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.