Days pass, one by one

 

Here we are, February 19, 2021. Day 341 at our house in our new life. Some of you have had longer or shorter days in your own experiences of our changed world. It was mid-March when the end of the world as we knew it began for us.

I continue to mark my passing days with my tapestry diary process in which I weave a small amount each day. I'm also making a larger image within the overall tapestry dedicated to each month. The theme for those monthly parts this year is leaves that I'm finding around the beginning of each month. I'm making a small watercolor pencil drawing of those and using that as the basis for the cartoon. I've just finished the one for February today, a few days early. 

The yarn I'm using as weft is the natural dyed wool singles from Harrisville remaining from what I'd dyed for students in the Traditional Craft Mentorship Program at the Folk School last fall. 

I'm continuing the method I started a few years ago for selecting my daily color by a toss of a die. I have six groups of variations of primary and secondary colors, plus a few neutrals. Each day I throw the die and whatever lands is what I weave: 1=red, 2=yellow, 3=blue, 4=green, 5=orange, 6=violet.

The size of the daily part depends on how much time I have to weave when I sit down at the loom or whether I need to level up from what was woven the day before. It's quite interesting to see how the colors develop throughout the year as the tosses of the die make the choices.

I've also started weaving again on a small tapestry on the other loom at my home studio. I'd set the warp up last year thinking I'd be able to finish the piece quickly. Well, that didn't turn out to be the case! I decided this afternoon to begin with it again. The design is based on a watercolor painting I made a few years ago when the tapestry diary theme was the black walnut tree in our front yard. The yarns I'm using for it are also natural dyes.

Maybe now that I've written about this piece I'll be able to keep up the momentum and actually finish it before another year passes!

This weekend I'll be taking another online class offered through John C. Campbell Folk School. It's a haiku class and I'm hoping I'll feel fine for it--I had the second dose of the COVID-19 vaccination today. So far all I feel is a sore arm! We were quite shocked when we went to our local health department for our scheduled time--we were two of only THREE people there! We were told that there were only ten people scheduled for Fridays, with about one hundred on other weekdays. I have friends in other states who've been vaccinated on motor speedways, for gosh sakes! And my sister is one of around 700 scheduled for shots at a local mega-church in an adjacent county next week. This is all crazy. Here's the way the room looked as we waited for the other person to have his turn first. Today the CDC COVID data tracker says that 59.6M vaccines have been administered in the U.S. To date in the U.S., 27,737,875 cases and 491,455 deaths.

 

Months pass before you know it

Well, hello, fellow hunker-downers... to borrow a phrase from Leslie Jordan.

I'd written a lengthy blog post the other day and was deleting some text and, poof! The whole dang thing went away! So I'll try again. 

This time I'll be short. I won't go on and on about how we've endured the past almost year with pandemic. I won't mention the ugliness of the election shenanigans and the continuing aftermath of the insurrection. I will talk instead about my studio days. And keep those troubling thoughts to myself.

About tapestry work--I was able to complete a couple of tapestries by the end of 2020. I actually did more than the two but the others were smaller. Not that the smaller ones weren't important to me. But I like to feel that I've accomplished a "major" tapestry each year and it seemed like 2020 was going to be one of the first years since I began my tapestry life a couple of decades ago that wouldn't happen.

But after I cut off one piece that had been languishing on the loom, cut it off at the point I'd gotten to and put it aside, I was able to begin another one. It was of a design I'd done several years ago and had always wanted to weave. So I though, why not do it now? I had a lot of the natural dyed single wool yarn from Harrisville that I'd dyed before my Traditional Craft Mentorship class taught at John Campbell Folk School last fall. I haven't used that yarn for tapestry before so thought this would be a good time to do so.

Here's the tapestry. I've called it Memories of Ferns. It's woven at 8 epi on a wool warp. The weft is the natural dyed singles.

 I also finished my 2020 tapestry diary. I've called it Hope is the Thing with Feathers, the first line of one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems. We surely did need hope last year; still do.

My 2021 tapestry diary is underway. I'm using more of the natural dyed yarns for it and the monthly parts will be leaves from our property that I find each month. I began with holly in January. I have a vine of English Ivy for February although I haven't started the weaving of that yet. Just keeping the days going, one after the other, so far. I'll post photos of it soon.

My studio time in the past couple of weeks has been with classes I'm taking or am going to be teaching. In the first week of February I was part of a wonderful online class through John C. Campbell Folk School taught by Dana Wildsmith. Dana included one of my poems in her blog post after the class. Here's my personal classroom during her class:
 

 And here's the same space now as I'm preparing for the class I'll be teaching online for the Folk School in March:

Looks quite the mess, doesn't it? Maybe it won't look that way to the class participants! It's quite the challenge to learn new technology for teaching. I keep telling myself: "You can do this! You can, you can!" so maybe I'll convince myself it's possible. A good friend is previewing some bits of things with me through zoom and she's giving great suggestions for improvements. This gives me even more appreciation for all of the tremendous challenges that teachers and students have had in the past year to accommodate their learning lives to the pandemic by taking their classes online.

May we all be well and move on from these times.