Monthly Archives: July 2012

I love finding buried treasure in my studio. Yesterday I went on a cleaning spree and came across stuff I brought home from my last trip to John C. Campbell Folk School. This past JanuaryI went down to take  a class from Kathrin Weber, owner of Blazing Shuttles. (Yep, I dumped all the stuff in a corner of my studio when I came home and am finally dealing with it. Life ensued.) Kathrin dyes and weaves with beautiful warp and weft. In her class we spent the weekend dying and the week weaving with what we had dyed. I had enough time to dye an extra warp to bring home. I also purchased a few warps that Kathrin had dyed. Yesterday I unearthed all that dyed yarn and got excited again.

It’s funny how I put off tidying up the studio. I dust and vaccuum but put off the picking up. I feel the push to be producing something instead of doing chores. I forget how my mind wanders and I become inspired when I’m puttering. I’m likely to pick out a few new yarn or color combinations to consider. I’ll look through that last issue of Handwoven magazine as I’m putting it away. When I’m done, I’ve come up with new inspirations.

 Now it’s time to take that treasure I found yesterday and weave it into something. What to weave, what to weave? I’ll figure it out.

I spent the day touring the Textile Museum and Phillips Collection in D. C. There’s plenty of inspiration at both. The Jasper Johns exhibit at the Phillips Collection showed his work as printmaker. The marks he makes and his mantra “Take and item, do something to it and then do something else” (a rough interpretation) create layers of design. I think I could spend hours looking at some of his later works.

The Textile Museum invited a group of well-known textile artists to take a piece (or two or three) from the museum’s collection as inspiration for new work. The results are fun, intriguing, playful and meditative. The new works are displayed next to the historic pieces, contextualizing contemporary design within the tradition of textile art.

Both exhibits are well worth a trip to D.C., even in hot, muggy July.