Guilty, Guilty Guilty!!

Summer and working in the yard is so seductive and distracting especially this week end the sun is shining and it’s in the high 70’s-finally! I am waiting on someone to show up at the studio. I would love to be out buying tomato and pepper plants and working on Chene’s path. Well, the path is really for my own use. So that I don’t kill myself tripping through the flower bed to save some poor Great Dane from Chene’s Napoleonic complexes, when I grab him to keep him from barking and trying to ooze out through the fence to conquer some dog that out weighs him by 60 to 100 lbs or more.. Anyway, just a while longer. .. Well-back on task.

Old Nancy- one of my favourite long time tapestry listers, who is someone someday I want to meet in person and share tea with!! Immediately sent me a note, after she received her So Warped about writing and finishing a book on colour and colour techniques. ”Old Nancy”(her words not mine) “realized her book might be at p o box since it had not arrived at home. i passed by the post office and am delighted in the book

HOWEVER, HOWEVER, HOWEVER now i want the book on color. please please please do not take any more detours etc. please give us the book on color next lest i die without ever being blessed by it. you always make everything so nice and straight forward, and i really appreciate it.”

      Now if that isn’t laying a guilt trip, Nancy!(gr) You better live a long time-Old Nancy. We still haven’t had a face to face!!! And, yes, I really want to begin working on the book on colour soon.

There is just no rest for the wicked or escaping guilt. I didn’t even get a chance to sit back and rest on Pat’s and my accomplishment of finishing the So Warped book. Thank you so much Nancy(grin)(grimace)(lol?)(and dozens of other emotions that I don’t know the symbols for!!!!!)

As my Grandmother would say and I really should remember it more often- What is-is and what will be will be. So deal with it and move on to the next is! Been there! Done that! Move on! So much for guilt!

Since I last wrote, I have taught at CNCH2010 and in Las Vegas. I really enjoyed the trip to Santa Clara. Coming back wasn’t so much fun with the snow, but we drove out and spent the night up near Shasta Lake. I met a lot of very nice people including Laverne Waddington. I enjoyed showing her the Old Believer Belts sort of late one night after teaching all day. She photographed many of them and put them on her blog. Interesting about how small the world is and how coincidentally things can happen. Laverne just happened to sit next to Pat and I at the banquet. Small talk led to my showing her the belts that I had brought to illustrate my Seminar on Old Believer Tassels and discovering she probably has seen the Old Believers in South America. It was a very interesting way to spend an evening.

Syne of Weavzine gave an interesting talk on the net and it’s uses. I discovered her pod casts of interviews that she has been doing and am really enjoying listening to them. She has actually done 3-4 on tapestry weavers-James Kohler, Michael Rohde and Sara Swett. There are 52 or 53 of these weave cast and I intend to listen to all of them. The world has taken an entirely new turn while i was trying to ignore any new technology that was evolving. Something i try and do as often as possible. I am such a Luddite-eh-well-I would really like to be, but feel like I am being drug into it. If you listen closely you can probably hear my fingernails dragging and clawing as I am pulled screaming into the new age/ newer technology.

At CNCH I/we learned a valuable lesson to not trust hotel maps. It took Pat and I an hour and half to find a Greek Restaurant the Athena using the hotel map, but 5 minutes to get home with directions from Patrons of the restaurant. We got to drive home in the middle of a heavy rain storm that eventually as we headed North turned into snow and even heavier rain.

I think I am finally happy with my Soumack handouts, PowerPoint presentation and the sampler I am using to teach my soumack classes. I still want to add the technique of doing padded soumack, which is a technique I am adding to my own repertoire of techniques that I use a when I weave my tapestries. Used them at CNCH and for a section that I taught in Las Vegas in a multilevel way or introduction with a lot of other techniques.

Las Vegas class

My Las Vegas trip to teach was really wonderful. Thanks to Maurine Adrezin and her efficient ways and organization. She makes the most wonderful fascinating dolls. They are felt and then clothed in handwoven outfits. Thanks to Maurine and Allan, I actually got to see Las Vegas and do the touristy thing-doesn’t usually happen when I go places to teach workshops. I have wonderful pictures of the Mountains around Las Vegas and pictures of the night scape with all of the lights. She and Allan introduced me to Skype. I can now Skype with people and my husband when he’s in the house and I am in the studio and see them. I think it will have some long distance teaching applications. I really want to try teaching long distance with Skype. Samples and tapestries can be seen in real time and discussed in real time, which has always been one of the reasons I haven’t been happy with long-distance teaching. For me it takes too much time between the beginning and end of a given instruction by having to wait so much times between the parts and descriptions and instruction.

 The Las Vegas group was really fun to teach. Kathi Meisel who was in my IWC class in Durango had finished a tapestry.(see above tapestry) It was really interesting to teach a multilevel tapestry class. The looms were all warped when i arrived so there was very little peripheral stuff that needed to be done before I could get down to the nitty-gritty teaching of technique. That was so nice. The 3 day length for the class was really nice too I felt better about the amount of technique I was able to teach in the class a little less crammed.

I have been spending every minute I can weaving. I am almost half way done with the Kona Pink. I have begun to design the night colour study I want to do of the Las Vegas skyline. I want to make it even smaller 1.5 inches by 7 inches. Most likely it will be of Allan’s secret place. The photo’s from Maurine’s favourite place will need to be a little larger and will probably include the street lights leading down to the strip lights. I have been trying to figure out if i want to reweave the piece that was stolen. I am seriously considering it since it was one of my favourite colour studies. I am really hoping to be able to hang all of my sky scapes in the Show at Village Wools.

     I finally got to do some silver work on Wednesday. I stopped trying to put my silver time on Friday as a reward or fun thing after a week of hard work. Fridays were already too full. So I am now taking Wednesday mornings after my Bones and Balance class. Just a different way of seeing the scheduling done. Redesigned the top of the box I could never get it to really work. It never felt right.  I am working on and am adding a silver price tag with Viking knitting to hold the silver price tag. Pat had/has this wonderful round rose quartz cap that I have decided to use and I have this wonderful recycled piece that I am adding to the top of the box. I can relate it back to the trinity and still have my miracles for sale price tag. I am really looking forward to taking more silver classes the first of July. I need to remember to sign up for the classes or I won’t be doing that either. Will do it the first thing Monday morning. One of the sides of the box. I am now almost half done with the  4 sides.

Well hears to the development of sangfroid, which lately I seem to be losing and one last picture of the mountains.

Cheers,

kathe