Friday, February 19, 2021

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.

 







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