Four feather days this week

My husband cringes when I say to him, "Come see how much I've gotten woven today!"  Not because he doesn't like my tapestry work but because it seems like watching a tapestry grow is sort of like watching grass grow.

HOWEVER, I have made some progress this week even if I'M the only one who sees it!  I usually photograph tapestries periodically as I work on them but I've been doing it each day before I leave the studio, a quick photo with my phone.  Here's a composite of four days of work this week; read them from left to right, top to bottom and excuse the image quality, please:

Below is a better shot of the overall view on 1-30-13

And the beat goes on...

Thoughts about the frequently boring process of weaving tapestry...

... from my mentor, Archie Brennan:

"Some years ago, I was weaving a quite large area of plain black when some men set off for the moon.  They got there before I was finished.

I work in a minor art form.  Tapestry is an indulgent, elitist, economically farcical, and frequently boring 20th century activity." 

Archie made these comments as part of his statement about his work in the catalog for the World Tapestry Today exhibit held in 1988-89.  It wasn't all a downer, though, because a few lines later he talks about his delight "... in the required degree of preplanning and the order of growth, slowly and erratically from one edge."  But reading his comments certainly made me take note back in 1988 when I came across them in the catalog.  I was a fledgling tapestry weaver then.  I've woven quite a bit of tapestry in the past couple of decades but I often bring Archie's comment to mind when I'm engaged in slogging through what seems to be an endless area of sameness.  Like the blue sky is right now in this feathers tapestry.  But then, the sky and the feathers are what this tapestry is all about.

So... onward and upward.  More square feet of blue to go.

The feathers continue to grow

Here they are on January 16...

A New Year is underway

My tapestry diary for 2013 has begun and I'll post about it sooner or later.

But my large feathers tapestry is moving along--even if slowly.  Here's where it stands today, at about 16 1/2" at the highest point on the right side.

This is about 1/4th of the way into the piece and the complications of shapes are just beginning.  The next areas of overlapping feathers will slow me down quite a bit but will be quite interesting to do.

I'm really enjoying the effects of the soumak lines in the background...

... and I'm using soumak within the feather shapes for some lines:

I returned from a couple of day trip to Asheville to pick up tapestries that had been in various exhibits and found in the mail box a check (!) for a sale of a small tapestry.  That was quite nice--the sale was of the feather image piece titled "Crow and More" -- the piece was at the Southern Highland Craft Guild's Allanstand shop.

One more bit of news--the latest American Tapestry Alliance educational article is one to which I contributed an essay.  Here's the link to it at the ATA site:  

http://americantapestryalliance.org/education/educational-articles/beyond-the-warp-continuing-education/