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

My favourite Student-Marge Crueger and my weekly progress Report

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

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

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

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

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

My progress report for the week

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

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

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

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

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

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