slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Art and Soul Retreat, July 2025

    In mid-July, I flew to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for three classes at the Art and Soul Retreat. It’s been a long time since I attended one of these. I enjoy them so much.

    When Seth Apter announced his classes at this retreat about a year ago, I signed up for “Within the Layers” immediately because I knew it would fill quickly. I planned to drive at first, but since I had enough miles to fly “free” on United, and both of our cars are nearing the 20 year old mark, I decided that it would be safer to fly. I registered for two more classes: “Copper Journal” with Thomas Ashman, and “Encaustics for All” with Lisa Bebi.

    Without a doubt, I was most satisfied with Seth’s class. I came out of it with a small book that was deeply meaningful to me. We were making gelli prints and stamping and stenciling and making marks on papers for the books, and one of my old papers stuck to the gelli plate. I loved the colors but I had to peel it off in pieces. When I started collaging the pieces to my book pages, I started thinking about how it is possible to see and make beauty out of destruction. Which led me to thinking about the destruction that Hurricane Helene left behind in western North Carolina and how it is still being reconstructed and rebuilt and cleaned up. The debris left in Helene’s wake also led to wildfires months later. My book morphed into these feelings about my sorrow and hope for western North Carolina.

    Here’s a slideshow of the pages. I’ve yet to bind the book and I might not do so, since I am happy with the band around the cover.

    On the third day I took a class from Thomas Ashman, hoping to improve my metalworking skills. I had a vision for this book, which in hindsight I should maybe have abandoned. I didn’t do the patinas and torching the covers that the others did, and now I regret it. Anyhow, I may dissemble this and re-do it. It’s wonky, and I’m not completely happy with it.

    The object on the front came from the flea market in Lisbon. When you remove the little pen on the right, it opens up to where a notepad would be. The pages are marbling samples that I made with my friend Susanne, with some noodling around on the backs of them. Those need some more “work.”

    In Lisa Bebi’s “Encaustics for All” class, she pretty much set things up, gave us some demos, and let us go. She brought all the supplies! I was really happy with playing in this class, especially when I found an old photograph of Betty White in the collage materials. Sadly, by the second morning, I found that I was too allergic to the fumes to continue the class and had to drop out. I was disappointed because I’ve wanted to learn encaustics for a long time. I’ll have to do it with a mask on next time, because it should not have been the room, which was HUGE with a high ceiling. Maybe at home on the front porch with fans going would work.

    encaustic collage with photo of young Betty White titled "What Would Saint Betty Do"
    “What Would Saint Betty Do?”
    alligator dragonfly

    I stayed in a cheaper hotel about five minutes away but I found that the traffic made it too dangerous to walk there, so I used Uber every day and it worked out. I made friends who I went to lunch and dinner and had drinks with. I always leave these events feeling like I’ve left my tribe behind, which is why I am friends with so many artists I’ve met at these retreats on Facebook and Instagram. It has enriched my life exponentially.

    The weather was wild on the East Coast on the day that I flew back. I compounded the wait at the airport by going straight there after I checked out of the hotel, because I felt sure that I had lost my eyeglasses there on the way into town. No luck, but they were an old pair and I had already ordered a new prescription, so it wasn’t a big deal since I wasn’t driving. Then our 2 p.m. flight was delayed again and again and again because of ground delays at my connecting airport, Dulles. Then I missed my connection at Dulles but was able to get on a later flight home. When we landed in Greensboro, it was in the middle of an intense thunderstorm and we sat on the tarmac in the plane until 15 minutes after the last lightning within five miles. Sandy was waiting inside. But I got my luggage, yay, and we got home at about 2:30 a.m. We’ve gotta expect this kind of thing with extreme weather caused by climate change already here to stay.

  • Art Catch-Up Post

    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.”

  • Wednesday evening

    I cannot believe it is Wednesday. Wow. My sense of time is so out of whack.

    I guess it is official now that I really do plan to go to Art and Soul in Harrisburg, PA this July because I bought plane tickets yesterday. Actually, I used miles. My Chase United card sent an email that they are raising my fee next year, so I decided to use up my points and cancel it. I don’t particularly feel safe to fly anywhere right now and had planned to drive, but realized that driving over eight hours one way in an almost 20 year old car probably wasn’t the safest or cheapest way to go.

    Anyway, I had registered months ago for one of Seth Apter’s two day classes because I knew it would fill quickly (it did) and then added a couple more along the way: a copper book class with Thomas Ashman, and a two day encaustics for beginners class with Lisa Bebi. I’ve been curious about encaustics for a long time.

    I booked a room at a cheaper hotel about five minutes away, but I wonder now if it would be cheaper to find a roommate and stay at the venue than to walk or get a Lyft. I just hate to subject anyone to my snoring, which is usually not too bad according to those who have heard it, but right now with my allergies I’ve been waking myself up!

    So that’s on my mind, as well as two retreats I plan to attend at Wildacres in Little Switzerland in the fall. I’ll go to the Tapestry Weavers South retreat and exhibit opening in Elkin in early June, but that’s only a little over an hour’s drive away. I’ll talk about those later.

    Anticipation of these events makes me happy.

    I spent some time in the studio yesterday and re-watched Tara Axford’s online class in Collage Maker’s Summit and made two collages from only discarded cardboard. I like the dimensional quality and the simplicity of these, and will do the rest of the lesson. Not sure if I will paint these or not.

    What I really feel good about, though, is that I worked some more on this collage which I call “aneuch,” because it actually WASN’T “enough,” but I couldn’t figure it out. What did it need? Sometimes it is good to spend time away from a piece.

    “aneuch” before
    “aneuch” after

    It was too clean and orderly before. I’m more of a grungy type. By the way, that wood scrap is a piece of the studio roof I found in the yard.

    The window AC unit has already arrived and man, is it heavy! Sandy and I will wrestle it into that window somehow but I’m glad it is for a ground floor window. I figure that it will be good to have a back-up if our house central AC unit goes out again, because we had two very expensive repairs to it two years apart. Of course the second one came just after the warranty expired on the first repair. We could move this window unit to the house if necessary. It is refurbished but it looks brand new.

    We lived without air conditioning for years until I hit peri-menopause and that was the end of that. I can’t stand the humid heat. But I do use our ceiling fans and other methods of cooling our space when I can. This is one reason I’d have to be desperate to move south of here.

    Okay, hopefully my mood will stay stable enough to keep doing art and posting. Cheers.

  • Tuesday morning coffee pot post

    No April Fool’s today. Nothing could shock me. I would believe anything.

    I can’t seem to deal with updating this website. I don’t want to make anything for sale. I haven’t been doing my stitch meditations for the past week. I don’t feel like starting seeds or planting anything. I don’t care about cooking any more. I have been doing a few other things though, so I’m not a total wipeout.

    The weather temps are beginning to result in blocks of warm colors for the high temperature column in the tapestry diary. Pretty soon the blues in the low temp column will be set aside. Greens are coming in more often for spring, and yellow, appropriately for today, considering the record high pollen count in our already pollen-ous city. I’ve learned that the Weather Underground history is often wrong, so I rely more on my observations for the center column. I am playing chicken with that light gray and gold yarn, although I have yarns in about the same shades to replace them, I’d hoped to use the same ones throughout April.

    Mostly I’ve been working in or on the back studio building. A handy friend of ours came over and fixed the doorknob and the cracked door frame for us, as well as a door knob inside our house. The best thing was that he fixed the thermostat in our fridge that we had spent hours on! That’s a big relief. Now we don’t have to keep a constant vigil over it, and I didn’t lose too much food because I have a working mini-fridge in the back and a small freezer that was empty because I had decided that I didn’t need it any more. Well, I did, and given the way things are I might need it in the future!

    I put up a magnetic screen over the studio patio doors in the back (there’s no patio), and will put up another over the studio front door today. It gets stuffy back there quickly. So I also ordered a refurbished window AC unit off EBay yesterday. I am trying to stay away from Amazon and Paypal, but it is hard because really, the big box stores are just as bad. I’d love to find a hardware store that doesn’t support the regime. If anyone knows of one online, please leave me the info in the comments. I sure do miss the little local hardware store we used to frequent that was just down the street.

    a fuzzy photo of sixteen great white egrets roosting on Cove Canal

    A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days down at Lake Waccamaw. (On the tapestry diary, indicated by what looks like a mirror image of EL, but is actually LW.) My intention was to go to Holden Beach and hunt for fossils, because the weather forecast was great. I put it off a day and then the weather turned windy and rainy so I didn’t make it to the beach. It was good to see my sister and niece, though, and I actually enjoy watching stormy weather at the lake. I’ll get to go to a different beach with some friends for a long weekend in late April.

    ^I had video of the windstorm the next day, but the wind was pushing me so hard that the camera was wobbly. Suffice it to say that there were big breakers and the Spanish moss was flying horizontally and flipping upwards. There were even small waves on the canal. There was a brief sunny time when a huge rainbow stretched over the lake.

    I used the time inside to stitch.

    Reading: I checked out Wendell Berry’s most recent book of short stories from the library. I didn’t realize that he was still writing fiction. This one was “How It Went: 13 Stories of the Port William Membership” and they were all told from Andy Catlett’s remembrances as an old man. Andy Catlett is Berry’s alter-ego. If you love WB’s fiction, it’s for you, but it isn’t an exciting read. It reminded me of some of the old characters from my childhood in rural North Carolina, toward the end of the tobacco subsidy era.

    After that my hold of “Mistborn: The Final Empire” dropped on Libby and that was a complete turnaround. What a fast-paced wild ride! Loved it, although I did find some of the fight sequences to be overly long and repetitive. I immediately put a hold on the second book in the series.

    Still reading “Virgil Wander,” since I put it down to finish my library check-outs. Also checked out “The Killing Moon” on Libby since I realized that there are several N.K. Jemisin books that I have somehow missed.

    I went to my new dentist (sniffle – I told my hygienist and dentist of almost 40 years that they couldn’t retire until after I died, and they disobeyed me!) and he informed me that I needed two crowns, one of which needs to be done sooner than later. Since they are on the same side, I scheduled them both to be done on the same visit. One thing I learned from “Castaway” was that you should not put off dental work. My COBRA dental policy ends this summer and then I will probably go on the state retiree dental policy, which is not as good. So that’s coming up this month.

    Still not watching much TV or movies, but we began watching “Dark Winds.” I read all the Tony Hillerman books way back in the 80s-90s. And I did register for the online Collage Makers Summit, but I haven’t done much of it yet. I am excited about a couple of the instructors, so that is going to spark some art making.

    Well, as usual, when I wait so long to post, there’s a lot to catch up on as far as recording a life journal. I’ll try to do it a little more often this month so I can put some thoughts down instead of just documenting events.

  • Where has the time gone?

    Retirement is so weird. The world is disgustingly surreal. The day is over before I know it. It goes so fast. I was supposed to have so much time on my hands to do ALL THE THINGS.

    Much of it is wasted on computer games and scrolling through social media. I do focus on artists, so it’s not all bad. The dopamine addiction is a problem, but I guess it could be worse. At least I’m not drinking much or overeating. My cholesterol is down 100 points since I went on statins and I’ve lost a few pounds.

    We went to a rally for the first time since the pandemic. Sandy and I aren’t in the physical shape for marches any more. Next time we need to bring chairs. I had a back spasm and had to sit on the ground. Sitting was harder than getting up! I really need to get a chiropractic adjustment but I keep putting it off. I did get a massage this week, though.

    We were considering adopting an older cat as a companion for Pablocito. I think that a lot of his problem is simple boredom. He runs around meowing several times a day. Frida the parakeet also needs a companion since Bernie died, but that is entirely up to Sandy. He plays parakeet videos for her, and sometimes she sings. However, with the chaos going on in our “government,” I’m nervous about taking on the financial responsibility of another cat. Pablocito and Diego cost us over $3000 in vet bills last year.

    Sandy is doing better. He is able to lift his feet better and his shoulder aches but he has been painting a lot and he is very enthusiastic about it.

    One saving grace has been the Hirsch Wellness Center, which supports cancer patients, carers, and survivors with art and wellness classes. I’ve attended three classes in the past few weeks, two with Sandy. We came home with homemade bars of soap from one, painted in another, and I took a tunnel book class from Mary Beth Boone by myself in another. I was very excited about Mary Beth’s class, not only because I admire her work so much, but because I needed someone to show me step by step how the tunnel book functioned. Now I’ve got it and I see so much potential if I can only motivate myself to do it.

    sample of tunnel book with swamp landscape scene
    quick acrylic painting of Diego lounging on the cat tree. I may go back to this.

    I’ve buried myself in reading and stitching. The tapestry diary is still going, but it takes very little time. I’ve woven a little on the Tucson tapestry. The main thing I want to do is sleep, but second to that, I want to stitch these stitch meditations and slow stitch pieces. This is Liz Kettle’s annual challenge for doing her copyrighted “Stitch Meditations” for 100 days. If it wasn’t copyrighted, I would be glad to teach it, but the basics of it are so simple. See her website here: https://www.textileevolution.com/pages/stitch-meditation. Honestly, it is the best thing I have found to calm my mind. I’ve found that doing it in the evening is best, although sometimes that backfires now that spring has arrived and my allergic headaches flare up at the end of the day. Yesterday I spent the afternoon alone in the studio stitching happily, listening to Hearts of Space in the background. Here’s a slideshow of what I’ve done so far.

    Current reading is “Virgil Wander” by Leif Enger. I just finished “Mohawk,” Richard Russo’s first novel. Russo is one of my favorite writers. Before that, I finished “Dawn” by Octavia Butler, which was an extremely bizarre one. I have three books about to drop on Libby, the library app, with one that I’ve had on hold for a long time. Isn’t that the way? I’ll have to put down the physical book and make a choice. It will be nice to read some sci-fi fantasy although I do love character-driven novels and historical fiction. I tried to read the extremely popular follow-up to “Fourth Wing,” which I enjoyed although I found it mildly annoying towards the end, and gave it up early in the second book when I found that I just couldn’t take that immature main character any more.

    “Constitution”

    Still can’t make myself pay attention to video. I dropped “A Paper Year,” Helen Heibert’s online course. It’s not that it wasn’t worth it. After the first month’s lesson, I just was not doing it. I have to save money where I can. The woven paper lantern cover was fun. Then I saw the Collage Makers Summit advertised and it is so tempting, but what happens is I buy these temptations and then can’t bring myself to watch all of them. The number of unfinished online art classes in my computer is crazy.

    “aneuch”

    The depression and fear is very heavy, which is why I have not posted much. It’s been an effort to make myself leave the bedroom. But I do. I have to do it to stave off agoraphobia. I’ve applied for part-time jobs but I wonder if I have the mental health and the physical stamina to work outside the house again. Haven’t heard from my temp remote job – it was this way last year which makes me nervous that they will offer me the same project again, which I hated, or worse, nothing at all. It’s possible with the federal cuts to education.

    But I do have good friends, and we are getting together occasionally. Sandy and I go out to eat, much more often than we should, actually. Things are rolling along, so far, so good, as long as I don’t think about the future.

  • The Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

    Overlooking the Altar Valley at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum

    We went to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum on Sunday morning to see the raptor release, where the trainers release birds that are being rehabilitated or can’t live in the wild for a time and they fly over the crowd’s heads back and forth. The birds were released one species at a time: a pair of Chihuahuan ravens, a great horned owl, and four Harris hawks. It had a gorgeous botanical garden with winding flat trails and places where you could sit in the shade and lots of water stations.

    Chihuahuan raven in flight
    Harris hawk
    Great horned owl
    Bobcat washing its face
    the Fabulous ZhaK on the way to the labyrinth
    The aviary with its cool dappled shade and stream
    wood duck just chillin’ in the aviary
    teddy bear chula is not cuddly

    Also seen at the museum zoo: an ocelot sunning itself, a hare, and several rattlesnakes. We also saw a caracara “Mexican eagle” flying with its trainer after the public raptor release.

    If you are in the Tucson area, I highly recommend this place. Early in the morning would likely be the best time to go, especially in the hot months.

  • Tucson, Arizona, Jan. 28-Feb. 4

    I flew out of Greensboro to see my friend who lives near Tucson, Arizona on Tuesday, Jan. 28. The idea was that I would take a three day tapestry workshop with Tricia Goldberg on that Wednesday through Friday while my friend, who is a telehealth counselor, worked from home, and then we would have some fun in the evenings and on the weekend together.

    I was so glad that I got a window seat for my flights because the snow that accentuated the fields and ridges and streams and mountains made stunning inspiration for future artwork.

    But, as I talked about in my previous post, things did not go as planned. Although I masked up on my trip there to avoid getting any bugs, it turned out that I was bringing Covid with me. So I missed my workshop. At least I didn’t make anyone there sick, but I feel sure I infected my friend.

    Anyway, when she picked me up from the airport, she took me for a beautiful sunset drive through the lands around the Desert Museum. I had just seen a rainstorm from the air, and I got this shot just before we went home.

    The following two days were rainy and chilly, but I was wrapped up in blankets inside. So the weather worked out, really. We ordered delivery from Guadalajara’s – chicken tortilla soup and a veggie crispy “pizza” that I had no idea what I was ordering but it was great!

    Late Friday afternoon we went out to the San Xavier Del Bac Mission and walked around the outside. It had scaffolding in front so I didn’t take a photo of that.

    We bought Indian tacos from Popoverz, a food truck. The fry bread was delicious, but I found that I’ve become somewhat of a weenie about hot spicy food, which is funny because I used to enjoy it.

    Saturday ZhaK tried to find an outside Indian craft event but it wasn’t there so she drove me around downtown Tucson and then up along the Catalina Highway into the Santa Catalina mountains to Mount Lemmon. It had snowed up there and there were families on the sides of the road pull-outs and parking lots building little snowmen and having snowball fights. The mountains, part of the Coronado National Forest, were full of rock stacks and hoodoos.

    Overlooking Tucson
    me and my buddy
    detail of saguaro
    Thimble Peak

    Sunday was a special treat – ZhaK is a member of the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, which is mostly outside flat winding trails through the desert. We went to see the raptor release, where the trainers release birds that are being rehabilitated or can’t live in the wild for a time and they fly over the crowd’s heads back and forth. The birds were released one species at a time: a pair of Chihuahuan ravens, a great horned owl, and four Harris hawks. I think I’ll make a separate post for this visit since I have so many photos.

    Later that afternoon we drove to South Tucson where I had to get a Sonoran hot dog, a regional specialty, and a horchata. Basically it was a beef dog wrapped in bacon, with a jalapeno sauce. The restaurant, El Güero Canelo, had a takeout window and a large indoor space with picnic tables and a well-stocked salsa and condiment bar. It received an America’s Classic award from the James Beard Foundation in 2018.

    I was supposed to fly home on Monday, but I changed my flight to Tuesday to a shorter flight and to give me one more day to make it what I think was 10 days since I was exposed. United Airlines, as usual, was terrific about changing my flight and didn’t charge me a change fee.

    On Monday I took out my Mirrix Saffron travel loom and began a little weaving with a stick I had picked up at the top and a pattern based on the many giant saguaro cacti I had seen. That night we ordered delivery from Guadalajara’s again and I had the most delicious pollo en mole!

    I didn’t fly out until Tuesday afternoon, so I spent the morning packing and roaming around the neighborhood and the wash next to ZhaK’s house. The flight home was good and I did make that tight connection in Denver with time to spare, so I was glad that I made the flight change.

    I will have to go back to Tucson sometime to explore the shops, galleries, and Saguaro National Park, and to have some indoor dining experiences. But I have to say, considering the circumstances, it was still an excellent trip, due to my friend.

  • Wednesday, post-Tucson trip

    Doing a coffee pot post today before I blog my trip to Tucson. I’ll drop the personal details here from the past week or so then do a separate post for the pretty pictures.

    The days before my trip were consumed with getting the studio cleaned and the yard stuff moved to the shed part and carpet tiles laid down. This part of the project was a lot of fun because my favorite “toy” when I was little were these small plastic grids with color tiles to press into them, much smaller than Legos. I could spend hours making different patterns with these. So putting together different colors and textures of 24 inch carpet tiles was great fun for me and I think Sandy enjoyed it too. I know that both of us are very pleased with the result.

    We went to an art opening reception at Center for Visual Arts on Friday night that was fun and featured a couple of friends. One shared the print studio with me and another was my ceramics professor when I was at Greensboro College. This is where I believe we picked up the Covid cooties. One person we both talked to for a while wiped his nose and said, “Excuse me, I’ve a bit of a cold.” Whereupon, I scooted away quickly, but unfortunately not quickly enough. And just as quickly, I forgot about it.

    Anyway, I’ve had a LOT of problems with allergies lately, including a two week case of hives, and between that and cleaning a dirty, dusty, spiderwebby, recently repaired moldy spotted space, I assumed that the symptoms that began for me on Sunday were allergies. We still had energy to do errands on Monday. The symptoms were consistent with the many times I have tested negative for Covid. So on Tuesday morning, I took my temperature, had no fever, so off I went on my trip to Tucson. In hindsight, of course, I should have tested. I wore an N95 mask to ward off any cooties I might encounter, not realizing that I was the one carrying the cooties.

    As soon as the plane got in the air, my sinuses let go. It was as if a faucet turned on. I kept stuffing toilet paper into my nostrils and breathing through my mouth. When I got off the plane during my connection, the dripping stopped. Back on the plane, it started again. When I hopped into my friend’s car at the Tucson airport and she proposed a drive in the country on the way back to her home, I was feeling fine and all for it.

    That night I began feeling freezing cold and foggy-brained, and I realized that I was sick. I contacted the tapestry workshop people and said I’d be missing the first day, but I would assess the situation Wed. night and take a Covid test if I was still sick. I did, and it was positive. My first known case of Covid, and I had brought it to my friend’s house in Tucson. I missed the tapestry workshop entirely, and the people in the guild very graciously refunded my money without me requesting it.

    My immediate concern was for my husband, Sandy, who has many health concerns and is immuno-compromised. He was alone at home and yes, he was sick. I texted a group of women friends and asked them to be on the alert if he needed help. One of them volunteered to drop off groceries and meds on the front porch, so that helped him get through it.

    I had the generous care of my nurturing friend in Tucson, who was working from home and brought me food and hot tea and blankets and a water pitcher and tissues and of course, got sick herself, but not so bad. She went out and bought a fifth of Jack Daniels the first day and we tried our mothers’ old-fashioned cure for colds: hot tea, lemon, honey, and whiskey. I think it helped.

    My main problem the first two nights was coughing and the constant sinus drainage and so I tried to sleep sitting up and didn’t get much sleep for three consecutive nights. Once I went down on Thursday, I slept a LOT. I broke a fever. We had ordered out dinner from her favorite restaurant, Guadalajara, so we had chicken tortilla soup and really good Mexican food. My sense of smell left and so did my appetite.

    By Friday afternoon I was feeling better so we went to the San Xavier Del Bac Mission and walked around the outside. We bought Indian tacos from a food truck. The next day she tried to find an outside Indian craft event but it wasn’t there so she drove me around downtown Tucson and then up into the Santa Catalina mountains up to Mount Lemmon.

    On Sunday, we went to the outdoor Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which had beautiful fairly flat trails through gardens and exhibits and a small zoo. But you’ll see that in the next post. We went to El Guaro Canelos for takeout and I had a Sonoran hot dog, which is a regional thing. Basically a beef dog wrapped in bacon with a Jalapeno sauce.

    Anyway, United was helpful, as they have always been to us, and once I figured out when I thought I caught the bug, I changed my flight to a shorter flight that was ten days out from first exposure. I explained why and they did not charge me a change fee.

    Monday I was at my friend’s house all day. I wandered around in the wash next to her house and I began a little tapestry with inspiration from the beautiful giant Saguaro cacti all around.

    The flight home on Tuesday was good and for most of it the plane was not full at all, so I had lots of room around me.

    And now I’m home, laundry done, coffee pot empty, and it’s time to catch up weaving on my tapestry diary.

  • Tapestry Diary 2025

    Tapestry Diary 2025

    I knew that I needed some kind of daily art practice, but I am terrible at sticking to it. In 2018 I wove a tapestry diary for the first part of the year, which started as daily, then became weekly, and then monthly, before I finally gave up due to depression that summer. I had serious decision fatigue, for reasons I won’t go into here. Based on how much I enjoyed making a Tunisian crochet temperature based scarf in 2019, I decided that temperature and weather was the way to go with a tapestry diary this year. As a farmer’s daughter who was always expected to give my father the weather report when he came home in the evening (in the days when we had 2-3 TV channels in rural NC, no cable or Internet), I have always been fascinated with and attuned to the weather.

    This month has been consumed with moving out from the studio downtown, moving stuff from the back building to the house, and in general, chores concerned with getting the back building repaired, cleaned, and turned into Slow Turn Studio. So I started the diary a bit late, but that’s okay. I’m not going to be OC about this thing. Now I am weaving the day’s weather data from the day before, measured at the airport at the Weather Underground website for consistency on the high and low temperatures. I use Weather Underground because it has a calendar of history data for some stations, and that’s handy when you need to catch up.

    I noticed that in 2019 I used white for all temps under 30F degrees. Ha! This year I would have a LOT of white in the tapestry already if I had chosen that. My chart for this year is more complicated, because it is a diary as well as weather related, and I wanted to add more colors for the lower range of temperatures.

    In general, the idea is to use the loose yarns in the box at the top of this post. Some are leftovers from past tapestries, others are old Paternayan crewel yarns from long long ago when I did needlepoint and embroidery, and came from my mother’s house. Some are dye samples or thrums (thread crumbs) given to me from other weavers. I’m going to use the colors in this box before I turn to my other tapestry yarns.

    So here’s how this is set up: the first row is 2025 in Roman numerals. After that, the edges are zig-zaggy and represent the earth, with whatever browns I pull out of the box. I’m not going to try to have straight edges because I don’t want long slits and I want it to look more organic. The first column of colors represent the high temperature of the day, and the third column of colors represent the low temperature of the day. The middle column is more flexible, representing the weather or whatever else I might feel like popping in there. So far, except for 1/20/25 I have used the weather. “pnp” means pick and pick, a tapestry weaving technique that creates vertical lines.

    There are three warps on this frame loom that are about six inches wide and the weavings will likely be around 28 inches long. We’ll see when we get there.

    Each day is 6 passes of weft. I started out doing more, and quickly realized that I would not have enough room on this frame loom if I made the days larger than that, so in the beginning I unwove and rewove until I got my ideas in line with reality. It works out, because even if I’m left wanting to do more, I have gotten my motor running and I go on to do other things. Motivation is difficult for me right now and this is part of the value of having a small, doable practice to begin the day.

    I shade the lines on the spreadsheet after I complete the weaving for clarity, especially when I was playing catch-up after a few days.

    If I’m traveling, as I will be doing next week (to Tucson, yay!) I’m going to chart the weather where I am, not here at home. It’s not a data set, like the scarf was. It’s a diary.

    Here is the tapestry diary up to 1/23/2025. I’m going to weave 1/24/2025 when I finish here, then I’m heading to the back studio to put down carpet tiles on that bare plywood floor. Soon I’ll have a space where I have room to work and play, with at least one large heavy work table. I am SO ready for a dedicated art space without the distractions of computer, housework, and cat. I hope it works!

  • Wednesday coffee pot post

    The biggest thing I plan to do today is stay out of my bedroom. As a recovering agoraphobic, it becomes my cocoon during times of great stress. When it is this cold those blankets beckon me. I bury my thoughts in reading novels and playing games and puzzles for those addictive dopamine hits. It helps (or hurts) that Pablocito pretty much spends all his time on my bed these days. He is much better and is eating canned food without too much complaint, and he has caught a couple more mice. But I know from experience that I am not cured of agoraphobia and I have to be ever vigilant not to get sucked back down into that hole.

    Anyway, I managed to take a shower last night and watched some reruns of Better Call Saul and Doc Martin on Pluto TV on my Kindle. Tonight I’m going to try to hang out in the living room with Sandy and watch Northern Exposure again. I’m in the middle of two very different novels about Ireland: This is Happiness by Niall Williams, and The Searcher by Tana French.

    I logged out of Facebook and Instagram for a week, and I deleted my Threads account. I am building community on Bluesky (@slowlysheturned) but I’m not leaving Meta yet, since I would lose valuable connections with friends, family, and artists from all over the world.

    I subscribed to Hearts of Space again and it has helped to keep the ambient music going, especially at the times when my husband is listening to political news. I’ve been a fan of ambient music since 1978 when I first heard the choral students at Governor’s School East practice some harmonies outside and it transported me to a peaceful place at a time when I was quite unhappy. Then when I worked for an local bookstore chain in the 1980s/early 90s, we sold cassette tapes by Windham Hill and I played them in the store often.

    My daily (sort of) practice now is to weave only six wefts across on a tapestry diary for each day, color-coded to reflect temperatures, weather, and occasionally mood. The last time I attempted a tapestry diary was in 2018, when I started out daily, then weekly, then monthly, and finally quit altogether as I had sunk into deep depression. I’m not saying that won’t happen again, as I am deeply depressed right now, BUT I have crocheted a temperature scarf before and really enjoyed it. My friend and teacher Tommye Scanlin published a gorgeous book about fiber art diaries called Marking Time with Fabric and Thread. It includes several friends of mine so it is a pleasure to use it for inspiration. More about the tapestry diary later, since this is really a catch up post about my life in general, and I have more to say about the diary.

    We are smack in the middle of a polar vortex right now, and the unusual part is that it is much colder and snowier to our south and east. We got the edge of the winter storm last night so the street and ground has a light cover of white. I’m keeping the faucets dripping inside as a precaution against surprise plumbing bills.

    It’s been mainly the mud from the melting snow and ice from a couple of weeks ago that has kept me from moving into the studio in the back. This North Carolina Piedmont red clay mud has sticking power. It’s one of the reasons that we have a local pottery craft center. After tracking it in over and over, I decided to wait. I’ll put down cardboard on the floor of the studio the next time I go out there, as we have in the back room of the house.

    But the little studio is going to be great, and I’m sure it will lift my spirits once we get it set up. The new roof is on, new insulation installed, the steps replaced, and the drywall ceiling patched and replaced where there were leaks. The shed on the side has a new frame, latticework, and doors. A lot of stuff inside can now go under the shed, because I stored yard and gardening tools and supplies inside when it got to be so viney and such a mess that it was difficult to get into. There was an extra pack of shingles so I put them down on the ground under the shed. It does need a new door and I have a ceiling fan that can be installed later.

    The next step, once I get more of the stuff out, is to put down carpet tiles on the plywood floor. After we got an estimate on carpet we decided that we could do this part ourselves. I mean, it’s gonna get paint on it anyway so why spend a lot of money? Mainly we need some padding for our backs and for warmth. Once we get the tiles down, we’ll add extra rugs or remnants or tiles on top where we’ll tend to stand.

    Sandy has laid claim to one corner, where he intends to set up his easel and paint. I’m planning to use the big heavy tables I found leaning against the walls behind the shelves (woo hoo!) and this will mainly serve as my book arts/mixed media/natural dye studio. I’ll take my small tapestry projects out there on the basis that I’m not going to store them or any yarn or fabric out there. They will need to come back inside the house the same day. The Macomber and Shannock looms stay inside. (I might sell the Shannock.) We have an oil-filled radiator heater, and I’ll probably replace the window unit air conditioner once it gets hot.

    The next thing I plan to do once I post this is weave yesterday’s weather entry on the diary, then I’m going to finish preparing the cartoon for my next tapestry. I’m going to warp the Mirrix and a small travel loom for the workshop I’m taking with Tricia Goldberg next week in Tucson. I need to prepare some sample cartoons for this workshop, and I thought I’d use sections of the larger tapestry I plan to weave. I’m staying with a dear friend of mine in Tucson, and this trip is a very bright spot on my horizon.

    I’ve been invited to participate in another exhibition at the Continental Club, but it has a Valentine’s Day theme, and I’m not sure I’ll do it this time. I didn’t sell anything at the Christmas one, but it was a lot of fun so I’m sure I’ll continue once I get my bearings again.

    I applied for Paper and Book Intensive, which happens in Michigan in May. Several years ago I applied and didn’t get in, so I’m not going to get my hopes up. I’m also signed up for Helen Hiebert’s “A Paper Year” ongoing classes, despite my dismal experience with online classes (wholly my bad) and my dislike for Zoom, but it’s monthly and if I’m not doing it by the end of February I’ll cancel it.