Blog - Page 34 of 100 - Sherri Woodard Coffey

Learning curve

Do you remember when you first started weaving? Most new weavers start out by weaving projects in magazines like Handwoven, recipe weaving. It might be many moons before the newbie branches out to take the weaving knowledge into a new and different place. I think I’m kind of in that spot. To give my creativity a boost, I started a wedge weave project, and when I try to change things up, the learning curve rears its ugly head. I don’t yet know enough about this structure (?) to know where I can go with it. I’ve got lots of ideas, but they’re going to wait until I know more about what to expect. And frankly, it might be better to just weave my design ideas in plain ol’ tapestry. At least by trying this new-to-me weaving process, I seem to have gotten past the creativity hurdle. And that’s a good thing!

The postman cometh

Lone Star Loom Room

Although I suspected it would arrive soon, after all, the charge did magically appear on my credit card, it was still a surprise when the postman rang. These are the Swedish cotton warp yarns and a wool experimental yarn from Lone Star Room. The wool is an 8/2 and may be too fine for my needs. It also seems to be very tightly spun, just from touching it.

Maryann Didricksen, Red Petals

Another really exciting package arrived at the same time in a really well wrapped and protected package. Inside was a letter explaining about protecting pastel paintings, so I took a brief look and closed it up again. Framing will come later. This is by Maryann Didricksen, titled Red Petals. She has other paintings posted on her Facebook page and her website.

And thinking of pastels makes me remember this photo of Georgia O’Keeffe’s pastels. They say that she made them herself. Even though they are very old, and I have no idea how to use them, I save my grandmother’s pastels. Pastels seem like they would be such a difficult medium to use, so I can’t imagine actually creating a beautiful painting with them.

The exhibit of Annie Leibovitz’s Pilgrimage photos about Georgia O’Keeffe and her work is at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum right now. New Mexico magazine also has a nice article.

In the de-cluttering that I have been doing, my goal is to only have things that make me smile, and that includes art. Do you have art that makes you smile?

This is amazing!

–to me, anyway. We all know about golden ratio, proportion, etc and we’ve seen pictures of the man with all those lines around his body. But look at this from ArtDaily. Do you find this as interesting as I do?

I took Jennifer Moore’s workshop Mathemagical, and frankly some of this stuff is mind-boggling to me. Yesterday I was reading about more places for online education and decided to read further about this one:

Geometric Folding Algorithms:Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra – Web Site –Erik Demaine, MIT

Take a look, tell me what you think when you read the list of lectures. I saved this information for later, but my head was swimming just looking.

It’s a start

Wedge Weave start

The is the beginning of The Great Wedge Weave Experiment. You will notice the curves on both selvedges. When the weaving starts on the right, that side curves, etc, although by putting in that tiny line of black–six picks–the curve doesn’t seem as great. I’m mainly using butterflies left from other projects, and there is no plan, kind of strange for me. Sometimes those kinds of projects turn out well and sometimes not. By the way, this pic was taken with my phone using the panorama feature, something else I had never done before. It kept telling me to slow down, so I started all over and slowed down. One must obey the phone!

Out of the abyss, otherwise known as the doldrums

Summer Stripe, 36.5 x 60 in

The weather is so dreary right now, a little pick-me-up is needed, which explains the inserted photo here today. Good news! My mother went home from rehab today and is doing great, getting around in a pretty nimble way. Of course, there is more rehab to be done, but she’s home and her little dog is so glad. He will not leave her side.

I have actually started weaving again, using a butterflies leftover from other projects, working on wedge weave. I’ve got a couple of ideas of where to go with this, but experience is necessary. As Janice Zindel said when I wrote about the doldrums a week or so ago, try something new. So I am! This piece is going to be fairly small to see if I like what I’m doing. Maybe a picture sometime this week.

Doldrums has maritime origins. Somehow the word seems like its origins should be from Ancient Greece mythology like Tantalus and his eternal punishment.

ArtHash

Purple Haze, hand-dyed wool yarns, tapestry, 38.5 x 38.5 inches $600 ©Sherri Coffey

A new art site (for me, anyway) is ArtHash. Skimming all the info there, I found this call for entries–Art: Square Exhibition. Any kind of art is eligible, so I quickly looked at the square or almost square pieces I have, but had to eliminate all but two because of the size limitation of 30 inches. Deadline is February 20 if you’re interested. It takes place in New York. Then I looked at the exhibition fee ($100) and said to myself “no way.” Shipping is already expensive enough! I haven’t spent very much time cruising through ArtHash, but have put it on my list. Let me know what you think.

In the creativity slump department, I may have poked my head up enough to try out something. The reed has been re-sleyed, but still needs to be tied on. That’s on tap, along with colored pencils and graph paper.

Art on the plains

You can see why driving through west Texas requires a really alert driver. Things to look at are few and far between. I have only seen Cadillac Ranch from a distance, never stopping, but was reminded again about it when I read parts of the NY Times this morning–and not in a good way. The picture above comes from a website called Two Guys and a Map Riding in Ron’s Car Tour. Sounds interesting.

The best I can tell, each car was its original color, but somewhere along the way that changed. Which is better? Although we’re not supposed to like graffiti, I like those best.

I also read about a potter that developed a technique to put the designs on the outside of his pots while it’s on the wheel. I would like to see that demonstrated.

News in the doldrums department–I am cleaning up my studio, moving a large piece out of there so that there will be room to park the baby loom. Maybe it will actually get warped.

Now a question…I received a phone call today from someone who had seen my work online. He wanted my address, which I was reluctant to give, of course, and he wanted to visit one night this week. I explained that my mother was in rehab, so my time was not really my own right now. But I really didn’t want a stranger coming to my house at night. So I told him a general square foot price, and as I thought, he quickly demurred. It was to be a Valentine gift, and I have to commend him for that. The questions is: Do you think prices should be on websites or not? Thoughts anyone?

Starting again

After starting the current weaving, you know, the one with slits, I decided that I really didn’t like it and wasn’t going to waste anymore time on it. So I cut it off. I like the colors (kind of like the ones above, but brighter), so I may just weave a stripe until I can finally decide on what to weave. How long does one stay in a state like this anyway? I am reminded of a video about Susan Rothenberg (which came to me via Lisa Call). She says how important it is to go into the studio each day, to do something, even if it’s wrong, even if it’s changed later. That so makes me feel better! The video is below, but there’s text with the link above.

While I try to figure out where to go from here, I will clean my studio. Exciting stuff! I ordered new warp today-on sale at Lone Star Room. I don’t need it right now, but there’s not a whole lot left on the warp beam. Since that’s the case, I switched out reeds from a 4-dent to a 6-dent. The big concern with that is whether my two strands of weft will cover the warp. I sometimes weave with three strands at 4 epi, so surely two strands will cover at 6 epi, right? So now I want to know–how do you get out of the doldrums, the creative slump? Hints, anyone?

Watch Memory on PBS. See more from ART:21.

This and that

Cranbrook by Schacht www.schachtspindle.com

Guild meeting was Saturday, and we had an excellent program, all about the care and feeding of your loom. Lorelei Caracausa was our expert. She is one of the owners of Heritage Arts and a member of our guild. Lorelei said we should treat our looms like a piece of fine furniture. Wow! Guilty as charged!

And speaking of our guild, take a look at our new guild website. It was really nice to have this group today because it was exactly what I needed after a difficult week. My mother broke her hip, which meant surgery, staying with her as much as possible in the hospital, and now visiting at the rehab facility. Now that she’s been moved, the first thing she wanted was her computer. She has two blogs here and here, and also participates in a couple of writing groups. Busy lady!

Trivia of the day–it is said that lack of sleep costs US businesses $63.2 billion a year. Then we have tweeting ($112 billion a year) and retweeting ($65.6 billion). And transferring your LPs to MP3 files costs the nation $11.7 billion a year. Who even thinks of these things to research? Even more wasteful activities can be found here. I don’t need research to know about my wasted time.

To slit or not to slit

Designs that require slits are to be avoided. And I usually do avoid them, but in a weak moment I started weaving a design when I really knew better. I’ve been sewing them up as I go along, but frankly, I just don’t like the way they look. To make sure I was doing them correctly, I did a small search.

ATA has a very good article by Susan Maffei about slits. Other links led me to articles or pictures were not so informative.

So while weaving, I have been thinking about these angles that end up in slits and a few other types of weaving I want to do. I’m thinking I really need to warp up that baby loom and get to experimenting.

To take a break from slits, I came across this from a publication called My San Antonio. The artist is Anita Valencia, who titled her installation “Sun She Rise Sun She Set and You Ain’t Seen Texas Yet”.