Rebecca Mezoff, Tapestry Artist

Etiquette

2012-01-22T08:00:00.013-07:00

I found a book the other day which I immediately realized I had to bring home with me. Rather incongruously it was on top of an Atkins diet book in the occupational therapy cubby at the hospital. The book is this one:

Original edition was 1922. This is the 11th edition, 95th printing, published in 1965 (Emily herself died in 1960 at the age of 86). There are many revisions I can imagine happened between 1922 and 1965, most along the lines of "in this age of women's equality" which inevitably comes right before something like this:

"She who changes her dress and fixes her hair for her husband's homecoming is sure to greet him with greater charm than she who thinks whatever she happens to have on is good enough. The very fact of looking more attractive makes one feel less tired and therefor more charming and better company." (671)

Perhaps she has a point, but it is a good thing I don't have a husband because mostly now that I am almost 40 I subscribe to Tina Fey's, when you're 40 you get to take your pants off when you get home (See her book Bossypants which I am going to shelve next to Etiquette from now on). I am fairly certain the woman pictured below (Emily Post herself) did not put on sweatpants when she got home from work:

I was surprised to find the variety of situations for which we need to know the social rules. (And I have to mention here that there is an entire chapter entitled, "An audience with the Pope.")

"Dressing for television: You can always decide on appropriate clothing for your television appearance by calling and asking the advice of the producer..." (121) Do you think Bjork did this when she chose the swan outfit for the 2001 Oscars?

For when you go on a trip: "Cancel milk delivery.... Have all laundry and cleaning delivered before you leave so that it is not left hanging outside for days or weeks.... Never give your travel plans or dates to your local newspaper in advance...." (130) (I can see it now, Tapestry Artist Leaves Studio Empty for 6-month Walk from Mexico to Canada: Locals ask if she is clinically insane or just a little nuts.)

"Whenever a damask or linen cloth is used, the middle crease must be put on so that it is an absolutely straight and unwavering line down the exact center from head to foot...." (178) Does that mean I have to use an iron?

Since I am getting married this summer and I was curious about what Emily Post had to say on this rather monumental event, I flipped pretty quickly to the wedding section. By the time I read the second paragraph, I was convinced Miss Post was not going to be of much help to me:

"Let it be said at the outset that our discussion of wedding plans will include a complete description of the most elaborate wedding possible. Not because more than a very few will want or be able to carry out every detail, but because only then can the pattern be complete. In other words, it is important to explain all possible details of perfection so that you can follow as many as you find pleasing and practical for you." (339)

Being a bit of a perfectionist myself, my heart sank a little as I turned the page... In fact I flipped through the whole chapter and couldn't find the section labeled, "Lesbian weddings". (Certainly it was just an oversight on Miss Post's part, after all, she didn't know Harvey Milk, Stonewall, or the successful gay wedding market Vermont has staged since they started letting same-sex couples get hitched in 2000 (civil unions, marriages in 2009)--brilliant way to increase tourism, don't you think?).

And by the time she started talking about "eight or ten bridesmaids, flower girls, pages, and a ring bearer" I was feeling a little ill. Did you know that black fruitcake is traditional for a wedding reception, and, Emily adds, most expensive. (350) You have to have flowers including various corsages and arrangements, canopys, special carpets, and Wagner's Lohengrin for the wedding procession (HELL no). That bit of information may come in handy some day at a cocktail party however ("[a cocktail party] can be the answer to a busy housewife's prayer", 215). So just remember, "Here Comes the Bride" is actually part of a Wagner opera with some less-than-romantic plot twists.

The number one question I've gotten about my wedding after, "When and where" is, "What are you wearing?" I really could use some help from Emily Post on this one, but alas chapter 44, The clothes for the wedding party did nothing to enlighten me.

"At her first wedding a bride suitably wears a dress of white and a bridal veil whether she be sixteen or forty!" (360)

Firstly, I will be just three weeks from forty (got in under the wire, eh?) when I get married and I resent the implication that I'm almost over the marriageable hill and secondly, I look horrible in white. I'm a pasty caucasian of European descent who sunburns easily and freckles cutely not at all. What I really want to know is is this a question a heterosexual bride gets asked or is it just the "lesbian wedding" phenomenon that makes the question pop out first. For the record, I have absolutely no idea what I am wearing, but I may try to get Tina Fey to help me out.

Emily Post is all about moderation and not making a spectacle of oneself. "Nothing could be more inappropriate than the bride and her attendants coming down the aisle of the church made up as though they were in a chorus line in a musical comedy." (361) I guess we'd better leave the queer contingent off the invitation list.

Please keep in mind, in the words of Emily Post, "If you know anyone who is gay, beguiling, and amusing, you will, if you are wise, do everything you can to make [her] prefer your house and your table to any other, for where [she] is, the successful party is also." (38, but I may have changed the pronouns a little) I will expect your dinner invitation to be engraved on a white card in a proportion of 3 units in height to 4 units in width preferably with your family crest embossed on the invitation. Please see chapter 52 of Etiquette for further details.

I suspect this book will be a great source of entertainment for many years to come and I have no intention of returning it to the cubby in which it was found. I will, however, leave the Atkins diet book in situ.

Post, Emily. Etiquette. New York: Funk & Wagnell's Company, Inc. 1965.

Tales of a Traveling Weaver Chapter 5; Weaving patterns...

2012-01-20T08:00:00.001-07:00

Montezuma Valley (where Cortez is) from Mesa Verde

Last week we spent some time at Mesa Verde National Park. I would have stayed longer but they kicked us out at dark.

Weave for us a garment of brightness;

may the warp be the white light of morning;

may the weft be the red light of evening;

may the fringe be the falling rain;

may the border be the standing rainbow.

-Tewa song

The patterns in the stone walls are fascinating to me. I have used ideas and feelings from these walls in my Emergence series of tapestries, especially Emergence I and Emergence V (links to photos of those pieces). Repetition is important. I have resisted it in many places in my life. But repetition teaches us something. It is comforting, and we learn from it. These walls are beautiful.

A wall at Lowry Pueblo, Canyon of the Ancients National Monument

Sunset at Lowry Pueblo, Canyon of the Ancients National Monument

Square Tower House, Mesa Verde National Park

Lowry Pueblo wall, Canyon of the Ancients National Monument

Cliff Palace, Mesa Verde National Park

Spruce Tree House, Mesa Verde National Park

La Plata Mountains from Mesa Verde

The great housing search ends...

2012-01-18T19:21:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my intrepid (and very pregnant) sister and her valiant husband, we have found a suitable house for our tenure in the San Luis Valley. I am happy to report that it is not only a significant upgrade from the rental described in this earlier post, but it is actually a cheerful, sunny place where I can see the stars and dream about hiking long trails and perhaps weave a few magic carpets or even tapestries.

Of course one of the drawbacks of the San Luis Valley of Colorado is the extreme cold in the winter. Despite the solar gain from the south-facing windows, we are going to be paying much more in propane for the next few months.

Ice on inside of the windows

My time in Cortez is concluding. Cortez is a great place to visit, especially if you are interested in the Anasazi/Ancient Puebloan cultures. I could explore the canyons and ruins here for the rest of my life. But for other reasons, I am moving on.

Emily came home with these beans the other day--grown and packaged just down the road... hopefully they were not grown by the original Anasazi however.

Snowy fields near Dove Creek, CO--one place I go in my home health travels

And I have a new weaving buddy--Thanks Grace!
Ernie is egging me along on my commission. I'm not quite halfway done and now realize I will have to move the loom with the tapestry partly finished. This would never be my first choice, but in this case, I have to move Feb 4th and as I still have to work approximately 96 hours (5,760 minutes) between now and then, I may not finish the last 24 inches of weaving before Cortez is but a shadow in my rear-view mirror.

Knitting a new year

2012-01-07T21:49:00.000-07:00

I have been working on various knitting projects. Yes, I'm still weaving and the new Emergence series piece is moving along (see photo near bottom). But occasionally other fiber that is less serious and takes less concentration needs some time.

There was the wee little elf sock... and since Dobby died in the last Harry Potter movie, it was destined to be the new baby's (not mine, my sister's) first Christmas tree ornament.

And the scarf I made for my brother-in-law's brother's girlfriend... (yarn came from Germany--well, the first ball I got in Germany when I was there in 2010 and the second I had to have Conni Gardella match and bring back for me when I didn't have enough to finish the scarf)

Christmas was full of snow adventure, cozy cabins, and a lot of family. My sister (who is now 8 months pregnant) went all out and knitted 5 women French Press slippers. They are felted and they are fantastic.

And here is what I use mine for...

The floor in this little rental house in Cortez must have zero insulation in it because my feet are always cold. These felted slippers keep them warm and I can feel the treadles through them. (I am approaching the halfway point on this sixth Emergence piece. I hope to speed it up soon, but tapestry resists hurry. Perhaps that is the point.)

As for my travels through Montezuma County, CO...
This small valley still has signs like this:

Those aren't signs to towns, they are signs to individual people's houses.

Housing Humor... the trials of a traveling weaver...

2011-12-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

We're moving to the San Luis Valley in a month and need a place to live. I asked my sister to go and check out a property in the valley which, admittedly, was surprisingly inexpensive for a "furnished" house... and this was the result in email form after their visit:

Subject: "Call me after reading this list of rousing endorsements..."

1. It is wedged between a cemetery, a utility company storage yard, 2 trailers, and a highway.
(at this point I am starting to suspect the viewing did not go well. The spare tire in the front yard also doesn't speak well of the property)

2. It stinks. Kinda bad.

(I once rented a small house in Sparks, NV that REEKED when I was looking at the place, and I convinced myself that the stench would go away... thus began 3 months of fighting with the landlord to replace the cat-pee saturated carpet and stop my perpetually tearing eyes. I think my co-workers were convinced I had taken up residence at the city dump... so this endorsement furthered my apprehension about the place. By the way, after a few days the cat pee stench which had also saturated the floorboards worked its way through the new carpet and I was forced to move out.)

3. The landlord said, "if any of these appliances break or are damaged, it is your responsibility to repair or replace them. They come AS-IS." Keep in mind that the furniture is mainly things that disgruntled tenants left behind (probably b/c that was cheaper than the dump), and the appliances were state of the art in 1963. Fortunately someone thought to clean them somewhere around 1986.

(Unfortunately our furniture is in storage in NM and I was hoping to find a furnished house, but this isn't exactly what I was looking for in the sectional sofa department)

4.He said the electric would be around $75 a month (for lights????) The rest is propane. The electric is metered with the adjacent trailer, so you have to kind of trust that he's making up the right amount for the electric bill.

(Never trust a landlord. I just spent three years drinking bacteria-infested water and suffering the gut-wrenching consequences... and didn't realize it until I was back on city water--I'll be paying the whole block's electricity and propane will be $500/month)

5. He said he'd take $375 per month for 3 months (to help offset the cost of the propane?) and after that, $425, which includes $25 per month for the dog.

(I am not sure exactly how my yellow lab could possibly damage this particular house)

6.The maintenance & cleanliness standards for your house in Cortez were MUCH higher than here. Though this place is perhaps slightly bigger.

(Keep in mind that when moving into the aforementioned Cortez house, we had to scrub it down, especially the kitchen. This place probably doesn't have a clean layer under sticky rings in the kitchen cabinets.)

7. It is a LOT better than living on the street (see-- I found something nice to say about it). Also it is fairly bright inside, and I'm pretty sure that no one has ever been murdered in the bathtub, but that doesn't necessarily mean you'd want to get in there naked.

(I'm not convinced she has any grounds to be so sure about the murder thing.)

8. The BOUG1 asks me to remind you that it kinda stinks.

(pregnant ladies being especially susceptible to stench)

9. Then my sister called her realtor and emphasized that we're professionals, and that translates into certain standards... I hope that is true. My track record isn't very good actually, so perhaps Emily should pick the next house. Besides the cat pee house in Sparks, NV and the water-disaster house in Velarde, NM, there were these housing adventures:

the house in LaGrande, OR that had a bedroom I took one look in and vowed not to use it for anything except storing my car topper (and I checked it for varmits before I put it back on the car). That was the same house that had oil heat which my traveling company didn't know needed to be filled and I spent an entire eastern OR winter weekend huddled in front of a small space heater in the bathroom.
the trailer in Chama, NM which took an entire bottle of Lysol in the kitchen before I would even put a carton of orange juice in the refrigerator... and I kept ALL my food in the refrigerator. The rest of the cupboards had copious evidence of recent mice visitation.
the house north of Reno that was infested with packrats--they chewed my boyfriend's ultralight airplane to shreds in what seemed like days and weren't too nice to my car either... actually, in retrospect perhaps that was the real cause of all the problems I had with my Ford Tempo...
the trailer in Dulce, NM where the pipes froze repeatedly in the -20 degree weather which the school (who owned it) refused to fix thus making me live in a casino hotel for the next 6 months surrounded by cigarette smoke and cursed with unuseably slow internet... but at least the casino had beds to sleep in.
the basement apartment in Fort Collins, CO where I thought my piano would fit down the outside stairs, but turns out it couldn't make the corner so the piano guys had to take it down (and eventually up) the steepest, narrowest set of stairs I've ever seen... oh, and there weren't any windows either.
the lovely adobe apartment in El Rito, NM that was so small, my brother-in-law had to come and put my bed 4 feet in the air so I could store all my yarn underneath it. I got used to eating dinner either at the loom or standing at the kitchen sink.
the cabin on the side of Mt. Blanca in CO without heat or running water where I had to pee in a bucket because the composting toilet was too small for all that liquid (probably from too much beer drinking to survive the -20 degree winters)
the house I shared with the vet student and her herpetologist boyfriend where I lived in the basement... also the home of assorted tortoises, turtles, snakes, iguanas, a pair of alligators, a cat named Louise, revolving rescued kittens at least three of which died in the year I was there, three dogs, and half of the live crickets that got out of the various tanks and ended up on my pillow (I slept on the floor in graduate school)... I loved the vet student and the dogs, but the rest of the crew, especially Louise and the boyfriend, I could really have done without.
the off-the-grid luxury log cabin 12 miles up a mountain near Monte Vista, CO which I had to buy a 4x4 Toyota truck to access in the winter (mongo snow drifts) and which had absolutely no heat in the bathroom--and no shower... so I rigged up a bucket shower in the sunroom which was actually a pleasant 75 degrees on a sunny winter afternoon. Please don't tell my landlady...

Whew. Maybe I should just give up now. I have a horrible track record when it comes to rentals. Emily, it is your game from here on out because I definitely don't want to add this particular house to the list.

____________________________

1. Baby of Unknown Gender

Tales of a Traveling Weaver, Chapter 4: Reindeer and such

2011-12-24T14:54:00.000-07:00

There are many ways for Santa to get around...

If you live in Dolores it looks like the reindeer pull the Galloping Goose. I'm not sure how they get to places without tracks, but perhaps they have a way. (This Galloping Goose #5 carried mail, freight, and passengers in the San Juans from 1933 to 1949. It was easier to maintain than a steam engine... though clearly now it needs reindeer help for mobility.)

In Cortez apparently they have substituted reindeer with Toyotas:

A wee tiny elf left his stocking at my house. I hope his toes aren't cold.

Regardless of how Santa gets around in your town, I hope that you have a wonderful holiday weekend with your loved ones.

Tales of a Traveling Weaver, Chapter 3: Signs of the times

2011-12-22T08:00:00.001-07:00

This is where I am headed to finish off my Christmas shopping:

The relative price of things...

We use words about weaving and tapestry all the time. The Methodists in Cortez even put it on their sign:

It doesn't take too much to control Cassy these days...

The liquor stores here are quite creative!

Say the name fast and run the words together...

This one is in Dove Creek which is just a few miles from the Utah border...

And this is my friendly corner liquor store...

And as always:

Tales of a Traveling Weaver, Chapter 2: Ancestral Puebloan Weaving

2011-12-19T08:26:00.001-07:00

I woke up this morning, still in Cortez, CO (at the start of week number 10 of at least 16). I asked Emily what I could do for her today and she said, "I want you to get medieval on that tapestry." This is not only a testament to her dedication to me having weaving time, but a statement of how much more media-saavy she is than me. Apparently that is a reference to the 1994 Quentin Tarantino film with John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Uma Thurman blockbuster Pulp Fiction--which of course, being a bit media-challenged, I never saw. It is also a reference to the medieval tapestry tradition. I may have to add this phrase to my lexicon, though perhaps I should watch Pulp Fiction first.

One thing I have greatly enjoyed about Cortez is that it is right in the middle of a huge archeological area. It is estimated that this area around Cortez probably had a higher population in the ancestral puebloan times than it does today. There are literally archeological sites everywhere. The Canyon of the Ancients National Monument is a place with sites scattered all over this area, but they do have a visitor's center near the newly-created (at least relative to 1200 AD) McPhee Reservoir.

In the visitors center they talk a little bit about weaving and they have this practice loom set up with fairly good instructions on how to weave plain weave.

Before the Ancestral Puebloans had cotton, they wove sandals and bags out of yucca.

Fragments of woven cotton have been found--they were growing cotton.

Cotton woven fiber fragment

They also have a fascinating replica of a pit house which depicts dwellings from one of the Basketmaker eras.

In further recent ancestral puebloan weaving explorations, you can see holes from looms in the tufa caves at Bandalier (see holes on floor and beams from ceiling)...

And over Thanksgiving I took a trip to Hubbell Trading Post National Monument in Ganadao, Arizona and Canyon de Chelly National Monument near Chinle, AZ. Hubbell's has a visitor's center which employs Navajo weavers and you can go there and watch them weaving intricate rugs. It is also still an operating trading post. You can pick up a coke, some feed for your chickens, a skein or two of local churro yarn, or in their rug room, a beautiful Navajo rug.

We also stopped for the traditional Thanksgiving tour of Canyon de Chelly. This is a rather poor photo of Spider Rock. My understanding of the Navajo creation stories is shaky at best, but one rendition is that Spider Woman made her home on top of Spider Rock. Spider Woman taught the Dine ancestors to weave on a loom. There are references to either Spider Woman or her husband Spider Man weaving the universe on a large loom. I love this image--the world starting with a weaving... or the act of weaving.

And finally, I just got the latest Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center newsletter and want to note that a Tiwa/Piro Pueblo weaver, Louie Garcia is going to be teaching some classes there. Our Southwestern weaving traditions are well saturated with Navajo and Hispanic weaving, but rarely do I see anyone talking about puebloan weaving. Here is a YouTube video where Louie is talking about his work. He talks about breath and spirit in every weaving and the spiritual aspect of pueblo culture. It looks like he is teaching two classes at EVFAC in January and February.

(Also note that my colleague Cornelia Theimer Gardella is teaching some classes at EVFAC in the spring and I highly recommend her! She is teaching a color theory class with dyeing--so those students of mine who are asking about learning to dye and about color, consider taking this class. Check the EVFAC website for details or Cornelia's website as she is also teaching at Ghost Ranch.)

Maybe this is why I keep going back to these ancient sites:

Tales of a Traveling Tapestry Weaver, Chapter 1

2011-12-18T15:00:00.001-07:00

So I am currently in roaming mode. I miss my big loom and my shelves full of yarn, but it is interesting to experience a new place for 3-4 months. I am in Cortez, Colorado at the moment which near Four Corners--southwestern Colorado on the Great Sage Plain. Between hours of working at the hospital here and weaving on a commission, I have been doing a little exploring.

A trip to Sand Canyon Pueblo which is part of Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, revealed a beautiful canyon full of snow on the north-facing slopes and dry and warm on the south-facing slopes. The pueblo was built into the end of a side-canyon with full southern exposure.

This pueblo has been partially excavated, but then filled back in to preserve the site. You have to use your imagination to see where the multitude of kivas and walls were.

Hiking down the north slope of a beautiful canyon.

View south from the Sand Canyon Trail to McElmo Canyon and Sleeping Ute Mountain.

These new and wonderful places have become my inspiration. Walking lets me think and imagine and settle into the land.

Below photo: sun setting behind the mesa at Sand Canyon Pueblo. The magic of these places is indescribable. Go out and walk, look around you, and listen for the older voices.

Who Does She Think She Is?

2011-12-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

The elephant in the room is a big one. Women artists. We still are severely under-represented, underpaid, undersold.

Tapestry and fiber art in general is regarded by our culture as "women's work" (whatever that means!), and "women's work" is still, in 2011, not valued. How, in this climate, can tapestry be understood as a valuable, researched, academically supported, and economically viable art form if it is considered "women's work"?

These questions come from a film I watched recently called Who does she think she is? It is a documentary about successful women artists and their struggle to have their art recognized in the midst of the rest of their lives which include children and family and a lot of "women's work". If you are a woman artist, please watch this movie (and thanks to Lyn Hart, tapestry artist extraordinaire, for telling me about it). It was released in 2009 by Mystic Artists Film Productions. Go to the website at www.whodoesshethinksheis.net to see a trailer.

Emergence V: The Center Place

2011-11-14T08:09:00.001-07:00

Emergence V: The Center Place, 44 x 44 inches, hand-dyed wool tapestry
photo: James Hart

This is the fifth piece in my Emergence series.
Here are links to the others (or you could just look at my website HERE to see them all):

Emergence I --the first of the series, helped along by some good solid design advice from James Koehler and woven while apprenticing with him in 2008-2009. It was in American Tapestry Biennial 8 as well as the Bauhaus show in Albuquerque in 2010. This tapestry is now at Weaving Southwest in Taos, NM

Emergence II --This piece was in the Bauhaus project (Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus) show at Michaeliskirche in Erfurt, Germany. From there it went to Weaving Southwest in Taos where it was bought by a college in Colorado for their permanent collection.

Emergence III --This piece was in Fiber Celebrated 2011 at the Intermountain Weaver's Conference in Durango, CO in July 2011 and is now hanging at Weaving Southwest in Taos waiting for someone to take it home.

Emergence IV --This piece is at Weaving Southwest also.

This piece started coalescing in my mind when I was at Chaco Canyon the day James Koehler died. You can see what I wrote about that time HERE.

The feeling of expanding horizon in the desert southwest is important to me. Chaco Canyon is a place where the sky is huge and I am but a small observer of the shifting universe.

The questions about ancient people and the artifacts and unanswered stories they left behind are also endlessly intriguing to me. This piece is full of questions.

Tapestry weaving and the nature of an art form

2011-11-13T08:35:00.000-07:00

I picked up Joan Potter Loveless's book, Three Weavers again this morning (of all things, I had to buy another copy of it because mine is buried in a storage locker, but I needed this particular book and bookfinder.com almost always pulls through). I had forgotten that she studied with Anni Albers at Black Mountain College (and took color classes with Josef Albers). Perhaps this book should have been on the Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus reading list.

Here is a quote from page 17 that got me thinking of other aspects of tapestry weaving and more questions about why contemporary tapestry is most often not considered an art form by the larger art world (though historical and traditional tapestry often are--why is this?).

Even though, in one sense, the "evolution" of handweaving can be seen as a progression toward more ease, more efficiency, with the development of equipment and tools that accomplish these things, this is not a true picture of what weaving is all about. Weaving in the present is also, and most importantly, all of the minute, separate, weaving occurrences that have gone on in the past, all of the particular, individual, bits and pieces that have been woven in the the past by people sitting at looms or simply twining fibers into some form. The satisfaction that we derive from being involved in a piece of weaving is exactly the same satisfaction that weavers always have derived from their work. Our work is no better; often it is not nearly as good. Weaving is not involved with the concept of progress; it is much more concerned with holding still the moment, with savoring and with marking it, with this still very simple participation with the fibers that we find around us.

Is this a common perspective among tapestry weavers? (and keep in mind that this book was published in 1992). I feel that meditative aspect of weaving almost every time I sit at the loom and I believe other weavers do also. Is there a fundamental rift between the glittery, monied art world and the slower universe of the tapestry weaver that we just can't overcome? Probably this is just one very small part of the problem of tapestry's place in the larger art world. After all, I imagine all artists have to find that meditative place when they are creating and thus experience this glaring difference of realities when faced with marketing and showing their work. But are tapestry weavers particularly inhibited by the slow plodding nature of our work when it comes to marketing and professional issues?

(photos Canyon of the Ancients National Monument, November 12, 2011)

A traveling tapestry studio

2011-11-10T19:58:00.000-07:00

I am in a bit of flux.
A state of flux (which reminds me of Back to the Future I'm afraid... which tells you about when I was a teenager) which is unlikely to resolve soon. So for the present moment and until at least January, I am living in Cortez, Colorado. We were hoping for Durango, but it turns out Cortez is okay. It is surrounded by mountains (Sleeping Ute, Mesa Verde, La Platas) and isn't all that different from the small NM towns I'm used to--except there seems to be a lot more white folks here... that kind of throws me off a little some days. I'm working here as a traveling occupational therapist (which just means that the job is temporary and someone else finds me housing).

So my studio has to be a little bit more portable. This is my Macomber workshop loom which found a place in my car (and many things had to be rejected so the looms could fit in--my car is small! But who needs extra shoes anyway?). This loom, or so she says, was my grandmother's first loom. She is a little creaky now and I'm not at all pleased with the lack of very tight tension (okay, it is pretty darn good for a little folding loom, but it isn't the Harrisville!) and the tiny beater, but overall she weaves a straight fell and creates a nice tapestry cloth. What can you expect from a loom that is at least 50 years old? In fact, Grandma insists that this was Mrs. Macomber's own loom which she sold my grandmother upon request. I never quite bought that story, but have no way to verify it, so perhaps Grandma is correct. My grandmother gave it to me years ago with 4 harnesses in the 8 harness castle. The last time I worked as a traveling OT (2003-4), I added 4 more harnesses to it, so now it has 8. I just called up the Macombers (they don't have a website, don't even look), gave them the serial number of the loom conveniently etched on a metal plate attached to the loom, and they undoubtedly sifted through some dust-covered index card records, found the needed parts (which they still make--can you believe it?) and shipped me off 4 more harnesses and the necessary treadles. Amazing. What will happen when those guys bite it? Macomber lovers everywhere will cry long and hard, that's what.

Nothing can replace my Harrisville rug loom. But for now I am weaving on the little looms. I've just put the warp on the Macomber for a commission in the Emergence series, and my trusty Mirrix is waiting in the wings in case I get desperate for something somewhat less wonky. Cassy was trying to help me warp, but I ended up with a big threading error, so perhaps she wasn't as helpful as she could have been... you know, if she had gone out for pizza for us instead or something.

Drawing the cartoon on mylar for the next piece on the coffee table in the little rental house. Turns out coffee tables of this shape are great for a 16 X 48 inch piece.

That is the whole studio at the moment... guess I'm lucky to have some smaller looms to cart around... and a job too.

And here is the studio I left behind, empty (well, except for the yellow lab--but I didn't leave her there).

Being a traveling weaver isn't all bad... Being in the heart of historical, ancestral puebloan country, a few days while the weather is nice here and there isn't something I can complain about! This is Hovenweep National Monument.

And just because I mentioned it earlier, this is the Cortez cow.

(I'm hoping for some better sights than the cow this weekend.)

The question of validation revisited...

2011-11-05T18:09:00.000-06:00

Last week I posted the text from a small article I wrote for the latest edition of the American Tapestry Alliance's newsletter, Tapestry Topics. You can read that HERE.

I am interested in furthering discussion in the tapestry artist community about professionalism and how we can increase our presence in the art world as artists. (And though I mention the art vs. craft debate in the article, in the many months since I wrote it, I have come to strongly suspect that that particular discussion is mostly just a waste of time and we should be talking about why tapestry and fiber art in general is not frequently recognized as an art form in the art world today.) So perhaps the real problem for me is not so much that I don't have a degree in art, but that my chosen artistic field is not one that is regularly recognized AS art. We as tapestry artists are good at recognizing each other and showing tapestry work, but how many shows or galleries do you go to where you see tapestry showcased along with other mediums?

I believe there are many people involved in ATA who are interested in these questions and would love to see tapestry perceived by the art public as an art form. There are a few people who have worked lately on getting the ATA forums going again and perhaps that can be one means of communication among tapestry artists.

So if you are a fiber artist, what is your experience in the art world? And if it hasn't been a positive experience, what can be done to change it?

And if these questions are intriguing to you, consider a book I just finished reading called The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: the Curious Economics of Contemporary Art by Don Thompson. The book starts with the example of a Damien Hirst piece titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living which, according to Thompson, is a contemporary work of art consisting of a shark caught in 1991 in Australia, prepared and mounted in England by technicians under Hirst's direction, presented in a giant glass vitrine which weighed two tons (not easy to get home). The selling price was twelve million dollars. From there the book explores the world of art auction houses (primarily Christies and Sothebys), dealers, and art fairs. This is a world in which tapestry plays very little part. The question is, why?

A question of validation

2011-11-01T23:00:00.000-06:00

This is the article I wrote for the American Tapestry Alliance's Fall 2011 Tapestry Topics which came out last week. The newsletter is currently for members only, a practice which I fear does not further the knowledge of tapestry in the wider world, so I am making what I wrote available here. If you are a member of ATA, make sure you read the whole issue. If you are not a member but are interested in the subject of professionalism as it is related to fiber art, perhaps asking ATA for access to the newsletter will help us make it more widely available.

A question of validation

Rebecca Mezoff

What makes you an artist? Discussion of professionalism and what constitutes art vs. craft is something that I think is rare in the field of tapestry and in some places is even discouraged. I believe this kind of dialogue is important among makers of tapestry if tapestry is going to be regarded as an art form in its own right. The field of art is a large monster that often feels intimidating to me and this leads me to questions of my own worth as an artist and musings about my own cobbled-together art education.

I am a tapestry artist who is attempting to make a significant portion of my income through art, but I am lacking a BFA, an MFA, or another pile of letters relating directly to making tapestry. When I went to college, I was interested in art, but the messages I received growing up and from the world in general were that art wasn’t a stable or acceptable professional career choice, so something else would have to do. I could make art as a hobby. Years later and somewhat disenchanted with the medical career I found myself in, I started weaving tapestry. I love it. I should do this. But I don’t have an art degree. I have a masters degree in a medical profession (occupational therapy) which used to be craft-based, but now is solidly medical. In this country (USA) anyway, many of the messages we receive growing up indicate that to be a professional anything and to be “successful” you have to have a degree. So not having a BFA or an MFA psychologically hinders me at times when I am thinking about “being an artist”. When I finish a new tapestry or sell a couple in the gallery, I don’t feel that an art degree is needed. When I am in the midst of a dry spell and inspiration is far away, I am working too much as an OT, and nothing is selling, then I question myself and look for validation… and inevitably start considering art school. Perhaps this is also a longing, as I am getting closer to the end of my 30s, for more knowledge and a new means of inspiration.

Emergence II by Rebecca Mezoff

In order to practice as an occupational therapist I am required to have at least a masters degree, pass various national and state exams, complete large amounts of continuing education every year, and maintain several licenses. In order to call myself an artist, I only have to make art. Is this true? Certainly not everyone who has an MFA is really an artist. Maybe it really does come down to the “What is art?” question and a real inability to answer that in any concise way. Perhaps that is as it should be. Art is what it needs to be for each of us. Some of us are in the “I just want to make pretty things” camp and some of us are in the “I want to change the world” camp (and sometimes those two camps are one and the same—and is that the difference between craft and art?).

Emergence III by Rebecca Mezoff

Emergence IV by Rebecca Mezoff

I believe that as tapestry artists there are intellectually significant questions that need to be asked and I don’t see many people asking them. How can we start these dialogues? I think our need for validation is part of the human condition. In general we all need support and positive regard. However I do find that the issue of professionalism in regard to tapestry art specifically is something fiber artists don’t talk about much. In the absence of these kinds of discussions, the need for validation is even stronger.

In the end, validation has to come from inside myself. I hope that if in my work I search for what is essential and valuable for me, the work will reflect some inner truth which will hold value. The act of making that thing that is valuable for me, I hope, is the only validation I really need. If this is not true first, then art school will not make any difference at all.

Where in the world is Rebecca? ...new adventures afoot...

2011-10-20T08:00:00.001-06:00

By now many of you have heard rumors of me moving. Fortunately or unfortunately, they are at least partly true. Okay, they are completely true. I no longer live in New Mexico and honestly, can't really say where it is I do live! But for sure for the coming three months I am staying and working in Cortez, CO. I was not all that thrilled about going to Cortez for this temporary job, but I have to say now that I am here, that I am quite impressed with this little town. Here are the reasons I've amassed so far:
1. There is a Chinese restaurant that serves gluten free food. Yes. Chinese. You heard that correctly (and it isn't P.F. Changs).
2. There are huge city parks here and they are gorgeous. They also include walking trails.
3. The City Market has Pamela's brownie mix and Udi's muffins. Need I say more?
4. I am living 3 minutes from work. If I wasn't doing home health (for which I need my car), I could walk to work every day.
5. The liquor store on the corner is called "Cork and Barrel" and there is an old Sirloin Stockade cow on the edge of town greeting all visitors. I was hoping to get a photo of the cow today, but work went long and after about 10 hours of work, my mind stops functioning. Heck, I was lucky I was able to drive the 6 blocks home in one piece--or even that I remembered where it is I'm staying now!

As for the moving, it was not as bad as it could have been--and moving is always bad on any scale.
My first order of business was to take apart the Harrisville rug loom. This was somewhat traumatic, and looking at this photo now makes me miss my beautiful loom again. I had to put her in pieces in a storage locker--which is just sad. I took this (and about 20 more) photo in the hopes that I will be able to put the loom back together without too much swearing (hopefully in the near future).

In the midst of the packing I had to dye a bunch of yarn for a commission. I think it was actually 20 colors. Luckily the colors turned out fine. Now I just have to find the time to wind 20 skeins and weave a 16 x 50 inch piece!

Cassy does not have opposable thumbs, so helping with the packing is difficult for her--and she starts getting anxious when things start coming apart (who can blame her? So do I).

After day one of moving, I was feeling fairly good! ...of course I had movers move all this stuff. I had scheduled a moving company to come and move my piano as I can't move it myself. And they literally volunteered to move all the other big items also. They rocked. I gave them each a big tip--I was so grateful. The next day was another story.

This is how I felt after the second day of moving (no movers, just me, Emily, and the UHaul).

And here is my car packed to the gills for the trip to Cortez. She was riding low and not as happy as usual to go up the hills. But we made it in one piece.

So now I'm working here for awhile. It is a good place to work... but I do miss my studio!

So here I am in a new spot, a little off kilter, but all in one piece. I'm grateful to have an occupation that pays me well which can subsidize my art career. I don't know where I will be going after here, but rest assured I will continue to weave tapestries wherever I am!

Photos from a hike October 2nd to Gold Hill from the Taos Ski Valley.

The Man Couch

2011-10-19T08:00:00.001-06:00

I found this amusing... I was in Weaving Southwest sometime last week and they have a couple couches set up--one in the gallery and one in the yarn store. The front couch's coffee table has Trend magazine and various other fiber publications on it--and sometimes someone's coffee cup. The new couch in the back struck me as being for a different set of customer...

The "men's couch" at Weaving Southwest.

The reading material supplied at the "men's couch".

El Rito Studio Tour and learning to let go a little bit...

2011-10-06T08:30:00.000-06:00

Saturday morning Emily and I headed over to El Rito, NM, a small town 15 miles north of Abiquiu and about the same distance west of Ojo Caliente. I lived in this little town for about 3 years and was excited to return and see some of the old friends there. Sara and Sierra were happy to tour us around El Rito for their annual studio tour.

My best buds Sierra and Sara outside Julie Wagner's studio

A young artist's work at the El Rito Public Library where they also have an event called "Death by Chocolate". I think it speaks for itself. (Thank you to the person who made a batch of gluten free brownies! I increased my donation at that point!)

The gang with the Leer es Poder sign outside the library.

I used to live virtually next door to Martins grocery. It closed its doors a few years ago and I miss walking through the dusty aisles marveling that you can get potted meat ALL over northern New Mexico.

We visited a friend and artist from my days of living in El Rito, Julie Claire. Julie and I talked a little about her intuitive painting workshops which she does through her coaching business, Full Bloom Coaching in both Santa Fe and El Rito. I have been intrigued by her process for years and hope to take one of her classes one day soon. I think Julie can teach me to loosen up and let go of some of the things that inhibit my design process. Tapestry is such a rigid medium in so many ways. Once the design is finished, I pretty much don't deviate from the cartoon after I start weaving. Yes, there are occasionally small changes I make as I go along--shifting a color or changing some highlights. But the process to that point which includes a trip to Santa Fe to have a cartoon enlarged by a blueprint shop not to mention the days of dyeing to come up with the exact colors for the piece mean that I am unlikely to deviate from the design once it goes to the loom. And weaving a tapestry can take months... following your pattern. This process seems to lend itself to rigidity of the mind... and I would like to loosen things up a little bit.

In Julie's workshops as I understand it, you start with one large surface and start painting--and you keep painting on that surface. Layers of pictures happen and you have to be willing to let the one you were working on go and let it change into something else. And isn't that how life works anyway?

Woven Stories: Weaving Traditions of Northern New Mexico

2011-10-05T09:11:00.000-06:00

Saturday after spending time at the Taos Wool Festival, I went to see the new film by Andrea Heckman, Woven Stories: Weaving Traditions of Northern New Mexico. This was the U.S. premier of the movie and was screened at the Taos Center for the Arts.

First I want to admit to the 100+ people in the audience that yes, it was me who shouted out, "Hey! That's my piece!" at the beginning of the movie. I know that is probably not cool. But I was excited to see my piece, Emergence II featured twice in the film. (I also admit that the ONE margarita I had had an hour earlier at the Adobe Bar might have influenced the outburst just a tad.)

Rebecca Mezoff, Emergence II
45 x 45 inches, hand-dyed wool tapestry

This film is full of wonderful voices. Rachel Brown herself makes an appearance. Her granddaughter and owner of Rachel's contemporary tapestry gallery Weaving Southwest, Teresa Loveless, gives a lot of information about Rachel's contribution to fiber art in northern NM. Teresa is also featured dyeing yarn for the gallery's yarn store. There is a Lisa Trujillo Chimayo weaving class filmed in the gallery with some thoughts by Lisa and the participants. There are stories from Kristina Wilson and many other long-time tapestry and fiber artists in New Mexico including Tierra Wools, Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center, the Mora mill, some sheep breeders, and a little bit about puebloan weaving at Taos Pueblo. My first tapestry teacher, Karen Martinez, talks about teaching tapestry at Northern NM College.

Fred Black talks about tapestry being like "frozen music" with its melodies and movement which I thought was a lovely metaphor.

Andrea also has a book called Woven Stories: Andean Textiles and Rituals. The film can be ordered from www.stonecorralmedia.com. The direct link to the page with the DVD is HERE.

Taos Wool Festival 2011

2011-10-04T08:31:00.003-06:00

Every year (if I possibly can), I go to the Taos Wool Festival. Emily says this is because "that is where my peeps are." I'm not sure if she is talking about the alpaca, the churro sheep, or the people (or maybe just the cinnamon almond vendor), but I do enjoy spending some time there every first weekend in October.

The Taos Wool Festival is run by the Mountain and Valley Wool Association and this was their 25th year. Their mission is to promote Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas wool, animal fiber, and their products. For more information, their website is HERE.

I usually buy a t-shirt... and I liked the logo a lot this year... but even though it was only Saturday afternoon, they were out of any shirts in my size in a color I liked, so I settled for this photograph.

Disclaimer: no animals were harmed in the making of this blog post... and there are some shots of a naked churro sheep so if that sort of thing makes you woozy, you might want to skip the rest.

There are lots of animals every year and I love seeing the angora bunnies. This little girl settled in to get acquainted with this rabbit.

I think this one is giving me the bunny evil-eye. Admittedly I was stalking him with my camera and I couldn't get him to hold still enough to get a clear shot that included his long shaggy ears which stood straight up. The woman minding the bunny cages said he was an English angora (I could have that wrong, things were a little confusing at that point)... and his ears were a hoot! He wasn't amenable to a photograph though.

There was a pen of Navajo Churro sheep and we did get to see one shorn (turn back now if you don't want to see the naked sheep!). Churro are the prize sheep of the Navajo. I recently watched the movie "A Gift from Talking God: The Story of the Navajo-Churro" which you can find out more about HERE. It is a wonderful documentary about how the churro sheep were almost wiped out and brought back to use in this region of the United States. They are highly prized for their double coat and their low-lanalin fleece as well as for their meat.

I don't know the name of this sheep shearer, but he was fast and I didn't see any sheep blood flying either. It amazes me how the sheep just lay there. About 6 years ago I saw a traditional shearer in El Rito using clippers shear a sheep almost as fast as this man did with his electric set-up. When the sheep is turned upside down, they just go limp. Robert, the El Rito shearer, told me that it was hard-wired into their brain because they are prey animals and when they are flipped over they are most likely going to be killed, so their brains just shut off.

The whole thing only took a couple minutes.

Here he is after being let back into the churro pen. I'm pretty sure at this point he was thinking, "Whoa, something is radically different..."

There were alpaca, which are my favorite. This one was crying and the handler said they make the whimpering noise when they are distressed. By Saturday afternoon he had probably had too many people taking photos of him. Sorry dude.

Llamas

And there were dogs everywhere.

And of course we can't forget the actual fiber booths. There were marvelous tapestries and rugs by Fred Black, Bettye Sullivan, and Alex George Sullivan. When I got to the Sullivan's booth, the person wearing Bettye Sullivan's name tag was definitely not Bettye (and I had NOT had a margarita yet). It was Julie Cloutman of Taos Fiber Arts who was running the booth for the Sullivans that day. Julie was sporting a fantastic pair of knitted (or they could have been crocheted, the artist is multi-talented) earrings. The artist was the offspring of the people running the felting booth next door. Here are the earrings and Julie with the artist himself. I regret that I do not know his name, so if anyone does, please comment and I'll credit him! He did win a ribbon in the youth competition for a rather conceptual piece of crocheting which was a long chain with loops--aptly titled "Scarf".

10/9/11: And Martie of Taos Sunflower just told me that the young artist is Chakotay Mitchell, son of Merce Mitchell of Pure Felt. Thanks for the information Martie (your yarn shop was my very very favorite for so long, but I sure understand the need to do other things!) and to Chakotay for his great fiber art!

There were marvelous signs, and of course fantastic amounts of fiber.

I'm kind of sorry it is over for the year. I didn't buy any yarn.

Hannah Haworth and the roving prairie dog at Weaving Southwest

2011-10-03T09:31:00.000-06:00

I visit Weaving Southwest fairly frequently. I like to visit my tapestries and see which ones have gone home with someone. Plus the people there are just so fantastically friendly! Hannah Haworth is a fairly new addition to the staff there and she is a knitting goddess and wonderful artist. This past weekend on one of my trips through the gallery (of which there were at least three), I spotted this little guy on the counter. Priscilla the Prairie Dog. And she comes right out of her little prairie dog hole and roams around the gallery.

She seemed awfully interested in looking at my tapestries actually! (Admittedly I might have encouraged that a little.)

Priscilla looking at Emergence III

Priscilla checking out Emergence I and the other beautiful tapestries.

Fortunately for us, Hannah has written a pattern for Priscilla and you can get it at Weaving Southwest and on Ravelry HERE. I definitely went home with a copy. She is writing new patterns as we speak, so keep an eye on her!

Hannah is also the one responsible for the new window displays at Weaving Southwest. This one is in the front window.

And this very cool tree with autumn leaves made from Weaving Southwest tapestry yarn is in the back window.

If you do nothing else, go to Hannah's website HERE and look at her amazing work. Also look through her blog. It is wonderful to see my New Mexico homeland through the eyes of someone from over the pond (Scotland, right Hannah?). New Mexico shimmers through her eyes. She is a wonderful addition to Weaving Southwest and I'm so glad she is there. Thanks Hannah.

Cochineal: there is bug blood in your cherry coke!

2011-09-17T21:00:00.001-06:00

My landlady wrote a book (Life on the Rocks by Katherine Wells) which mentions cochineal on the mesa and I remembered a couple years ago seeing some white fuzz on some prickly pear cactus a mile or so from the house. This morning in the rain I went back to check, and sure enough, it was cochineal!

After some online research and a return to the Colorways Summer 2011 online magazine (there are some fascinating photos in the article in this emag of the bugs on the cactus: "Sell me your gold, silver, cochineal..." by Linda Ligon) I learned a few more things about cochineal:

There are about 70,000 bugs in a pound of cochineal. I won't be using the ones on my mesa any time soon for dyeing.
The insect produces carminic acid (17-24% of the weight of the dried insect per Wikipedia--which we all know is ALWAYS correct) which is used to make cochineal dye.
It used to be used extensively for dyeing fabric, but now is used largely in the cosmetics and food industries as a red dye. At least it isn't carcinogenic!
The insects create the powdery/webby patches for protection, camouflage and to prevent dessication. My cochineal bugs were very well protected as the bugs were deep inside their webs.
They like prickly pear cactus the best.
They do range into NM but are generally at lower elevations than this mesa (about 5,600 feet)

When their eggs hatch, the nymphs crawl to new areas on the cactus or using the waxy substance they are surrounded with, "balloon" to a new host cactus. Then--get this--they start feeding on the cactus, molt and lose their legs. (!) That would seem to make further transportation a bit difficult.
It looks like cochineal currently sells for twice the price of silver by weight.
I found this interesting cochineal farm in Oaxaca that gives tours. And they have a workshop you can take about cultivating cochineal. This sounds like my kind of vacation! Unfortunately I'd probably have to move south to grow them in the US. It'll be hard to dye much yarn with 10 bugs... and I don't want to kill the entire crop either. Unfortunately dyeing with them seems to involve death on the part of the bug (when they are pregnant!).

And after all this fascinating information, I had to pull out my color books. From Colors: What they mean and how to make them by Anne Varichon, I found out that there are actually three primary kinds of cochineal. Besides the Mexican kind that live largely on nopal (prickly pear) cactus, there is the Armenian cochineal which lives on reeds and grasses in Armenia and Turkey and the Polish cochineal which feeds on German knotgrass and lives near the Baltic Sea and in the Ukraine (p 124).
Some history from the same book (p 124): dyeing with cochineal seems to have been done since about 700 BCE in Peru and large fields were cultivated long before the arrival of the Spanish. The Conquistadors realized that this insect represented enormous wealth and escalated production. Starting in 1520, they exported hundreds of tons of cochineals to Europe and around the world.
The annual yield of the nopales fields in southern Mexico can be 264 pounds of insects per acre.

"Spanish Red, I noted in my diary that night, is usually born between the fog and the frost in places where land is cheap and the prickly pear, on which it is a parasite, grows in abundance on the desert sands. It is a holy blight, a noble rot where the treasure is rubies rather than the gold of dessert wine. It is a deep, intensely colored organic red, but it will never be used for Buddhist robes because there is too much death in it. In the twenty-first century women around the world coat their lips with insect blood, we apparently dab our cheeks with it, and in the United States it is one of few permitted red constituents of eye shadow. 'And finally,' I wrote with a happy frisson, 'Cherry Coke is full of it; it is color additive E120.'" [Finlay, V. (2002). Color: A natural history of the palette. New York: Random House. p 137-8.]

Weave well friends! (and when you dye with cochineal, remember all the little bug souls)

Of bumblebees and Taos Fiber Arts

2011-09-05T19:15:00.001-06:00

I went to a needle felting class yesterday at Taos Fiber Arts. Julie and Ashley Cloutman (a mother-daughter team) are a great combination--and they are a lot of fun. I know Julie because she has sold a whole whack of my tapestries at Weaving Southwest... and anyone who has that much good to say about me must be one fantastic lady.

Ashley spent a couple hours teaching me the fine art of 3D needle felting--and repeatedly reminding me how not to stab myself. She was really good at this. I think she has been stabbed a few times (sharp needles with barbs!). I only caused myself to bleed once in two hours which I thought was pretty good considering my unfamiliarity with the techniques and my general clumsiness. Her set-by-set approach and excellent creativity (not to mention humor) makes her a very fun teacher. (She also has a great line of zombie attire and felted objects. I suspect with the right marketing these could become a craze which would support Ashley for a very long time.)

Julie and Ashley Cloutman of Taos Fiber Arts.

SHARP needles!

My project started out looking like this (and though it looks simple, it was not easy to get a head and body to the shape I wanted!):

And within a couple hours, had become this funky sort of bee dude:

Notice his little stinger... and purple shoes... and long purple hair...

Ashley started this great Frankenstein figure. I love the neck bolts... not really sure how she did that.

Taos Fiber Arts has beautiful fiber like this detail of a felted shawl with yarn trapped between the layers (made by Ashley). They have hand-dyed yarn, roving, clothing, felted scarves, weaving, and will teach you many fiber techniques (including multiple felting techniques--I'm going back for a nuno class sometime and maybe another needle felting class. Julie also teaches weaving!).

They also have a great collection of old signs (many from Taos Ski Valley) and other fun elements.

Go visit them.
(P.S. They are fairly easy to find behind the plaza and... they have parking!)

Oh, by the way, the inspiration for the bee I made was this baby sock I knitted this weekend. Now I just have to knit the other one! ...unless someone is having a one-legged baby... which might give me some occupational therapy business, but overall would not be desirable to the parents, I'm sure.

I hesitate to give the pattern (because I don't want my ultra knitting-talented relatives to steal my very cute knitting patterns before my niece or nephew is born), but will do so in the interest of not being accused of copyright infringement... because I am not a talented enough knitter to come up with this by myself. I leave the creative coming-up-with-it-ism to tapestry design. It is Bumblebee Socks from Knit Baby Head and Toes (ed Gwen Steege). The pattern is by Barbara Telford.

LeClerc Dorothy loom for sale

2011-09-03T14:34:00.000-06:00

Since this is my blog, I suppose I can use it to advertise a loom I am trying to sell! Sorry for all of you who read this blog for more interesting content. I once sold a Gilmore loom through the blog though, so maybe this will work.

The loom belonged to my grandmother. See THIS post for the story about her. Grandma hasn't used this loom for a long time. In fact at least 15 years ago (maybe longer, the years have gone faster since high school ended), she gave it to either me or my sister (can't remember which! My memory is kind of like a big room full of post it notes with vital information written on them and sometimes someone turns on an oscillating fan--yes, I stole that metaphor from Ellis Delaney). We have passed it back and forth since and rarely used it.

It is a fantastic loom for weaving workshops. You know the ones--you warp the loom up with some specified sort of warp and cart it into some conference center (usually 3 miles from the car and you wished you had brought that dolly that is in your garage) and all wide-eyed and eager, you are ready for your round-robin class... and everyone hates the colors your chose. Or maybe they don't and you warped the loom beautifully and everyone else wants to weave on it and you never get the chance... Anyway, it is a great workshop loom. It doesn't work worth a toot for tapestry though. Don't say I didn't warn you.

It is a great little loom. 15 3/4 inches weaving width, 8 harness with the ability to add 8 more. It comes with a 12 and a 10 dent reed and the heddles that are on it (unless I can locate more in the depths of my studio--and believe me, there are depths!).

Side view

LeClerc Dorothy

View from the top. Yes, one of the little plastic pieces is missing. It may have been chewed by a dog or swallowed by a child (perhaps me!), or it might have just fallen into the junk heap of time. It works fine without the plastic piece, though one could probably be fashioned out of sculpey clay if it really bugs you. The red one is missing. Kids like red. Maybe that explains all the gut troubles over the years. Sigh.

Removing one of the castles. Note the four sets of holes--two more castles could be added to make this a 16 harness loom.

These braces hold the loom rigid and can be lifted if you want to fold it.

Loom with one castle removed and folded. It will not fold unless you remove one castle (it is a physics thing--believe me, it won't)

If you look at this link to the LeClerc website, this loom is the one pictured in the box that says 8 and 12 shaft loom. You might also note that the price for a new loom like this is $1172.

I'm asking $350 plus shipping to wherever you live.

If you, or someone you love would like to own this loom preferably sometime before October 1st, 2011, let me know!

As an almost complete aside, I also have another loom for sale. It is a brand new inkle loom made by Schacht. I know this is kind of cheating, but I received it as a door prize at a conference a few years ago and I already have an identical loom. I really really don't need two. So this one needs a new home. They are about $75 new. I'll send this one (in the box it came in no less!) to you for $45 plus shipping (and I'll only charge you exactly what the shipping actually is--I promise. You can check the label when you get the thing).

Isn't this a nice product shot? That is the price tag still on it.

I have a real fondness for Schacht. Maybe it is the sheep in their logo.

You have to make your own heddles. Sorry, that is how it is with inkle looms.

Those are all the looms I can bear to part with right now.

Come take a tapestry class!!!

2011-08-31T08:00:00.001-06:00

I am teaching a class in a couple weeks at Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center in Espanola, NM. The class is Color Gradation Techniques for Tapestry. It is three days and there are still some openings! This class is a benefit for the center and I am hoping to fill the class to maximize their profits. So this is a great time to take a class in tapestry if you never have. Here is a recent blog post I did with more photos of the center and some of its offerings.

photo: Laura Barger

The class focuses on technical ways to grade color in a tapestry including using hatching and hachure. I have some great hand-dyed yarns we can play with and the class promises to be a lot of fun. As a bonus I will also be showing a slide show about the Bauhaus Tapestry Project (Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus) I did with Cornelia Theimer Gardella and James Koehler which was completed six months before James passed away.

photo: Laura Barger

From the class description:

In this three-day class, students will weave a sampler exploring

color gradation techniques in contemporary tapestry. A small tapestry

may be started if time allows. We will learn different forms of hatching

and hachure along with various methods of grading color. Color mixing

techniques along with some color theory will be investigated. Hand-dyed

wool yarn in a large range of hues suitable for gradation will be provided.

Rebecca Mezoff was a student and apprentice of James Koehler for

6 years and as part of the class, will offer a presentation about their

Bauhaus project which included his last shows, photos of some of his

work as it relates to color gradation techniques, and discussion about

how James used the gradation techniques we will be studying in his work.

James was an avid supporter of EVFAC and this class is offered as a

benefit for the center with all proceeds going to help EVFAC keep its

doors open. Basic knowledge of tapestry weaving is recommended, a

desire to learn and have a great time is a requirement!

My return from the mountains...

2011-08-30T11:35:00.000-06:00

I've been sitting in a campground near Silverton, CO for a few days reading a book about indigo (Indigo: in search of the color that seduced the world by Catherine E McKinley--I recommend it!). How I came to be car camping near Silverton instead of walking the Colorado Trail south of Silverton is a long story. If you're interested you can read about it in my trail journal HERE. The short version is that I hiked 100 miles of the 300 I had planned to hike along the Colorado Trail this summer and a knee injury took me off the trail. I am home again after some beautiful days with my family in a fantastic campground outside Silverton. We saw two moose, a plethora of mines, did some four wheeling thanks to my sister and brother-in-law, and sat in the rain reading about indigo.

I am lucky to be able to walk 100 miles. I am disappointed that I couldn't do the whole hike, but know that with a little rehab I will be out there again very soon.

I am ready to finish a tapestry and look to new horizons. Colorado is unbelieveably beautiful and I enjoyed my three weeks at high altitude immensely.

Mine near Silverton

We saw two moose! What is the plural of moose?

Between Searle and Kokimo passes on the Colorado Trail

At the top of the Ten Mile Range between Breckenridge and Copper mountain--first day out

Twin Lakes at sunrise from a lakeside camp

I'm off for a hike... Colorado Trail

2011-08-10T19:29:00.000-06:00

After I leave Pueblo tomorrow I'm headed out on the Colorado Trail. I'm looking forward to some weeks of hiking and a simpler life... for a little while.

The Pueblo class has been marvelous. What a great bunch of students! I have enjoyed teaching and will be developing new classes about color and design for tapestry for the spring. Thanks for the inspiration all you Pueblo-ites!

What a great facility--the staff and classroom were both wonderful.

I am leaving from Breckenridge heading towards Durango soon now. You can follow my progress HERE if you are interested. I'll be back in several weeks with more from the land of tapestry...

In the meantime, hike your own hike.
~Rebecca

Chaco Canyon

2011-08-09T19:45:00.001-06:00

I found out James Koehler died not many hours after he passed. I was on my way to Chaco Canyon March 4th, 2011 with Emily and some good friends and I got a phone message somewhere between Regina and Cuba.

Chaco Canyon is a place of stillness. It has a long history which is much debated--and is one of those places I like to go to because there aren't any answers to why it exists or what really happened there during its centuries of occupation.

Chaco is a place that can push you. Camping the first weekend in March was cold and the wind and blowing sand can needle you incessantly. There is little shelter out on the desert and you are forced to take what comes at you when walking out on the mesas. But I find that the discomfort that first appears at Chaco quickly disappears as I am forced to let go of noise and electronics and remember to look at the vastness of the sky and appreciate the brightness of the stars.

The great houses and kivas are a marvel and a mystery. I love to trace the patterns of the rock walls with my eyes. It is a place of repetition. It feels old and unchanging, but even when it was being built it changed all the time. We like to think of the Anasazi as a particular group of people in one time and place, but they were much like us—building and changing and creating and destroying their society all the time.

Chaco is a place to go when questioning. It was a good place to be when I found out my tapestry teacher had died... a good place to wonder what that meant for me personally and in a more general sense.

Chaco is about doors and passageways and empty questions. It is also about sand and sky and stars. It pushes my boundaries and I will return.

All content copyrighted Rebecca Mezoff, 2011.

My next adventure...

2011-08-07T13:00:00.002-06:00

There is a tapestry mouldering on the loom--a fact I greatly regret. But I also regret the slipping away of summer without a single backpacking trip yet. My soul needs to walk and so I am leaving the tapestry unfinished for now and heading out for a solid month of hiking.

Here is the sad lonely tapestry waiting for me to finish her up... Finished tapestry will be 45 inches--not quite halfway there.

Before I leave on the hike I will be teaching a 3 day workshop for the Pueblo weaving guild. From there I'm headed out on the Colorado Trail.

My sister and I hiked the entire trail in 2003 from Denver to Durango (about 500 miles) with my then-3-year-old dog Cassy. Cassy will be coming on part of this hike, but she is turning 12 in a few days and will not have to carry a backpack this time around. She is a spry old thing -- a fact I attribute to her walking every day of her life perhaps as well as a puppy-ish personality and a lot of joy.

When we finished my grandmother had trophies made for us. Too bad the trophy shop misspelled Colorado(A) !!

I have been busy dehydrating food and making some gear in between getting ready to teach the tapestry workshop and figuring out how I am going to finish that big tapestry and a commission before I return to gainful employment (NOT that tapestry weaving isn't gainful, it just doesn't quite pay the mortgage YET).

So I'm off for a little walk. Part of it will be on my own and part of it will be with my two best girls, Emily and Cassy. About 300 miles of the Colorado Trail before we come home again... You may not hear much from this blog until mid-September, but rest assured I am having a grand time outside.

Colorado Mountains... (This is actually Little Bear, a 14er that is part of the Blanca Massif near Alamosa, CO.)

Go For a Hike!!! (before it snows again)

My grandmother is a weaver...

2011-08-06T08:00:00.002-06:00

I remember growing up standing beside my grandfather as he wove on a 60 inch Macomber in his basement. I think he was working on a large drapery project for their greenhouse (some horrific yardage number in what must have been doubleweave--and all white). Grandpa learned to weave after he retired from a long career as a metallurgical engineer. (It is amazing to me how many musicians, engineers, and scientists become weavers in retirement.) Grandpa got me interested in looms--how they work, how amazing it is you can make cloth on this machine...

But it was my grandmother Marian who inspired me to actually make art. She received her bachelors degree in art when she was 60 years old. (Do what you love no matter what age you are.) I loved her collection of children's books and her garden gnomes in her Tulsa, OK garden (I was never really sure they weren't real because she talked about them like they were). Grandma was a person who encouraged IMAGINATION in a child (and sometimes terror if we didn't finish our breakfast cereal).

Grandma is in retirement now and no longer has her looms. In fact, I have her and my grandfather's looms and I thank them every day I sit down to weave for those beautiful pieces of equipment.

This is a piece my grandmother did many years ago which I rediscovered recently when the medical clinic it has been hanging in was being redecorated and the piece was temporarily relocated to my parents house. I loved the peek-a-boo flaps and all the faces in this round tapestry-ish work and I hear the kids in the clinic still do today.

(Yep, sometimes you have to sacrifice some stuffed animals in the name of art...)

Grandma has a fantastic drawing ability. Her family Christmas cards are legendary and I wish I had a complete set--the little cartoonish family-member characters all set in their lively lives yet somehow blended on one piece of paper. Every letter I've ever received from my grandma was covered with little doodles and marks to imply motion. She also loves to underline and accent her writing.

I have her 60 inch LeClerc tapestry loom. I am saving it's inaugural tapestry for a time when I have a big enough studio to set it up next to my favorite Harrisville Rug Loom (grandpa's loom) which I use for all my tapestry currently. Her last cartoon for this loom, which was never woven, was a drawing from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak--a favorite in her book collection.

Thanks for living such a creative life Grandma... and for inspiring me to do the same.

In search of tapestry yarn?

2011-08-05T16:06:00.001-06:00

I sell my work through Weaving Southwest in Taos, which conveniently for me, is only about 40 miles from my house. I stopped by today after getting my hair whacked (I can say whacked, right? Or do you have to be Canadian to do that on a blog?) to drop off Emergence IV (you'll have to visit it there--see post with photo HERE).

I walked in the door and saw this:

I gasped a little. I've never seen those walls empty. Teresa was having the ultimate fun of hanging a new show arrangement. I'm sure it'll look lovely.

Some of my students were asking about where to get tapestry yarn. I dye my own as I have had the same problem, but Weaving Southwest does sell a nice line of tapestry yarn which is all hand-dyed. They will sell you this color card if you are interested!

It is hard to see that the gradations are bunched together on the card. But there are 5 colors in each bundle. Here are the Persian Lilac colors. It is a two ply 100% wool yarn which comes in 4 ounce skeins (162 yards).

I can't wait to see the new show.

Garage sales don't sell looms...

2011-08-04T16:05:00.000-06:00

Well, I tried to unload a couple looms last Saturday at a family garage sale, but turns out that a yard sale in rural Colorado is not the place to sell even small looms. (Excellent garage sale street art by my sister Laura, somewhat modified by me to block out the address.)

These are the looms I had for sale. I'll have to list them on some site once I get back from my next adventure sometime in September. The LeClerc Dorothy loom is a good piece of equipment, but I just don't have any use for an 8 harness table loom anymore... apparently neither do garage sale hunters in rural CO!

I have an identical inkle loom to this one and I don't need two! Probably no one knew what it was among the piles of old drills and bicycles.

It is amazing what people WILL buy at a garage sale though. Even if you tell them 10 times that something is irrevocably broken, they will stay pay a quarter to haul it away for you.

Cassy wishing she could come and lick the sticky fingers of the kids under the tables...

Then there was an injury...

Garage sales can be dangerous you know.

It happened not far from where this sign was posted....

Turns out it was only STAGE BLOOD... (Don't worry Tommye!)

Whew.

I think I might need a 12 step program like this one... Do you think they have daily meetings?

Emergence IV

2011-07-29T13:00:00.000-06:00

This piece was finished a few months ago, but was awaiting a show before I posted it here.
As with most tapestries I didn't like it when I took it off the loom, but now I'm quite happy with it.
Enjoy!

Emergence IV
15 x 46 inches
hand-dyed wool tapestry

And after the conference relaxation...

2011-07-28T13:00:00.000-06:00

I was exhausted after teaching for three days. I had no idea I would be so worn out. Undoubtedly it has something to do with extroverting myself for four days straight. Fortunately I had the foresight to purchase Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge rail tickets for Monday after the conference and Emily and I had a fantastic time riding the train and exploring some more of western Colorado.

There is a weaving shop in Silverton called Weathertop Wovens. They don't allow photos in the shop, but here is the storefront. In the past when I've visited they have both spent a lot of time explaining how they create their garments. They are great people to visit. They use multi-colored warps mostly in cotton to weave fabric which they then sew into ruanas and jackets. (Does the name come from The Lord of the Rings? I didn't think to ask them while there this time.)

This is perhaps one of the funniest signs I have ever seen. It was in front of a house in Silverton--a town where only the main street is paved, most of the town leaves for all but 3 months of the year, and the people who live there year round are tougher than nails. I suspect this sign belongs to one of the tough ones. (Silverton also gets a LOT of summer-time tourist traffic and I suspect people get sick of tourists parking in front of their houses.)

On our way home we drove through Bayfield, CO. I had asked the woman at Yarn (an amazing little yarn shop where I have spent some money in past months!) in Durango if there were any other yarn shops in the area and she mentioned one in Bayfield. We ran across this one which has one of the most clever names for a knit shop that I have ever seen... considering that the shop is on Pearl Street.

Color Gradation for Tapestry

2011-07-27T13:00:00.001-06:00

I taught a new class at Intermountain Weaver's Conference in Durango last weekend. The conference was July 21-24 at Fort Lewis College. I greatly enjoyed teaching this class. I had wonderful students and we learned a lot about structural techniques for mixing color in tapestry as well as a little bit of color theory.

Prepping an example for the class...

Dyed yarn. We had many discussions about where to get tapestry yarn. I dye my own because it is so difficult to find gradations to purchase commercially (and because I like dyeing). For people who don't want to dye their own yarn, finding more than a couple values in one hue is difficult!

Some student examples...

Use of blocks to grade color.

Pick and pick on doubled warps...

We had two rigid heddle looms in the class. I never would have advocated using this loom for tapestry, but I have to admit that the tension was significantly better than I expected it to be.

We also had a couple Archie Brennan style looms in the class which get a great tension although they can be difficult to get a shed on. One student had modified her loom with a shedding mechanism, though she still had to use a shedding stick due to the narrow width of her top copper pipe (not this loom).

There was one table loom made by Mountain Loom Company. I was surprised that this loom held an excellent tension which has not been my experience with table looms. There was a Wolf Pup and the rest of the looms were Mirrix.

One student designed this great transparency exercise with two circles (this is the back--due to the Mirrix warp wrapping around, I couldn't photograph the front of this example).

We went over to see the Fiber Celebrated show and look at a couple pieces I had there.

Fort Lewis College is a great place for a fiber conference. The vendor hall was marvelous, the IWC board members kept the whole thing running smoothly, and the cafeteria actually did make me gluten-free food.

The juried show Fiber Celebrated 2011 also opened during the conference. You can see my blog post about that show HERE.

There was also a non-juried show at the conference and I've posted some photos of that HERE.

Lastly, I was a little surprised to see the advertising for the Swedish singles yarn that James Koehler used as it seemed to imply that the proceeds somehow had something to do with James... In reality the vendor was just trying to sell an overstock that James left behind.

Intermountain Creations

2011-07-26T18:34:00.000-06:00

The non-juried show at Intermountain Weavers Conference is called Intermountain Creations. This year the instructor's show Intermountain Spirit was intermixed with the Creations show.

I thought there were many wonderful pieces in this show and I shot a few photos of some of them. There were, of course many pieces I didn't include here, some due to impossible lighting and some because I was focusing on what struck me at the moment.

Evelyn Campbell lives near me and was a student of James Koehler's. She is something of a hero to me perhaps just due to her her vitality, ability to engage vibrantly with the world, and the hope that I can maintain those things in my own life as I get older.

Kandinsky Slalom
Evelyn Campbell
wool tapestry

Sagrado Familia near Black Mesa
Evelyn Campbell
wool tapestry

Nancy took my Color Gradation for Tapestry class this year and had two delightful tapestries in the show. I loved the effect of the floating bars in the dark brown parts of this tapestry as well as her use of demi-duites and pick and pick. (Great piece to study for the class Nancy!)

Chiapas Windows II
Nancy Wohlenberg

This piece was one of my favorites. I loved her use of a doubled warp so that she could go from 6 to 12 ends per inch in different parts of the tapestry. She was experimenting with pearl cotton as weft here and it worked extremely well in this small-size tapestry. She did a great job of color gradation also even using pick and pick to grade some of the background imperceptibly.

Earth and Sky Pot
Nancy Wohlenberg

Cindy also took my class (and was another student of James'). This tapestry was my favorite in this show. The flatness of the color effects were really attractive as well as the black outlining of the sailboat.

Serendipity
Cindy Dworzak

Serendipity, detail
Cindy Dworzak

There were many pieces in techniques other than tapestry in this show. This woven shawl caught my eye.

Night Sea Scarf
Gaylene Garlitz
tencel warp, cotton weft, 16 harness weave

I enjoyed the detail of this mixed media piece.

Mycelial Matrix, detail
Rain Klepper

And I was happy that Emergence IV got to hang out in a show for a few days before heading to Weaving Southwest for the summer sale season.

Emergence IV
Rebecca Mezoff

Fiber Celebrated 2011

2011-07-26T17:51:00.000-06:00

I had two pieces in Fiber Celebrated 2011 which opened at the Intermountain Weaver's Conference at Fort Lewis College in Durango this past weekend. The show is at the Center of Southwest Studies main gallery. Juanita Girardin was the juror for this show. She actually lives in the same small New Mexico town that I do. Her comments at the opening convocation of the conference resonated with me as she spoke at length about using good craftsmanship.

Both pieces have a great deal of subtle color gradation. Here are the two that were accepted to the show:

Emergence III; 9 x 44 inches; hand-dyed wool tapestry

(Barn burned down) Now I can see the moon; 5.75 x 16.75 inches; hand-dyed wool tapestry

And here they are as displayed at the Center for Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College:

Yep, that is what they really looked like. They might as well have been in a closet the light was so bad. I asked. They said they couldn't do anything about it. Two years ago this show was in another part of the gallery and it was very well lit. It didn't fare so well this year, though some things looked better than others.

So I pulled my pieces off the wall to show to my class. We were learning about color gradation and it was impossible to see the color changes where the pieces were hanging.

Despite my disappointment with the hanging of my own pieces, there were other tapestries in the show which were better lit.

Canyon Sunset
Carolyn Van Sant
cotton

left to right: Asa III by Buff Palm; Turquoise Study by Bettye Sullivan; Midnight by Alex G. Sullivan; Lights by Buff Palm

Asa III by Buff Palm, detail

Mary Cost's piece suffered from the same lack of lighting that mine did.

Grand Slam
Mary Cost

Kathy Spoering's piece was wonderful and the class spent a fair bit of time discussing her color mixing techniques as well as how the eye perceives something like the bright red under the dog's neck (which does not look bright red unless your face is right in the tapestry). An enchanting piece for which she received the Northern Colorado Weaver's Guild award.

August or "The Dog Days of Summer"
Kathy Spoering
wool and cotton

Elizabeth Buckley's piece, Dialogues Through the Veil is beautiful and it was an important center of discussion for the tapestry class on hatching and color use techniques I was teaching at the conference. This piece won the American Tapestry Alliance award which is definitely deserved.

Dialogues Through the Veil
Elizabeth Buckley
wool, cotton, embroidery floss, silk, cotton seine

I love the use of hatching and the shiny effect from the silk and embroidery floss as well as the implied figures throughout the piece and the leaps of imagination it inspires.

Dialogues Through the Veil, detail

Dialogues Through the Veil, detail

I felt like the show was much smaller than it was last year. I focused on the tapestry pieces, but there were many other fantastic fiber works in this show including some amazing three-dimensional pieces. If you get a chance to see it, definitely stop by.

Wrap on a raised warp...

2011-07-17T20:10:00.000-06:00

James always told me, "advancing color wraps on a raised warp"... (Frequently followed by, "why aren't you doing that?").

I am teaching a class at Intermountain Weaver's Conference next weekend (if you're interested there is an unexpected opening or two) and in preparation for this class (Color Gradation for Tapestry) I did a sampler in the hope that my explanations about hatching and hachure would be a little clearer than mud. Since I chose two very contrasting colors to illustrate the hachures we are going to be learning, the results of not wrapping on the correctly oriented warp thread were extremely obvious. I just wanted to share this graphic illustration... And yes, I do realize that you're only going to get a charge out of this if you're a tapestry weaver... and possibly not even then.

This photo is from the back of the weaving (the side facing me as I was weaving). I weave all my tapestries from the back. I don't want to get into why right this moment. I just do. Wrapping an advancing color on a raised warp yields this bumpy hachure.

But magically when you look at the other ("right") side of the tapestry, it looks like I drew those angles with a straight edge. Cool, eh?

Yep, I'm a bit of a weaving nerd.

(Ref at last night's Taos Whiplash bout--"Official Lee Hated" and his NERD socks)

Light from the forest fire...

2011-07-05T22:15:00.000-06:00

I live on a south-east facing flank of a mesa north of Espanola, NM. This mesa blocks my view of the Jemez mountains almost completely. Thursday, Jun 30th at about 10 pm I drove to the top of the mesa and was shocked to see the entire top of the Jemez glowing or with active fires (Las Conchas fire). The bright red-orange flames about 20 miles away in the dark night stopped me cold. Fire is an immensely powerful force.

The play of light with the smoke swirling around my home is dramatic and mesmerizing. I have learned that if I glance up from the loom and see that the sunlight on the ground is reddish I need to check for smoke (and open windows)... but also to go out and look up at the color of the sky.

The smoke makes for exceptionally dramatic sunsets. I did a piece a few years ago in a gradation of these exact colors.

Sunset June 29th from Velarde, NM over the mesa where I live.

I was grateful that I could escape the smoke and heat for a few days this weekend to head to Colorado to spend some time with my family. As of Thursday June 30th, most of New Mexico was under stage III fire restrictions which indicates a complete closing of the forests (and a hopefully temporary end to my NM hiking escapades). As I drove north along Hwy 285 I noticed that every forest service road was gated and signed as closed. Some roads that didn't have gates had newly hung barbed wire across the cattle guards. I pulled over at San Antonio mountain on a road I hoped to go down later this summer for some hiking in the Cruces Basin Wilderness...

San Antonio mountain partially obscured by smoke.

As I was driving home today after enjoying 4 days of relatively smoke-free breathing in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado (which did have visible smoke, but I couldn't smell it), I was shocked to see the Jemez. The fire has wrapped around the north side of the Polvadera and I fear that the entire Jemez Mtn complex is in danger at this point (that is just my supposition)... on the google earth maps it looks like about a third of it has burned already. I just couldn't believe that the fire was so close to Espanola. (We are not in danger from this fire, but many people live in the area where this fire seems to be moving.)

Las Conchas fire from Highway 285 July 5th, 2011

I enjoyed a wonderful weekend of hiking, family, and hummingbird watching. Tomorrow it is back to the loom and hopefully little smoke.

Colorways

2011-06-27T18:40:00.001-06:00

I saw the advertisements recently for the new online magazine (emag) Colorways. I was immediately skeptical as I really love my paper books and magazines. But after seeing several advertisements and investigating the videos about it, I decided to see what it was all about. I have to say that I am really impressed. I suppose this is the wave of the future--online magazines. The interface is really engaging and I loved having videos to go with the articles. The little pop-outs and extra informational boxes that come up when you click on certain prompts are slick and seductive! After playing with it for awhile I realized that not only are there videos, but there are slide shows so you can see many more photographs than you would in a paper magazine. I found the whole thing engaging, easy to navigate, and a lot of fun. Way to go Interweave! (By the way, I don't work for them and am extremely disappointed in the death of Fiber Arts magazine.)

The content of the emag (Colorways: Artisan hues in fiber and fabric), by the way, is natural dyeing and its use all over the world. I loved the pictures of harvesting cochineal and learning about dye techniques such as kakishibu (with video!) was great.

Here is the link, check it out!
http://www.interweavestore.com/Spinning/Magazines/Colorways-Summer-2011-eMag-for-PC.html

And here is a photo I shot heading north out of Santa Fe Saturday afternoon of the Pacheco fire near SF ski basin. Since then a much more dangerous fire has caused the evacuation of Los Alamos, NM.

Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center: keeping the doors open...

2011-06-26T10:28:00.000-06:00

Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center (EVFAC) is an important place. In this northern New Mexico valley, it represents a place where people can go to learn a craft, buy supplies, or teach. They have been there for me in warp emergencies, knitting needle situations, a spinning wheel crisis, and yarn-supply predicaments. They have offered up their reference library and evening lecture series, free spinning Saturdays and knitting get-togethers... And in this recession they are struggling to keep the doors open. It is an organization that has served this community for many years and has managed to expand significantly in the last decade.

EVFAC has a large collection of looms and weaving equipment they use for teaching classes, or you can rent them to do your own project. They have a wide variety of teachers including people like Jason Collingwood, Jennifer Moore, Karen Martinez, Beatrice Maestas Sandoval, Irene Smith, Robin Reider, James Koehler, Connie Enzmann-Forneris, Diane Bowman, Lisa Trujillo, Ted Hallman, and many many more. They also have a dye studio and offer other kinds of fiber and artistic classes (see their class schedule on their website). They support a kids fiber camp in the summer and are teaming up with Northern New Mexico College to offer traditional Rio Grande weaving classes this fall.

They have a great library for members.

And offer frequent lectures and informational events.

Cornelia Theimer Gardella talking about one of her tapestries at EVFAC, April 2011: L to R--Janet Austin, Pamela Topham, Terry Olson, Conni Gardella, Karen Chiu, Joyce Hayes

They showcase work of their members including this wall which was hung for a contemporary tapestry tour of the area in April 2011.

Contemporary tapestry work of Cindy Dworzak and Evelyn Campbell

I didn't really know how I could help the center survive until my partner suggested I teach a class there and donate the proceeds to EVFAC. So now it is scheduled. I'll be teaching Color Gradation for Tapestry September 16-18. See the link with class description HERE. All of the class fees will go to the center. I'll also be showing some slide presentations including one about the Bauhaus project I completed with the late James Koehler and Cornelia Theimer Gardella in 2010.

They have shows of members work. The current show is by Andrea Ortiz.

Traditional tapestry by Andrea Ortiz

There are quilts and clothing as well as felted pieces and baskets.

Here is the magnificent naturally dyed yarn of Liesel Orend (which you can buy!)

And they have a studio space in the back where you can rent space for your loom (or rent a loom too!) and have your own spot to work.

EVFAC has a great newsletter. You can view it HERE. In it you'll find all the scheduled events as well as equipment for sale and information about shows and other happenings. And if you live in some other part of the country, consider a trip to beautiful New Mexico to take a fiber class. Espanola is at the heart of a rich tradition of fiber art and within striking distance of both Taos and Santa Fe.

It is summer!

Go and take a class (consider taking mine! September is beautiful in New Mexico)

or stop by with your knitting and sit on the couch and meet some new fiber friends

or go to one of Jen's spinning Saturdays and pick up some new tips from a master

order some yarn for a project or buy some they have in stock

check out their gallery or enter your own piece to show there

participate in their Ghost Ranch shows

above all, become a member.

A very busy bunch of dye days...

2011-06-24T19:01:00.001-06:00

Three full days of dyeing wool is great exercise. I'm glad I get a break for a few days though as I wait for a dye I don't have to come in. I love experimenting with new colors and found myself warming to the task as the days went along. I started off with some basic colors (actually they look kind of like a candy store to me) and then started pulling out old dye formulas I haven't used in years and giving those a go. It is amazing how many colors you can make--I think the combinations might be infinite.

Candy store colors

I still have a large pile of yarn to turn into balls so it can be used in workshops. I've never seen an electric ball winder, but wish I had such a thing!

I used an emerald green dye I found in my dye stash and ended up with a yarn that looked like it was intentionally variegated it was so uneven. I believe some dyes are more prone to this than others and if I use this dye again I'll have to experiment with another leveling agent. All I used on this skein was glauber's salt. I considered overdyeing it, but decided that it would probably look interesting in a weaving and I'd see what happened.

And I was reading Debbie Herd's blog and pondering her question about whether posting photos of tapestries online before they are exhibited is a good idea. I do think this is a good question. It goes along with my questioning of whether blogging is a good idea in general. I think that the internet can be a benefit to us as artists... but consideration of how we use it is always important. I agree that going to an exhibition and seeing work that hasn't been shown anywhere is exciting. Sometimes I follow this little rule about not posting photos on my blog or website until the show has gone up, and sometimes I don't. It all depends. I think if I were doing a solo show I would wait to post photos until after the opening.

Life in rural New Mexico

2011-06-17T18:09:00.000-06:00

Here is a little photo montage of life in rural northern New Mexico. My question as I look at the photos I take near my home and consider new possibilities in my life is how much environment shapes the art I make. Could I do the same work that I do if I lived in, say, Australia? What about England? I think the work would be different, but I couldn't possibly anticipate in what ways. I think the big sky of the southwestern United States has a big influence on my thinking and vision in terms of making art, but I have no way of testing that (besides moving to New England or to Germany or perhaps the Himalaya... just kidding on that last one--mostly anyway)...

Here is a collection of signs I see on a regular basis in my travels around northern NM and southern Colorado.

This one has survived since the last election--in Cebolla, NM.

In Espanola, as in other parts of the country, "cokes" can mean many kinds of soda... Unfortunately I just missed getting the passing low rider in the shot.

This one is certainly a comment on the continuing land grant disagreements in this part of the state. This sign is near Tierra Amarilla in Rio Arriba county.

This one was actually in the San Luis Valley last fall where you might not be able to get a beer, but you can certainly find a potato!

In Chama, NM-- the rental seems to be missing...

What would New Mexico be without the trail signs? The Continental Divide Trail runs from the Mexican border to Canada through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana. This sign is between Ghost Ranch and Tierra Amarilla.

I love this sign-- and it could only have been created by a West Rim Drive resident, Carson, NM (near Taos)... I like that the word EVOLVE has the word love in it twice when written this way.

And then there are the myriad of cultural influences in NM...

This teepee was across the street from my school housing for most of the year... and regularly used for ceremonies I can attest by the frequent drumming late into the evenings.

The typical lunch selection in small town NM...

This one is from Gallup and every time I see it I think maybe they forgot a "C"... I guess that would be a different kind of business though!

And some special Durango culture, captured by my partner with an iPhone from the passenger seat...

And on the way home today from southern Colorado I ran into several fairly routine obstacles.

A train to wait for...

A herd of cows and their wranglers (the herding dogs were riding in the back of the four-wheeler to the left of the white horse--this is a busy highway, speed limit here was 65 mph--and we have to keep those dogs safe!)...

15 miles later, the requisite farm equipment...

And a northern NM resident doesn't think twice about a washboarded gravel road without guard rails and at least a 12% grade like this being part of a regular commute... heck, the canyon is beautiful!

The land of enchantment.

James Koehler's looms for sale

2011-06-12T16:03:00.000-06:00

James Koehler's death on March 4th, 2011 still seems a little shocking three months later. His memorial service has happened, his studio has been emptied, and his apprentices are trying to help each other with the questions we would have asked James. This is what happens when somebody dies.

James' student looms and most of his studio contents have been sold but there are three of his personal looms left which have to be sold.

This loom is a 56 inch (weaving width) Macomber which is selling for $1800 (there is no need for me to tell a bunch of weavers what a great deal that is!). I believe the bench (which has a slider) is separate. This loom is in fantastic shape and if I didn't already have a Macomber (and if I had any more space for looms which I don't unless I take to sleeping under them), I would purchase it myself. It is an 8 harness loom with a double back beam, one of them sectional.

This is a huge Shannock that James acquired recently. I don't know the weaving width, but it is somewhere between 80 and 100 inches. James was interested in trying vertical weaving again, but had not used it yet when he died. I don't know a price for this loom, but I suspect it would be negotiable.

And this loom caused me much angst and indecision. I very much wanted to purchase this 100 inch (weaving width) Cranbrook, but since it is bigger than my car and my studio is about 180 square feet, eventually I had to decline. This was James' main loom for many years. All the tapestries I saw him weaving were on this loom. It has 6 harnesses though James only has 4 installed. I believe it comes with several reeds. There is a long sliding bench which is extra. It has locking treadles and James wove at it standing up (notice it is up on 2 by 6's). It is in beautiful shape and has the added bonus of being used by a master weaver for at least 20 years. I don't know the final price for this loom, but trust me, it is criminally low. This particular loom is no longer made (and hasn't been for decades).

If you are seriously interested in purchasing one of these looms (or there is also some of his hand-dyed yarn left), you can contact me at the comments section of this blog or through my website.

I am hoping that someone who loves weaving and will appreciate the master who wove on these looms will purchase one of them and continue to love them for many years to come. And if you buy the Cranbrook, can I come and visit it? (kidding, I'm just kidding on that last bit-- mostly anyway)

Weaving progress... last four days

2011-06-07T19:35:00.000-06:00

Sometimes things move along at a very heartening pace...
Here I am after one day beginning a new piece which is 45 inches square. (There are actually several colors here, you just can't see them in the photo.)

Day 1

6/4/11

Day 2

6/5/11

Note the quick progress here. I decided it would be smart to activate the date stamp on my camera to "prove" how fast I was progressing, though bright and skeptical family members might remind me that it can be easily changed to whatever I want it to be.

Day 3

Then things slowed down a little...

This photo was taken after a 4 mile, 3,000 foot climb. That be some steep hiking (and we took the wussy trail).

Wheeler Peak from Lobo Peak (New Mexico Sangre de Cristos)

Cassy loves spring snow on a hot belly.

Day 4

And here is today's progress... I think it was three sequences.

But I did work in the studio all day. It was just that I had to figure out what I was doing once I finished the border, and it took this to do it.

Those are various color combinations I was trying out for one aspect of the tapestry. I just hope they work out once I put them in the actual piece or it is more sampling for me. I often don't take the time to do a sample of something, but do realize that it really does help figure out what is going to work and what is going to be a colossal mistake.

A new tapestry teacher emerges...

2011-06-04T10:52:00.000-06:00

I always thought I would teach tapestry "someday". After all, I have been a teacher since I was an undergraduate, teaching piano to preschoolers, then running my own piano studio in graduate school, teaching a couple sections of 200 undergraduates medical terminology as a graduate teaching assistant, and then pretty much my entire subsequent career as an occupational therapist (teaching is teaching whether you're showing someone where middle C is or how to wipe their butt after a spinal surgery--just sayin').

Until my own teacher died three months ago today, I hadn't thought I would teach tapestry for a few more years. But here I am and I am very excited about this new journey. I have things to say and my own voice to say them in, so what better way to spend my time then showing people how exciting tapestry can be? Teaching was incredibly important to James and I still feel that he would want me to teach now that he cannot do it himself anymore. I hope I'm right about that James!

I'm starting out with a workshop at Intermountain Weaver's Conference in Durango in July. IWC has been a great conference for me. I love Durango and have enjoyed the atmosphere there studying on the Fort Lewis College campus. I'll be teaching a class about color gradation for tapestry. My work is full of this kind of color shifting as I find it fascinating, so I am looking forward to showing other weavers how to do this. I am also looking forward to the learning that I know I will do as part of this process. I know there will be questions that I hadn't considered. Perhaps that is the best thing about being a teacher--the way it pushes you to learn more yourself.

Contemplative Garden, 30 x 48 inches, hand-dyed wool tapestry

Emergence II, 44 x 44 inches, hand-dyed wool tapestry

So today marks the day when I start a summer of tapestry focus. My school year is completed (I buy groceries mostly with my paycheck as an occupational therapist working in the public schools) and I am ready to begin. I have a multitude of projects to complete in the next 6 weeks and I'm so excited about each of them I don't know where to start today--probably that is why I'm blogging instead! In the next week or so I'll be dyeing pounds and pounds of student yarn, beginning a big tapestry for an upcoming show, completing a sampler for one of the classes I'll be teaching this summer, working on powerpoint presentations for the classes, helping a friend put on a sectional warp, and finishing a design for a commission I hope to weave later this summer. Okay, perhaps that is more than anyone can do in a week...

And for those of you in one of my upcoming classes on color gradation for tapestry, check out this online article by Kathe Todd-Hooker about ways to achieve optical blending with yarn. Kathe is a brilliant woman and successful tapestry weaver who has published several books and runs her own fiber art company. This article contains a lot of information that is similar to what we will be practicing in the class.

My best weaving buddy Cassy who is going to help me decide which project to start with today... or perhaps just snore.

And as a random post-script to this post:
I just returned from a trip to Michigan for my grandmother's funeral. I had to check out the local yarn shop, Threadbender. It was a great place. There was a weaving class going on--but the shop is so full of yarn that the looms are tucked into corners. You're looking for Mini Mochi for a hat and you round a corner to find a woman working on summer and winter on a Baby Wolf.

And this last photo is for my Grandmother Thelma who died Friday May 27th. Thank you for living an inspired life Grandma. We'll miss you!

Eldorado Studio Tour

2011-05-26T14:00:00.001-06:00

I was able to take a few hours and see part of the Eldorado Studio Tour the 15th of May. This studio tour is impressive. Their brochure was beautiful with good photos of some work so you could start forming some plan of attack. There were 75 studios to visit, so seeing all of them was definitely not possible. There was a preview gallery which was very helpful as I could tell right away what art I wanted to see more of and what I wanted to skip.

Eldorado Studio Tour preview gallery

This is Sheila Burke, tapestry artist. She has just finished this beautiful studio (of which admittedly I was very jealous).

And a beautiful doubleweave shawl by Jennifer Moore.

NM Fiber Arts Trails in Texas!

2011-05-25T20:02:00.001-06:00

This is what I saw in a rack card display at a Ramada Inn in Dallas, Texas last weekend. I wasn't supposed to be in a Ramada Inn in Texas, but I was interested to see how far afield the NM Fiber Arts Trails brochures had made it. Unfortunately it was 5am on the day I was already supposed to be in Gulfport, MS for a wedding. Through a series of travel mishaps involving thunderstorms and perhaps bad luck, I got to spend a night in Dallas (and fortunately not on one of those piles of cots I saw in the airport the next morning!). Could be worse I suppose--I did make it to the wedding in time.

I was a little afraid that my pilot would be raptured while we were in the air, but apparently he was enough of a sinner that he was able to land the plane safely.

After my 5:30am arrival at the airport for a 9am flight (I was hoping to get an earlier flight or perhaps just hedging against more bad luck as most people hadn't been lucky enough to get a confirmed seat on a flight to the coast) I decided to check out the art in terminal D. There was a descriptive brochure to show me around... This thing made music when you walked through it.

But mostly I just knitted. This photo reminds me of the last time I flew--a similar photo in the Frankfurt airport sometime in the middle of the night...

Dallas Fort-Worth May 2011

Frankfurt, Germany September 2010

Eventually after reading a National Geographic article on climbing in Yosemite I moved on to the People magazine's issue about the Royal Wedding... at this point I felt my intelligence leaking into the sticky vinyl seats and had to talk sternly to myself to keep from moving on to the Enquirer. I was afraid if I sunk that far the white-coated people would find me under the yogurt cart rocking and mumbling.

I wondered many times what the point of all that self-imposed torture was, but of course we want to get places quickly these days and can't stand it when we are delayed by hours or days. Perhaps a little Buddhist perspective might get me through the next one... increase compassion, try to talk to fellow travelers (if absolutely necessary), and let the little wheelchair ladies go in front of you in line. Who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and get to sit by a guide dog.

I am looking down the mouth of another airplane trip (I'll be carbon off-setting these flights forever) and I really hope the next blog post doesn't include a photo with knitting and a sleeping guy in the Detroit or Chicago airports.

Guess what-- coming home I couldn't get out of Gulfport and finally got a flight from Memphis to ABQ (a day and 8 hours of driving later) which stopped in, you guessed it, Dallas. Joining the throngs of cranky air travel people in Dallas for another terminal tour and then I finally made it home.

But, despite the flying difficulties, I had a fantastic weekend... here are some highlights.

Osprey nest seen from Papa John's boat tour. See the baby?

Alligator, also on the boat tour. We didn't feed any of the kids to this old lady.

And because of the drive north to Memphis I got to see Clark play baseball. He was awesome.

Walking on the beach in Gulfport.

And this is Jiggy. He should be my mascot. He was chewed up by a Rottweiler and put together by Emily's brother-in-law (who is actually a veterinarian fortunately). He is one tough little dude. Sometimes his eyeballs still pop out, but Dr. J just pops them back in. Sometimes you've gotta be tough.

Young artists and occupational therapy

2011-05-16T07:40:00.000-06:00

This is Megan. I wrote another post about her here when she wove this watermelon tapestry last summer. Megan is now 11 years old (and definitely smarter than me if you go by IQ scores) and I'm hoping she is going to come here again this summer to weave another tapestry. (Oh wait, that last part might just be my goal not hers.)

I work in a rural New Mexico school system, and as I wrote on that post last summer about Megan, I was hoping to do some weaving with the kids this year. I was not able to pull together a tapestry weaving project due to my heavy caseload, but I did pull out an inkle loom and interested a few kids in weaving inkle bands. Some kids who tried this had a great deal of difficulty sequencing raising and lowering the warp, putting the shuttle through in the correct direction, and then beating before going the other way. I found that it was a great exercise in so many ways: fine motor skills, visual-perception, cognition, attention, self-regulation... a great task for an occupational therapy session. I think my older kids could handle a small tapestry or something on the cardboard looms in Sarah Swett's book Kid's Weaving. Hopefully next year.

This child did the best of any child who tried it, but she is also the one who doesn't qualify for OT!

This is another amazing young lady I had the privilege of meeting last weekend (see blog post here). Railynn is a natural artist who jumped right into our art journaling retreat. Quite frankly, some of her work looked much better than mine. I think that is thanks to lack of inhibition and no fear of failure. I think most adults should take a page from the kids book of life... especially artists.

This is an art piece I saw hanging in the elementary grade 3-5 hall last year sometime. I was never able to find out who the artist was, but it is one of my favorite pieces of art ever. I want to weave it just like this, but fear that plagiarizing a 10 year old is probably not going to increase my karma any.

Kids are amazing (and I don't have any of my own, so maybe that is partly why I feel that way). They will often tell you their bottom line without any prompting--oh how I wish sometimes adults would do that. When it comes to being an artist, children have no inhibitions (until we implant them) and they believe in what they can do. My preschool, kindergarten, and first graders have great opinions of their abilities as artists. It is when I start asking 4th and 5th graders that I hear how they are "bad at art" or "can't draw". I think the world would be a better place if we never taught children things like that. If every kid graduated from high school thinking they were creative or artistic in some way, we would have given them the greatest gift possible.

Studios...

2011-05-15T08:16:00.003-06:00

What does it mean to have my own studio (besides that I feel great when I tell someone I'm "working in my studio")? For me it is a space for work and reflection. A quiet spot where (if I remember to turn off the phone and computer) I can get lost in the work of making art. Sometimes time even slows down.

James' studio was a place he built himself. It was a beautiful space full of tapestries, yarn, looms, and creative people. It was a welcoming place where a lot of learning (and a lot of skut work) happened. Not to mention the amazing tapestries he created there. It is hard to think about everything being dispersed. His studio sale was May 2nd and so now he will have to live on in our memories and through our work.

James Koehler Studio, Santa Fe, NM

First spring flowers in front of James' studio, March 2011.
We'll miss you James.

The much-awaited tapestry retreat

2011-05-14T09:02:00.002-06:00

Arizona, specifically the Navajo Indian reservation, is a fantastically stunning place--quiet and slow-moving, full of mesas and sandstone formations, but also full of big trucks and rutted roads (perhaps the roads help explain the quiet). It is a huge reservation and I have only been in a few parts of it... but the places I have had the privilege of visiting are undeniably beautiful.

Searing sunshine
Sand storms that will make you weep
Huge expanses of sky
Snakes, coyotes, elk, and of course sheep and horses (the last two are domestic)
Mud and the dryest clay
The reddest rocks
A wide array of plants and flowers
Juniper and sage scent released in the rain storm
Fantastic sandstone formations in all shades of tan, red, and green

I grew up in Gallup, NM where many who live in the southeast corner of the reservation go to visit what was, when I was young, the largest Walmart in the world. I saw the huge lumps of mud left behind in the car washes, I attended a boarding school with mostly native children, and I took the yearly trips to Canyon de Chelly National Monument and Hubbells Trading Post with my family when I was growing up. But I never really got a chance to feel the reservation any deeper until last weekend.

I was invited to a small tapestry retreat by a group of friends who have been supporting each other's art for years now. I am still honored to have been invited. Thank you Lyn Hart, Jane Hoffman, and DY Begay for your welcome, your wonderful gluten-free cooking, your advice, and your laughter.

The retreat took place at DY Begay's reservation home not far from Chinle, AZ. We brought art supplies and got a whirlwind workshop from Lyn on art journaling. This was so much fun for me. This mixed media pursuit was something that made me let go of my notions of how things "should" be and allowed me to play. I felt myself letting go of all my recent stress just hours after I arrived.

Here are some photos of our retreat. I even got my Mirrix warped.

DY shows one of her latest weavings. (My abject apologies that I cannot remember what the title is.) The color in her work is so rich and deep. Photos don't begin to capture her use of natural dyes and color choices in the weaving.

Lyn Hart showed us her condor project. She was an artist-in-residence at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon last summer and as a result of that she is weaving a full sized condor to hang in the visitor's center there. In case it escapes you, a condor's wing span can be over 9 feet. Lyn's tapestry is 6 feet wide and 10 feet high. The sheer magnitude of weaving this boggles my mind, but Lyn seems to have the whole process well in hand. I can't wait to visit it when it is installed.

Initial drawing for condor piece with condor photo on transparency

Lyn Hart

It was wonderful to get to know Jane Hoffman a little better. Her gentle spirit and vast knowledge of all things fiber were inspiring. Here she is with her art journaling portrait. Jane is a natural dyer and weaves wonderful tapestries. She has also done a lot of teaching and gave me some good tips. She made this pipe loom adding many custom touches. I'm not sure you could find a better portable loom than a Jane Hoffman!

Here are some examples of the art journaling process we were exploring. This WEAVE page is unfinished in this photograph, but you can see how we created a ground color then added elements. Eventually most of this was painted over!

This spread was done in an old journal I had. The pages were too thin so I had to glue several together. I attached a map of the reservation and added a pocket for a piece of DY's naturally dyed yarn.

Detail of the right page. You can see how I used pages torn from a dictionary and then painted gesso and acrylic paint over top so that the original pictures were obscured. My morning tea fortune also made it onto this page.

This creation was done on top of a painting that was in this old Heron Dance journal. I liked how the aspen trees made a background for my sketch of the mountains.

We all dreaded and I think finally enjoyed the portrait exercise. I know this looks nothing like me, but it was fun to do and I'll probably do it again.

DY's niece came to the studio Sunday afternoon and made art with us. She is only 8 years old, but clearly has a very artistic spirit. It turns out Lyn is a good teacher of both eccentric tapestry weavers and elementary-aged children.

The group with our portrait pages.

The beauty of the Arizona desert and the calm surroundings of DY's home (as well as her spirit) left me feeling rejuvenated. In fact I may have stopped at the art store in Taos today to get a few more supplies!

I stopped along the north rim of Canyon de Chelly on my way back east.

Donna Loraine Contractor's new show at Weaving Southwest

2011-05-13T17:08:00.000-06:00

I had to go to Taos today so I stopped by Weaving Southwest to investigate Donna Loraine Contractor's new show. I was unable to be at the opening last weekend, but I hear it was well-attended.

I had heard that the show was going to be hung from the ceiling, but I couldn't quite envision how this was going to work. To be honest, I was a bit skeptical. But I have to say (at least in the bright light of day) that it was quite effective to see all those window pieces hanging from the ceiling (but watch out lest you walk into one!). Teresa Loveless and her trusty crew hung them on monofilament--the filament went through the hollow lucite bars that Donna uses to hang her pieces. With the pieces hung from two points on the ceiling, this allowed them to be leveled easily (especially when the wind had other ideas).

On the back wall from left to right are three pieces each of Letitia Roller, Mary Zicafoose, and Robin Reider.

Here is my grouping: Emergence II (the one with the blue square and spiral), Inscription (two green panels), and the small one underneath is called Spaces: Pause.

These three pieces are by another favorite tapestry artist of mine, LaDonna Mayer of Santa Fe. We are all anxiously awaiting her city-scapes... though I fear we may have to wait awhile to see them unveiled!

These three pieces are by Michael Rohde, another favorite tapestry artist.

And here is a somewhat clearer shot of Letitia Roller's three pieces.

And finally here is a photo of me and my new haircut...

Oh wait, sorry, that is Hilary Swank. My teeth aren't that white, but otherwise the resemblance is uncanny, don't you think?

A fantastic find in Portland...

2011-04-19T09:14:00.000-06:00

Today I reached a life-long dream of visiting Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland, Oregon. It was raining and then HAILING, I had no umbrella and had 10 blocks to walk from the MAX station, but I was not going to be deterred from this destination under any circumstances.

There were maps of the store. Yes, maps so that when you circled the 8 aisles of cookbooks and couldn't find your way back to travel, you might be able to find your way back to the front of the store. Of course under the armload of books I was toting and lacking a compass, I was forced to use my cell phone to locate Emily and call for assistance. I might still be there otherwise.

I was so impressed with this (independent!) bookstore. They had two entires shelves about pirates. Here is the evidence:

I don't actually read books about pirates, but the fact that there was a two-shelf section devoted to them was impressive to me (Dad, they had 10 shelves about sailing and nautical navigation!).

Here is a photo of most of the books I came home with--a bunch were on sale too! I have wanted the Diary of Frida Kahlo for awhile and they had a nice used copy. I am excited about the John Berger book. It looks to be about art and the way we see things--a favorite topic of mine. And the Making Color Sing book was a difficult decision. It is written for painters, but seemed to have such great suggestions for color use that ultimately it came with me too. It didn't seem quite like your average color book that just goes over color theory. She has examples of how to make certain areas of a painting pop out using color and other tricks that I haven't seen anywhere else. I just hope I can translate paint to dye pot.

Throw in a climbing book, a Portland guide and a book about Crater Lake which I hope to see later in the week (the lake that is as I already have the book)... and you have a nice little load to put my suitcase over the weight limit on the way home.

And for those of you New Mexicans who have never seen a jackalope, I saw one who had visited a taxidermist and now lives in the Old Curiosity shop in downtown Seattle.

Chimayo weaving with Lisa Trujillo

2011-04-05T17:13:00.000-06:00

The American Tapestry Alliance offered a workshop in conjunction with the opening of the Small Tapestry International 2: Passages show at Weaving Southwest. The workshop was April 3-5 at Weaving Southwest in Taos, New Mexico.

Lisa Trujillo taught a class on Chimayo weaving. Lisa and her husband Irvin Trujillo own Centinela Traditional Arts in Chimayo, New Mexico. Both are internationally known for their weaving. Their business employs many local weavers which allows people who wouldn't otherwise be able to sell their weaving to make a living.

There were 6 enthusiastic women from all over the country who came to Taos to relax and learn some traditional weaving from a master weaver. Lisa proved to be an exceptional teacher and I recommend taking a workshop from her if you are interested in traditional hispanic weaving. I'm hoping she'll eventually make her beautifully written handout into a technique book.

After a bit of a fight to tie up the big Rio Grande looms (Rachel Brown style Rio Grandes) to two treadles instead of four (they were four harness looms), we were off and running. The class was full of people who had done a lot of weaving and they quickly picked up the Rio Grande techniques. Some amazing little weavings were created in just a few days.

Lisa Trujillo at Weaving Southwest with the Small Tapestry International show behind her.

Barbara Richards in front of some great tapestry.

Judy Sutton

Erika Scott and Terry Olson creating some complicated designs.

We did figure out that the beating of the Rio Grandes was enough vibration to knock all those small format tapestries askew. I kept fixing them until I realized that they were crooked again immediately. I'm sure once the looms are gone the tapestries will stay put.

Small Tapestry International 2: Passages Opening

2011-04-03T21:28:00.000-06:00

Yesterday evening was the opening of the American Tapestry Alliance's small format juried show, Small Tapestry International 2: Passages. The opening was from 5-7 at Weaving Southwest in Taos, New Mexico.

The show looks wonderful. It runs through May 1st here before it heads to other venues. Go see it. It is not only well hung but the work is marvelous.

My piece, center top, Barn Burned Down (now I can see the moon).

New Mexico ATA Studio Tour

2011-04-03T20:46:00.000-06:00

Today was the American Tapestry Alliance (ATA) tour of some NM tapestry studios. This tour was organized by ATA in conjunction with the Small Tapestry International 2: Passages show opening at Weaving Southwest this evening.

I, along with Cornelia Theimer Gardella, had the pleasure of shlepping all over northern NM with a van-full of fantastic people driven by the most excellent Raymond.

It was a beautiful day and after leaving the Taos Inn here is some of what we saw:

Isn't this a great building?

Joyce Hayes and Irene Smith, owner of Metier Gallery.

Metier Gallery is a wonderful tapestry studio in the center of Dixon. Irene Smith is a renowned tapestry weaver and basket maker who welcomed us into her wonderful studio gallery to see her work and the work of some other weavers.

After the fantastic suggestion by Raymond to take the scenic high road from Dixon to Chimayo, we visited Centinela Traditional Arts. This wonderful studio and gallery is owned by Lisa and Irvin Trujillo who have both earned numerous awards as weavers of traditional Chimayo-style textiles.

Irvin Trujillo's work

Lisa Trujillo working at her loom as she explains Chimayo weaving to the group.

Irvin Trujillo weaving at his amazing 12 foot wide, self-built loom.

Our next stop was Rancho de Chimayo for lunch. I have not been to this famous restaurant for many years and after the fantastic lunch there, I am certain I'll be returning soon. They did a great job with our group of 11 including accommodating my gluten intolerance with ease.

The group eating: Alan enjoyed several of their excellent margaritas.

Conni had a prickly pear lemonade which was a fantastic shade of pink.

After lunch we visited Ortega's weaving shop in Chimayo.

Our final stop of the day was Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center. This amazing fiber arts center was extremely accommodating. Cornelia and I did a short presentation about contemporary tapestry weaving in northern New Mexico. Here Conni is talking about one of her pieces, Passages.

Work of Evelyn Campbell and Cindy.

Two EVFAC members brought in their contemporary pieces for our perusal.

We made it back to Taos just in time for the opening at Weaving Southwest. A great day in sunny northern New Mexico was had by all.