Waiting, Waiting and More Waiting

transparencies

Waiting, waiting,waiting, more waiting.

I need to create a hierarchy of waiting.  Perhaps, I can organize what I am waiting for by the amount of time I need to wait for the waiting to end. waiting like  Dante’’s levels of hell.  I really need to reread the Inferno again just for the descriptions of hell. I am sure there must be something about hell, procrastination and waiting. Or, perhaps, surely,  levels of limbo. 

 Limbo (Latin limbus, edge or boundary, referring to the “edge” of Hell) is a speculative idea.

Enough Diva-ness  and word play for today.

WOW! What a difference a day can make!

       Yesterdays attitude seems almost funny today. Well-today it’s humorous-Yesterday not so. Waiting is over and now I feel a since of urgency. I can use my hand again. Finally discovered the complexity of my hand surgery. I have 4 incisions that are healing just fine- 4 in the palm and one at the base of my thumb.  Stings something fierce with the stitches out.

What Spider Women could have told Ikotomi and Icarus.

       Poor Dr. Yao-my hand surgeon- I don’t think he understand my obsession with tapestry weaving. He doesn’t know whether to be amused or…? about my weaving and my schedule, or worried about my unsterotypical ideas and work.  At my age- and I don’t think that I am that old-I think he thinks a women at my age should be retiring and easing up. He always has this nonplussed look on his face when I discuss my tapestry weaving and how it affects my hands.  If I don’t weave my hands stiffen up. O well, if I were in my 30’s I might feel  the same way.exhibit
      Last week was even better
I won Best of Show at the Blue Ridge Hand weavers Exhibit. Every time I have entered-my second time- I have been amazed at the quality of the work in the show. The pictures they mount on their website are lovely and intriguing. To top it all off Tommye Scanlin had donated one of her Kudzu pieces to a fund raising raffle they were holding. I never win anything. I feel buying raffle tickets is  a donation-nothing more. I was so surprised when I won.

Tommye Scanlin. size 20inches by 22inches. Image stolen from Blue Ridge Hand weavers  exhibit web site. My thanks for its use

     Had a nice surprise today. My Handwoven Magazine  arrived and it actually has a  good deal of tapestry in it. It also contains a picture of So Many Chances and the colour is fairly accurate.  There is a very interesting article by Sara Swett on weaving lists. Sort of reminds me of the time I wove the scratch paper from my drafting table/ work table. See photo’s somewhere below and out of place. They keep shifting.

Broken feather/ Broken promise

       I     with drew So Sought after from Small Expressions.  So all the prize winners moved up 1 level.  I am still a little angry at HGA, but not for the reason one would think. Prizes, getting into shows and awards have never meant that much to me. After the last 3 decades of entering shows I view it like a game of chance. I don’t stake how I feel about my work or myself on games of chance. They are more of a puzzlement to be figured out and be amused about the results.  I am angry because on January 4th I called the HGA office to ask  for clarification of the rules- the rule about a piece having never been published. I wanted to know if they meant published anywhere or just in HGA publications. On their advice and reassurance that it just meant HGA publications I entered the piece. I would not have entered that piece into the exhibit if I had been given accurate information. I am not so dumb to think someone wouldn’t have noticed let alone the ethics of entering a piece knowing it broke the rules-so not me. Cheating destroys the game aspect of entering shows.   The year before they took away my third prize because my framing was messed up in shipping.  I use the letter in my classes when we discuss mounting, shipping, and entering exhibits. Good workmanship is important to the whole experience of a tapestry. They hung the piece, but hung it upside down. I just can’t seem to win with HGA. I admit that the frame problem was mine, but still they should have hung it right side up.  I have been in Small Expressions 13 or 14 times since 1988- 20 or so years. O, well-asi es la vida de los esclavos-gr! Lol! It’s taken them until about yesterday to remove it from their web page! So now I get to answer 4 months of questions about what happened. Enuff!

 On to better more important  stuff.

  I did finish the piece on the Shannock.    I finished the sample, scrap,  portion of “And he…” I am just not sure how to define this piece at this particular point in time or if I’ll ever attempt to show it or sale it-after all it is only a portion of the whole.    The piece itself is 9 inches by 24 inches. I still haven’t decided how to finish it. Leave my name or turn it under. I love the over dyed indigo colour. Pat dyed the ton of the ugly yellow stuff I had purchased because it was cheap and i could afford it into a beautiful Indigo colour.Other then cheapness i have no idea what I thought I could do with all of that ugly yellow.   I, also,  need to decide how I am going to handle the two feet of selvedge on each side. The only thing I seemed to be able to do  last week was weave with my hand all wrapped up.   Now that I woven the sample no matter what the reason I wove the scrap, but  mostly because I couldn’t  let go of the loom with an unfinished piece on it. (Interesting the spell-check brings up love when I click on wove. ) I can hardly wait to start the small format/ small scale version of the design.  It will be half the size this “and he…”  was intended to be.I have fallen in love with the colours.

Scroodle scrap paper from Maze Craze 1990

I love the colours in the  wing, but I did learn that it would have been much better to have woven the design the other direction. I wouldn’t have had to work so hard getting rid of the stair steps on the feathers.

 Learned not to use crosheen on the lace bits. It worms against the wool and even worse against the embroidery flosses.

Maze Craze late 1990

 I learned that I didn’t need bobbins. All I needed was to be able to hook the wefts with my fingers and pull. Valuable information  for those weaving with problem hands that i teach.  It does make one work harder to keep the weft loopies from forming in the half passes. There really is a very good reason for using bobbins as opposed to loose wefts hanging and butterflies. The bobbin helps control the tension of the weft threads as they are woven and come off the bobbin.  The bobbins also allow the weaver to control the twist and the closeness of the colour as it is laid in a pass. This then allows you to twist the weft bundle and change the density of the colour in mélanges and chenes.  I need to do some samples of this colour density thing  happening.

       Another lesson that I learned is that different rayon embroidery flosses weave differently. DMC rayon weaves thicker and has an almost nappy feel.  The ratio  is also different.  DMC needs  4  strands  instead of the 6 that Coates and Clark’s need at 20 epi.  At 10 epi it needs to be double that. Coats and Clark’s rayon-especially in the black gets a flake or peel of something light grey when you weave at 20 epi. It’s a little like dandruff or dry skin. The same reason I don’t use quilting thread as warp, but buttonhole twist or  dual craft thread for warp at 20 epi.

Remembering spring as fall happens

      I really had fun with the gold in the scroll. I learned that filigree and loops need to be larger in scale  in order to allow the detail to be seen at 5-10 feet where the best optical blending occurs in the colour when weaving with wool at  10 epi.  On the other hand at 20 epi the scroll work can be much more delicate and should be much more delicate in scale, because people stand so close to the small work. They actually have a tendency to stand closer than necessary to get the optical blending.   One would think that if the optimum at 10 epi is 10 feet then it should be 5 feet for 20 epi. BUT, people don’t do that  with small format/small scale work, People stand a foot or two from the work.

 SO for my designs the colour blending needs to be finer with more bobbin blendings that are more closely related  to get the maximum effect of the optical blending.

 I ended up doing a lot of single wraps while working on the inner turns of the scroll. Next time I think I’ll make the scroll twice as big so I have two warp threads instead of one  warp thread. Live and learn. This gave me a lot of practice of sharing warp turns and shared warps. It’s fairly easy to hide the interlocks and weft turns if one remembers to watch the direction of the turn around loop  or the direction it goes around the  warp.  The turns and wraps need to extra dense so that they can pack down and help hide the sharing and the turns. The direction of the loops isn’t always consistent in which colour looks right in the sharing. It depends on if you are working with a hill or a valley thread. Turns and loop backs done on valley threads are easier to hide because the next turn or wrap drops down into the valley and covers the previous turning thread.  Doing almost anything in a valley is easier to cover because the next half pass is a hill thread drops down and covers.  In vertical soumack it works  in the same way. Drop the turning thread onto a valley warp and the next pass of weft will cover the turn-unless your working the weft with too tight or a warp tension too loose and that’s a whole other problem.

Chene’s car seat

The other study that I am doing with the top of the selvedge is experimenting with soumack  and twined edges which I will then braid when I cut off the piece, which should be tomorrow. The loom is ready to go with good karma!!!

(This is just great.  I have managed to hit a magic button that  wants to save all of my typos and corrections. How embarrassing!  Where is the sanctity of second chances without shame that the corrections one is able to do on the computer generally promote.)  

Well as I began. It’s all a great adventure…
cheers for now.