. Well-today it’s humorous-Yesterday not so. Waiting is over and now I feel a since of urgency. I can use my hand again. Finally discovered the complexity of my hand surgery. I have 4 incisions that are healing just fine- 4 in the palm and one at the base of my thumb. Stings something fierce with the stitches out.
Poor Dr. Yao-my hand surgeon- I don’t think he understand my obsession with tapestry weaving. He doesn't know whether to be amused or…? about my weaving and my schedule, or worried about my unsterotypical ideas and work. At my age- and I don’t think that I am that old-I think he thinks a women at my age should be retiring and easing up. He always has this nonplussed look on his face when I discuss my tapestry weaving and how it affects my hands. If I don’t weave my hands stiffen up. O well, if I were in my 30’s I might feel the same way.exhibit
Last week was even better
I won Best of Show at the Blue Ridge Hand weavers Exhibit. Every time I have entered-my second time- I have been amazed at the quality of the work in the show. The pictures they mount on their website are lovely and intriguing. To top it all off Tommye Scanlin had donated one of her Kudzu pieces to a fund raising raffle they were holding. I never win anything. I feel buying raffle tickets is a donation-nothing more. I was so surprised when I won.
Had a nice surprise today. My Handwoven Magazine arrived and it actually has a good deal of tapestry in it. It also contains a picture of So Many Chances and the colour is fairly accurate. There is a very interesting article by Sara Swett on weaving lists. Sort of reminds me of the time I wove the scratch paper from my drafting table/ work table. See photo's somewhere below and out of place. They keep shifting.
I with drew So Sought after from Small Expressions. So all the prize winners moved up 1 level. I am still a little angry at HGA, but not for the reason one would think. Prizes, getting into shows and awards have never meant that much to me. After the last 3 decades of entering shows I view it like a game of chance. I don’t stake how I feel about my work or myself on games of chance. They are more of a puzzlement to be figured out and be amused about the results. I am angry because on January 4th I called the HGA office to ask for clarification of the rules- the rule about a piece having never been published. I wanted to know if they meant published anywhere or just in HGA publications. On their advice and reassurance that it just meant HGA publications I entered the piece. I would not have entered that piece into the exhibit if I had been given accurate information. I am not so dumb to think someone wouldn’t have noticed let alone the ethics of entering a piece knowing it broke the rules-so not me. Cheating destroys the game aspect of entering shows. The year before they took away my third prize because my framing was messed up in shipping. I use the letter in my classes when we discuss mounting, shipping, and entering exhibits. Good workmanship is important to the whole experience of a tapestry. They hung the piece, but hung it upside down. I just can’t seem to win with HGA. I admit that the frame problem was mine, but still they should have hung it right side up. I have been in Small Expressions 13 or 14 times since 1988- 20 or so years. O, well-asi es la vida de los esclavos-gr! Lol! It’s taken them until about yesterday to remove it from their web page! So now I get to answer 4 months of questions about what happened. Enuff!
On to better more important stuff.
I did finish the piece on the Shannock. I finished the sample, scrap, portion of "And he..." I am just not sure how to define this piece at this particular point in time or if I'll ever attempt to show it or sale it-after all it is only a portion of the whole. The piece itself is 9 inches by 24 inches. I still haven't decided how to finish it. Leave my name or turn it under. I love the over dyed indigo colour. Pat dyed the ton of the ugly yellow stuff I had purchased because it was cheap and i could afford it into a beautiful Indigo colour.Other then cheapness i have no idea what I thought I could do with all of that ugly yellow. I, also, need to decide how I am going to handle the two feet of selvedge on each side. The only thing I seemed to be able to do last week was weave with my hand all wrapped up. Now that I woven the sample no matter what the reason I wove the scrap, but mostly because I couldn't let go of the loom with an unfinished piece on it. (Interesting the spell-check brings up love when I click on wove. ) I can hardly wait to start the small format/ small scale version of the design. It will be half the size this “and he…” was intended to be.I have fallen in love with the colours.
I love the colours in the wing, but I did learn that it would have been much better to have woven the design the other direction. I wouldn’t have had to work so hard getting rid of the stair steps on the feathers.
Learned not to use crosheen on the lace bits. It worms against the wool and even worse against the embroidery flosses.
I learned that I didn’t need bobbins. All I needed was to be able to hook the wefts with my fingers and pull. Valuable information for those weaving with problem hands that i teach. It does make one work harder to keep the weft loopies from forming in the half passes. There really is a very good reason for using bobbins as opposed to loose wefts hanging and butterflies. The bobbin helps control the tension of the weft threads as they are woven and come off the bobbin. The bobbins also allow the weaver to control the twist and the closeness of the colour as it is laid in a pass. This then allows you to twist the weft bundle and change the density of the colour in mélanges and chenes. I need to do some samples of this colour density thing happening.
Another lesson that I learned is that different rayon embroidery flosses weave differently. DMC rayon weaves thicker and has an almost nappy feel. The ratio is also different. DMC needs 4 strands instead of the 6 that Coates and Clark’s need at 20 epi. At 10 epi it needs to be double that. Coats and Clark's rayon-especially in the black gets a flake or peel of something light grey when you weave at 20 epi. It’s a little like dandruff or dry skin. The same reason I don’t use quilting thread as warp, but buttonhole twist or dual craft thread for warp at 20 epi.
I really had fun with the gold in the scroll. I learned that filigree and loops need to be larger in scale in order to allow the detail to be seen at 5-10 feet where the best optical blending occurs in the colour when weaving with wool at 10 epi. On the other hand at 20 epi the scroll work can be much more delicate and should be much more delicate in scale, because people stand so close to the small work. They actually have a tendency to stand closer than necessary to get the optical blending. One would think that if the optimum at 10 epi is 10 feet then it should be 5 feet for 20 epi. BUT, people don’t do that with small format/small scale work, People stand a foot or two from the work.
SO for my designs the colour blending needs to be finer with more bobbin blendings that are more closely related to get the maximum effect of the optical blending.
I ended up doing a lot of single wraps while working on the inner turns of the scroll. Next time I think I’ll make the scroll twice as big so I have two warp threads instead of one warp thread. Live and learn. This gave me a lot of practice of sharing warp turns and shared warps. It’s fairly easy to hide the interlocks and weft turns if one remembers to watch the direction of the turn around loop or the direction it goes around the warp. The turns and wraps need to extra dense so that they can pack down and help hide the sharing and the turns. The direction of the loops isn’t always consistent in which colour looks right in the sharing. It depends on if you are working with a hill or a valley thread. Turns and loop backs done on valley threads are easier to hide because the next turn or wrap drops down into the valley and covers the previous turning thread. Doing almost anything in a valley is easier to cover because the next half pass is a hill thread drops down and covers. In vertical soumack it works in the same way. Drop the turning thread onto a valley warp and the next pass of weft will cover the turn-unless your working the weft with too tight or a warp tension too loose and that’s a whole other problem.
The other study that I am doing with the top of the selvedge is experimenting with soumack and twined edges which I will then braid when I cut off the piece, which should be tomorrow. The loom is ready to go with good karma!!!
(This is just great. I have managed to hit a magic button that wants to save all of my typos and corrections. How embarrassing! Where is the sanctity of second chances without shame that the corrections one is able to do on the computer generally promote.)
Well as I began. It's all a great adventure...
cheers for now.
Obviously written by someone who doesn’t mind waiting.
Enough Diva-ness and word play for today.
WOW! What a difference a day can make!
Yesterdays attitude seems almost funny today. Well-today it’s humorous-Yesterday not so. Waiting is over and now I feel a since of urgency. I can use my hand again. Finally discovered the complexity of my hand surgery. I have 4 incisions that are healing just fine- 4 in the palm and one at the base of my thumb. Stings something fierce with the stitches out.
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| What Spider Women could have told Ikotomi and Icarus. |
Last week was even better
I won Best of Show at the Blue Ridge Hand weavers Exhibit. Every time I have entered-my second time- I have been amazed at the quality of the work in the show. The pictures they mount on their website are lovely and intriguing. To top it all off Tommye Scanlin had donated one of her Kudzu pieces to a fund raising raffle they were holding. I never win anything. I feel buying raffle tickets is a donation-nothing more. I was so surprised when I won.
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| Tommye Scanlin. size 20inches by 22inches. Image stolen from Blue Ridge Hand weavers exhibit web site. My thanks for its use |
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| Broken feather/ Broken promise |
On to better more important stuff.
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| Scroodle scrap paper from Maze Craze 1990 |
Learned not to use crosheen on the lace bits. It worms against the wool and even worse against the embroidery flosses.
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| Maze Craze late 1990 |
Another lesson that I learned is that different rayon embroidery flosses weave differently. DMC rayon weaves thicker and has an almost nappy feel. The ratio is also different. DMC needs 4 strands instead of the 6 that Coates and Clark’s need at 20 epi. At 10 epi it needs to be double that. Coats and Clark's rayon-especially in the black gets a flake or peel of something light grey when you weave at 20 epi. It’s a little like dandruff or dry skin. The same reason I don’t use quilting thread as warp, but buttonhole twist or dual craft thread for warp at 20 epi.
 |
| Remembering spring as fall happens |
SO for my designs the colour blending needs to be finer with more bobbin blendings that are more closely related to get the maximum effect of the optical blending.
I ended up doing a lot of single wraps while working on the inner turns of the scroll. Next time I think I’ll make the scroll twice as big so I have two warp threads instead of one warp thread. Live and learn. This gave me a lot of practice of sharing warp turns and shared warps. It’s fairly easy to hide the interlocks and weft turns if one remembers to watch the direction of the turn around loop or the direction it goes around the warp. The turns and wraps need to extra dense so that they can pack down and help hide the sharing and the turns. The direction of the loops isn’t always consistent in which colour looks right in the sharing. It depends on if you are working with a hill or a valley thread. Turns and loop backs done on valley threads are easier to hide because the next turn or wrap drops down into the valley and covers the previous turning thread. Doing almost anything in a valley is easier to cover because the next half pass is a hill thread drops down and covers. In vertical soumack it works in the same way. Drop the turning thread onto a valley warp and the next pass of weft will cover the turn-unless your working the weft with too tight or a warp tension too loose and that’s a whole other problem.
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| Chene's car seat |
(This is just great. I have managed to hit a magic button that wants to save all of my typos and corrections. How embarrassing! Where is the sanctity of second chances without shame that the corrections one is able to do on the computer generally promote.)
Well as I began. It's all a great adventure...
cheers for now.
2 comments:
Love the fog photo! It would make a good study of transparency in tapestry!
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