Wednesday, February 9, 2011

A Finished Piece

I finished another piece of weaving in the last week.  While weaving, I liked the blue and white piece shown in progress below the best.  But, I am having problems figuring out how to mount it.  I played around with paint and acid free tissue paper on this canvas and found I liked it.  However, once I place the little tapestry on the canvas it faded into the background.  Instead, what I decided to do was sew the tapestry on a cloth, then attach it to a small canvas, and then sew the smaller canvas onto the larger one.  I am pleased with the results and now find I like this little tapestry.  Now what to do with the blue and white one....



Just a note about living in the country, this past Sunday as I was in my studio weaving I heard a large crash of something hitting one of our large windows followed by ferocious barking by our little muttly dog.  I looked out the window to see that our dog Elsie had cornered a young racoon who was putting up a game fight of defending himself against the approaches of our dog.  I rushed out to realize that getting too close was not too bright not knowing if the raccoon was rabid or not and seeing it in a state of panic.  I shut the back door and ran around to another door and with much shouting convinced Elsie she should leave the raccoon to its own business.  I later looked out to see my horse snorting and galloping around the field and ran outside in time to see the raccoon scooting up the tree next to his field.  I ran and got my camera and took photos of the little guy as he tried to recover from his panicked state.  If my horse had not called attention to him, I would have never seen this little guy in the tree, his coloring really helps him melt into the tree.  Luckily, he did not find my two chickens who are the only souls left from recent dog attacks in our barn. 


All is quiet this week.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Weaving Progress

Through the summer and fall little weaving progress occurred.  Between my back saga, the holidays, and other unrelated family happenings I just didn't get any weaving done.  I am finally trying to get back to my looms.  Last spring I visited Susan Iverson in her studio and mentioned some problems I was having with my sand pail tapestry, the sides were really pulling in.  She encouraged me to unweave it, and reweave the problem areas.  I did that, and I lost about 3 inches of weaving.  I am so glad that I did unweave it even if it was painful to see my progress disappear.  Now the tapestry looks much better and I am finally more than halfway done.   I have six more inches to weave and will try to stay focused on weaving just a little each day.  Here is my progress thus far....



The other weaving that I started was something unexpected.  I first started weaving some linen to try and make a shaped tapestry.  I was having a really difficult time with the linen and it kept pulling in the warp no matter how hard I tried.  I eventually gave up.  In the meantime, my Sylvia Heyden book arrived.  It is a beautiful book showing the tapestries she has made throughout her life and some of her approaches to tapestry weaving.  As you can see above, the sand pail tapestry is a painterly effect with the sand and bucket.  I wanted to try and expand my horizons and I enjoyed reading Ms. Heyden's approach to tapestry that indicates that the weaver should weave tapestries that are unique to the medium and not just be copies of paintings or drawings.  I decided to try this approach.  My fiber arts group has several photos that are to be inspirations for us to develop works that can be part of a show called "Wish You Were Here."  One of the photos is of a beautiful rowboat in the waters off the Swedish coast.  I used this photo as a jumping off point to start weaving an improvised water tapestry.  The green at the bottom will be part of the selvedge.  The blue yarn is much brighter in person and shows up dull in this photo despite my best efforts to brighten it a bit. 


This is a small tapestry and will be one of a series of small water-like pieces.  Now I have to figure out how to mount them.