Summer fun

A few questions have come in about how the monster is coming along…. and it isn’t. I have stopped working on the big tapestry to work on a few chenille scarves and some woven jewelry for the summer craft festival season.  The next one I will be at will be the Trinidad Fish Fest on June 23.

I have started taking names for an Eccentric Weft Tapestry class in the fall, this time in Eureka, California. It will be a three-part class covering how to design, weave, and finish your own tapestry wall hanging. $150. If you are interested then email me at annabiszantz(at)gmail.com. Update: Classes start Wed September 5th at 630pm. Classes Sept 5, 12, and 19. There is a week in between classes because tapestry takes awhile, be advised there will be homework.

One last thing! I am the Vice President of the Humboldt Handweaver’s and Spinner’s guild.  I really should have said this before because it is part of my job to do press for the guild’s activities. The meetings are on a summer hiatus but we have a demonstration room every year at the Humboldt County Fair in August with lots of weaving and spinning contests to enter for both beginners and advanced fiber artists.

24g copper, brass, and nickel woven wire cuffs

Growth of a Monster

I had a moment of doubt and very nearly ripped the monster out and started another landscape during the beginning of the upper jaw. But I need to live up to the zebra butt.
Awhile back, I went to an art show for some fiber association and saw a beautiful tapestry of a zebra’s butt. It really was a beautiful zebra butt, but seriously a butt? None of the other art work in the show was ironic, most of it were quilts depicting landscapes. Looking back I don’t think the zebra butt was meant to be funny or ironic. This zebra butt captured my imagination and still has it. I had so wanted to do some monsters or dragons or something and kept deciding against it. Happy landscapes! I say I don’t draw cartoons but I have lots of sketches of monsters. Back to the zebra butt, it released me somehow. If that artist could do such a lovely zebra butt, I could somehow find a way to make scary monsters. Yes, I know this one isn’t scary. I am working up to the scary bit.

I should take a moment to thank Elaine. She gave me a bunch of old yarn and most of the yarn for the monster is from her. THANK YOU!!

4-15

What is a good color for the inside of a monster’s mouth? I was thinking burnt orange but with all the blue it looked very bright. Maybe a dark swamp muck would be better than the maroon. If I had decided to do splashy drool I wouldn’t have this problem. I really didn’t want to think that in depth about splashy drool.

Teeth are hard

Teeth are hard. Critters are hard. I think this is my first critter since my second tapestry ever when I did fish (in water!). I usually like to do nice peaceful Pacific northwest scenery. Weaving is so calming, it is nice to zen out and weave my happy places, or a conglomeration of them. Things that move on their own volition are not very calming to me.

Tapestry is one of those art forms that require so much work that usually people do a LOT of planning and pre-drawing to work up a cartoon of what the weaving will look like. Not me. I do not think drawing leads to a dynamic weaving, especially working with eccentric weft where movement comes from the color as well as how the weft flows. Except teeth are hard. So after ripping things out for the fifth time I decided to do a sketch.

Following a cartoon to weave the critter.

Water…again

This is a split warp tapestry. There are two warps on every nail and they will be woven together for most of the water part. Then when I get to the subject the warps will be split so I can get more detail. 

2-16-12

6 inches left. Still no title. 

Eeeek! As I look at this on the computer, I realize the sides are drawing in way more than I thought.  One of the many problems I am encountering with this open of a set.  Although I should say that this is not an unusual set for a tapestry, I just usually choose to work with 7 or 8 warps per inch, instead of 3 like this tapestry. The main difference is the thickness of the weft you can weave with and still cover all the warps effectively and apparently the length of time spent weaving. It is going very fast and would go faster except I ripped the sun and some rocks out but I am not really using any thicker of a weft than normal. —Just looked at the post and realized that I am using the same oranges and pinks I used in the sunset gradation piece set as the background.  Yes they are from the same dye lot and they were originally for my BFA review show, but as always I dye extra….so much extra 8 years later I still have way more.

Back to work

Every time I walk by one of my looms empty I feel antsy like I should be doing something. This past month or so I thought we were moving soon so I stopped weaving temporarily. Well it is apparently going to take a while for my husband and I to find and agree on a place, so I had to start again. I warped my tapestry loom differently this time. Instead of using large dowels as warp beams and sumac stitches to begin my warp spacing, I decided re-do the nails I had taken out when I first retrieved the loom from the sidewalk. This means that I will have way less ends per inch and it will accept larger wefts. In the end this means less detail but it should  weave way faster with thicker wefts.

I wove this a while back (2 years maybe more) but when I washed it all the colors ran:( I ran across this picture yesterday while trying to find pictures of another weaving. It reminds me about two important lessons 1. test everything for wash fast colors 2. always take a before picture. Too bad I only remembered one of those with this weaving. I would show what it looks like now but I can’t find it.

Fantastic Plastic

These are the finished flags for the “Flags and Fibers”  opening tonight ( 9-3-11) They are 6″ x 8″ and will be donated with the  flag collection to somewhere in the area, if you have suggestions contact Jorie at the Ink People. The opening will be from 6 – 9 tonight during Arts Alive! in Eureka, California at the Adorni Center. The show ends on Sept 27 if you can’t make it tonight.

I made the yarn for these out of plastic wrap. I cut the tubes of plastic into strips then used my weft winder and rolled it on to some bobbins and wove from there. Extreme tension is needed to keep the warps from going crooked through out the piece.