The Weaver is Happy...

Doing weaver things.

Towards the end of attempting to finish my mixed media projects, I started cooking up gazillion color combinations for warps. Some of them will happen big time later in cotton, but for now I'm revisiting the pleated scarves, revising what I learned, and trying to decide if I want to go with grays first or blues; these are the hues I have in a variety of values and sheen. The brown is reserved for the previously-mentioned mate in the first instance, I think.

Pat came yesterday to show me a few techniques and left me with her samples, some equipment, wefts and a book already marked which chapters I should study carefully. As I imaged, tapestry techniques, like knitting, is theoretically simple but goodness me, in practice they are delicate. The book, "The Tapestry Handbook" by Carol K. Russell, has wonderful examples of Impressionistic, abstract, and even slightly Dada examples, along with old or traditional-looking pieces, and the former is a great help in visualizing how I could incorporate the techniques in cloths.

Pat weaves both tapestry and cloth. She finds tapestry weaving therapeutic, (I think she used this word,) and cloth weaving, after designing, boring, (she did use this word!) I understand her point but this morning I woke up "seeing" another cloth, which confirmed I prefer cloth weaving because there is nothing more satisfying and pleasurable like watching patterns emerge in front of me. I'm destined to make backgrounds, not pictures.

I've got a routine now where unless I have a particularly difficult warp, (like the last half a dozen,) weaving after sampling is physical/mechanical, and my mental energy is spent planning the next projects simultaneously. Bliss.

The red project is ugly and dusty, but heck it's weaving, and I'm practicing the correct way to use a Navajo beater; the fingers, not the wrist.

Since I got a gluten-free bread recipe that produced edible bread, (actually quite delicious,) we've been eating this and slowly reducing our gluten intake in general. I don't know if this is also helping my well-being. Now that I use white and brown rice flour to feed the sourdough, it smells nicer, too; I realize now how much the smell of rice is in our DNA.