Tapestry Diary

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Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

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Weaving circles with hand-dyed tapestry yarn

Making circles is a tricky thing in tapestry weaving. To weave a circle we believe is round, you have to trick the eye or make it really big. Tapestry is woven on a grid and to make a form perfectly circular means you basically take a square and cut the corners off. If your tapestry is huge, then this illusion is not as hard to make, though it IS still quite difficult to make a perfectly round circle given fiber’s propensity to squish and move about.

If your circles are small, it is all the harder because you don’t have very many warps to convince us that what is a shape with steps is really round.

Relying on ritual: The Year of Rosie

Relying on ritual: The Year of Rosie

I definitely notice how much I rely on familiar rituals when things change in my life. Emily and I have been taking care of a little dog named Rosie for the last year. Her family went overseas on a research fellowship and they couldn’t take her along. We haven’t had a dog since Cassy died in 2013 and after taking care of her for a few days and being completely charmed by her adorableness, we agreed to take her for the year. She needed a house without other pets or kids and we definitely qualified.

Rosie’s family came home last weekend and she went home to them this week. It was so hard to let her go, but seeing her absolute overwhelming joy at seeing them again made it worth it. She was beside herself when she realized who was in front of her. I do wonder what dogs think when their lives change. She took a few months to really blossom with us but I hope she goes right back to her old life now that she is home again.

Wander. Weaving through July...

Wander. Weaving through July...

I’ve been focusing on my tapestry diary for the last couple months. I started doing these small tapestries based on things I see around me again because I am teaching an online course about this practice (see Summer of Tapestry). But I quickly remembered that the process of weaving small, quickly finished tapestries in which I explore something I saw or a feeling I had are a great way for me to remain grounded when the world feels a little haywire.

It has encouraged me to finish some of the tapestries from Iceland which, though a bit larger than my normal tapestry diary piece, are still in the same vein. I’ve planned a few more tapestries from Icelandic inspiration and I’ve also finished quite a few small pieces from Colorado inspirations. I talked about the rose tapestry in THIS blog post. I titled that post “What would you weave if you knew you could not fail?” because that is such an important part of weaving these small things for me. There are no rules. I have no expectation of ever showing these pieces. I am not worrying about technique or whether they are “good”. I’m just playing.

What would you weave if you knew you could not fail?

What would you weave if you knew you could not fail?

. . . So I spent last weekend sitting still and doing some small weavings. I watched my judgey monkey brain say, that is too simple. That is too small. You’ll never express anything if you choose this. And I told that little voice to step off, grabbed the yarn colors of the roses in my back yard, and started weaving. These rose bushes were here when I moved in. They’re hardy. They have to be because I don’t do much besides occasionally aim the hose in their general direction and trim them back at the end of the season. They seem perfectly happy to offer up white and pink blooms year after year and I admire that persistence.

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Summer of Tapestry. Let's take a good wander.

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Summer of Tapestry. Let's take a good wander.

I can pinpoint the moment when I started my practice of sketch tapestry. I had just driven 70 miles from my childhood home in Gallup, NM to Petrified Forest National Park in early November of 2016 through a driving rainstorm. It was the kind of rain that the desert longs for. The rain that fills the arroyos to gushing almost instantly. The rain that makes the desert smell like sage and wet sand.

I arrived at the national park to start my artist residency just as the sun came out. As I was taking my looms and yarn out of my car and settling into the casita I would live in for the month, a rainbow appeared over the painted desert just outside.

Cameron Peak Fire revisited

Cameron Peak Fire revisited

The Cameron Peak Fire burned 326 square miles near my home in 2020.* It started August 13th and was finally declared controlled in January of 2021. All four of the trails I backpacked prior to August 13th in 2020 burned in the fire as did every other trail near home on my hiking bucket list. The forest is closed in most of the burn area and likely will remain so for a very long time as the dangers to people, the land, and the watershed are many. Regeneration will happen but the fire burned very hot in places and the soil was destroyed. That means things won’t grow back there any time soon and that soil will erode and negatively impact our water supply and the habitat of everything that lives near this zone.

If you followed me during the worst months of the fire, you know how much grief the loss of these places in the form I knew them brought up for me. I wove four small tapestries about the fire and will probably weave more in the series. These are small 3 x 3 inch tapestry diary pieces. All four are woven as if I’m standing in the same place looking at the same mountain in the Rawah Wilderness. But they could represent any of the hundreds of miles of trail that existed in the burn area.

The first two I wove on the same warp. The initial weaving was from an image I took on a hike just north of where the fire started. I took this image on my birthday which was August 5th. As I left the wilderness the next day, I distinctly remember thinking, 4 days in this wilderness wasn’t long enough, but I’ll be back soon. Less than a week later, the Cameron Peak Fire started in a place I could have seen from where I took this image. (Not all of the Rawah burned. The beginning of the trail to get to this place burned but I don’t believe the spot where this photo was taken did. This tree may still be standing and since it is probably many hundreds of years old, I hope it is. One day when it is safe, I will go and check.)

Weaving about the Cameron Peak Fire, Part 2

Weaving about the Cameron Peak Fire, Part 2

Several weeks ago I wrote a post about the start of the Cameron Peak Fire in northern Colorado. This fire has brought up some challenging emotions for me and I’m sure I’m not done dealing with all of them.

This fire started August 13th high up near the Continental Divide near Chambers Lake. It was started by a person though the details have not been publicly released yet. It was a bluebird day. The fire sat at around 25,000 acres for a long time—weeks, and I was lulled into some sense of hope that it wouldn’t grow much more before the snows came. But fire is fickle and a beast waiting for just the right weather conditions. Last weekend the fire more than tripled with one run of 10 miles.