slowly she turned

I am back to really enjoying weaving again. There’s something about laying in that yarn to fill those spaces – so simple but can be so complex.

Here’s what the inside of my studio looks like now. Sandy has decided that he is happier painting in his man-cave where he can access photos on his computer, but he still has a space there. I decided that I want to use it for my tapestry studio so I moved a lot of my tapestry stuff back there. I’m using his easel for the frame loom that I am weaving the weather diary on. Once this weather diary project is done, this frame loom is either going to be upcycled or sent to the landfill. It’s done well in its forty plus years but it is tired and the nails are rusty and it doesn’t want to hold tension anymore. I TOTALLY GET THIS.

^^^JULY: I’ve kept up with the weather diary so that seems to be a good tapestry diary theme for me that cuts through the depression days. One thing is for sure – there will be weather every day. Above you can see that July was particularly hot, and set a record in this area for the average maximum low temperature at night. HAR stands for Harrisburg, PA, where I attended the Art and Soul Retreat. That will be a separate post.

^^^Above is the panel for January through April.

I had to cut off the May through June panel because the tension became impossible to deal with by the last week of June. I think it was the humidity. Look at all that rain in the middle column! 38 stands for our wedding anniversary, and EL is when I went to Elkin, NC for a tapestry workshop and the Tapestry Weavers South retreat. WAC stands for the ten days we spent at Lake Waccamaw, NC. Whenever I travel, I indicate the weather in that location. It was incredibly hot that week in North Carolina.

My latest tapestry project (above) is using the leftover warp and some of the yarns that I used in Betty Hilton-Nash’s tapestry vessel workshop in early June. It was from a design exercise she had us do in the workshop. I plan to do some extra surface embellishment – probably attaching found objects or stitching. I’m following my nose on this one.

Below is what is on the other side of the loom – to be the side(s) of the vessel that I wove in Betty’s workshop. Once I finish up the tapestry above, it will all get cut off and hopefully I will finish the vessel, which I designed from a photo I took in Scotland at Neptune’s Staircase, a historic lock system with eight locks near Fort William that connects the Calendonian Canal with Loch Linnhe. I’m calling it “Loch Lock.”