Wednesday, June 1, 2016

tapestry diary in Ordinary Time

We last checked in with my tapestry diary of the liturgical year at the start of the white season of Easter.  I decided it was appropriate then to break out of the grid I'd been following and weave triangles, diamonds and other shapes. I bent the color rule a little and used silver and yellow as well. It was really fun to work so improvisationally.

Seven weeks after Easter Sunday is Pentecost, the only red day on the liturgical calendar.  I'd been looking forward to weaving that single bright patch of red. . . but alas, life intervened and I was away from my loom then.  As usual, I left blank warps to show the time away, and when I returned it was Ordinary Time.

In church parlance, "ordinary" means "counted" (as in "ordinal") rather than ho-hum or mundane.  It is time counted ("First Sunday after Pentecost" and so on) between Easter and Advent on the liturgical calendar.  It is seen as a time of spiritual growth, and its color is green. It is the longest season of the liturgical year, running for six and a half months from spring into late fall.

In keeping with the idea of growth, and enjoying the small daily improvisation of weaving non-rectangular shapes, I am weaving overlapping leaves for Ordinary Time.  This is proving to be hard excellent practice in recalling how to achieve certain diagonal angles and smooth curves.



As the season progresses I hope my leaves will become more complex and detailed, but for now I'm focusing on making interesting shapes.  In retrospect, I wish I had not started the green season with a straight baseline (especially with that line of white half-hitches--what was I thinking with white??).  It might  have been cool to allow the leaf shapes to make an irregular angled line that would look better with the irregular top edge of the Easter season.  Oh well.  One of my rules for the diary is that there is no unweaving, so I'm leaving it as is.  This diary will be a true record of growth all right!

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