Newly mounted piece

Here is a piece that I just finished mounting.  Once I got lighting on it, I saw that the mounting still needs some tweaking.

It is a small experimental piece 4 inches wide by 6 inches tall.  It is the first piece in which I have tried shaping a tapestry with pulled warp.  In the aqua weft, I would leave small rectangles every inch or so and used paper to hold my space.  In the green grass section I just continued to weave.  I did this piece on a small copper pipe loom.  Once finished, I pulled the warp to form pleats in the grass.  It supposed to be reminiscent of waving sea grass.  Unfortunately, you cannot see the pleating in this photograph.  I am not sure how to light it to see the pleating.  

This piece was a study for a larger piece I was thinking of weaving, but I decided I did not like the results as it did not turn out as I had envisioned.  So, rather than scaling up this piece, I am thinking of a new piece working from a photo I took on Lake Champlain while in Vermont.

Fiber Transformed Group Show

The fiber art group, Fiber Transformed, of which I am a member has a  show open right now in Suffolk, Virginia.

September 11 - October 28, 2011

"FT: Fiber Transformed Exhibit"
Suffolk Art Gallery
Bosley Avenue, Suffolk, VA 
Call for gallery hours and directions: 757-514-7284

This exhibit includes the the Fiber Transformed show, "Wish You Were Here" plus additional work by each of the group's members.  "Wish You Were Here" is a show that uses travel photographs taken by members as inspiration for art pieces.  

Hopefully I can make it down to view the show before it closes!

A Growing Garden

Sometime ago I posted photos of our front yard after we moved back in after our renovation.  Then it was a bare plot of land with a wall and a sidewalk.  The sidewalk was new, and the wall quite old.  Here is a photo of our burgeoning front yard.  After 15 years of marriage I find out my husband doesn't like those messy cottagey gardens.  So we ended up with a different kind of yard.  After looking through scads of garden books, I found one picture where he said, Oh, I like that.  It was by Piet Oudolf, a garden full of grasses, he loved the structure and look.  So, grasses it was.  I have fallen in love with all of them.  They look different at different times of the year and of the day.  

The grasses in this photo are quite small and will take a while to mature, the ones on the left which are hard to see are quite beautiful and standup against a wall.

These grasses are a bit larger, but hard to tell in this photo.  It is hard to be patient sometimes with a garden, but in time the grasses will all fill in and be quite beautiful.  These grasses, pink Muhlebergia look lovely in the winter with their pink blooms that glow in the morning sun.

I do have one area that is more like a cottage garden which is filled with grasses and very tall wild flowers.  They are supposedly deer proof, but several gotten munched on pretty heavily this spring and summer.  This garden has a wild unmanaged look with tall grasses with while puffy flowers intermixed with flowers.  About 90 percent of the garden is native.  We did put in four crepe myrtle trees because we couldn't find a native that fit in the space with the same structure, and there are a couple of flowers that are in the garden that are not native, but otherwise....

One thing that I love about my meadow garden is the visitors.  The butterflies and bees have loved this plant which started blooming in June and is still blooming now, although not as pretty as it was in June, it is still attracting visitors like this Hawk's moth above.  My children observed that the bees tended to come in the morning and the butterflies in the afternoon.  I even saw a Monarch butterfly yesterday visiting.

I haven't gotten any weaving done, but I do love my garden!