Gosh, is it just me or did life get busy all of a sudden?

I've been kind of quiet on social media for awhile until just the other day--but I'm still here, plugging away in the studio and at the laptop.  Read on a for a recap of recent weavings, new workshop dates added to the schedule, and preparations for the Big Mama of fiber conferences, Convergence! 

I did a little poll on Instagram and Facebook asking folks which arrangement of this 3-part piece worked best.  You've seen it in progress on the loom, and since then I've been dithering about whether to stick with the original layout, with the panels hung separately and offset from each other: 

Molly Elkind, Faraway Nearby, (c) 2022.  Cotton warp, wool, linen, metallic, kudzu wefts.  

Or this one, suggested by my good friend and talented fiberist Julia Stephens, which has more of a collaged feel.  The plan here would be to weave a small inset piece that looks like that yarn wrap in the center top.  

Molly Elkind, alternate view 1, Faraway Nearby, (c) 2022.  
Cotton warp, wool, linen, metallic, kudzu wefts.

A few people suggested this arrangement, which I had tried before and discarded.  But this time around I'm liking it a lot better.  

Molly Elkind, alternate view 2, Faraway Nearby, (c) 2022.  
Cotton warp, wool, linen, metallic, kudzu wefts.

(Please excuse the amateur photos--works in progress!)

The popular vote at first was to stick with the more traditional arrangement, the first one, but lately the third one, just above, is gaining traction.  It's been great to hear everyone's readings of the piece and I'm grateful (though still dithering a bit).  If you have an opinion, please chime in by commenting below!  

Speaking of helpful feedback, my small feedback groups have been going great.  There are three groups of 4 to 6 weavers meeting now on Zoom, once a month, to share their work and get and give feedback.  We also discuss a tapestry or art-biz topic every month, and I throw out a suggestion for experimenting and expanding skills each time as well.   (This is optional, not homework.)  There's one opening in the Monday group; comment below if you want to know more.  

I've also been doing a few more small pieces in the SkyGrass series.  I will be taking these to Convergence as well as some other small work to sell on Saturday night 7:00-7:50 pm.  It was a lot of fun to use Japanese ramie bark yarn from Weaverhouse to embroider a blue grama grass seed-head on the first of these.  Definitely planning to do more experimentation with stitching and weird fibers.  

Molly Elkind, untitled, (c) 2022.  5" x 5"  
Cotton warp, wool weft, ramie stitching

Molly Elkind, untitled, (c) 2022.  5" x 5"  
Cotton warp, Churro wool weft, linen and metallic stitching

Molly Elkind, untitled, (c) 2022.  5" x 5"  
Cotton warp, wool weft, linen, wool and metallic stitching

As you might guess, these are all inspired by the little gold/taupe seed-heads of the native blue grama grass.  The middle one incorporates hand-dyed indigo Churro yarn from the good folks at Tierra Wools.  

At Convergence next week, I'm teaching three times.  On Friday, July 15, I'm doing a full-day class, Weave a Minime, which is full.  On Saturday morning, July 16, I'm offering a 3-hour seminar, Your Tapestry Superpower:  Sampling--all about the various kinds of sampling you can do before sitting down at the loom to make for a less frustrating and more time-efficient tapestry weaving experience.  No loom required for this class.  And in the afternoon on Saturday, I'll present The Contemporary Tapestry Scene:  Trends & Traditions.  This is a 90-minute slide show surveying the field of contemporary woven art.  There's plenty of room in the Sampling class and in the slide talk.   Register here.  

I'm thrilled to report that the remainder of 2022 and 2023 are shaping up to include quite a bit of both in-person and virtual teaching.  You can see my entire teaching schedule here, but here's a quick rundown of recently added opportunities: 

August 20, 2022:  Zoom lecture for Weavers' Guild of St. Louis, Finding my Voice in Fiber. 

October 1, 8, and 9, 2022:  Zoom class sessions for Southeast Fiber Arts Alliance (SEFAA) on Building a Color Palette.  This class offers practical advice (minimal color theory) on selecting a palette for your fiber piece that supports your  intentions, whether it's tapestry or another fiber art medium.  A feedback session will be included in the three session/six hour workshop.  

Nov. 5, 10 and 12, 2022:  Zoom workshop for MidAtlantic Fiber Arts Alliance (MAFA).  This is a brand-new workshop entitled Weaving Landscape in Tapestry.  I'll present a number of approaches to responding to those special places in our lives with woven tapestry.  Six hours spread over three sessions, including feedback.  

July 20-23, 2023:  In-person workshops at New England Weavers Seminar (NEWS), in Worcester, MA.  I'll be offering Collage to Cartoon . . . and Beyond! and Collage:  Design Tool and Art Form.  

You can read more about each of these classes on my website's Workshops page--click on the blue-highlighted titles there to open a PDF with all the details about each workshop.  

It hasn't been all work/no play.  Sam and I spent a wonderful week kayaking and whale-watching in Puget Sound in June.  Thanks to fellow tour members for these photos.   

I hope you get a chance to do meaningful work, connect with your tribe, and get outside and play this summer.  Join me here next month for a full report from Convergence.  

Looking back, looking ahead: time to do the Janus face

Happy New Year, dear friends!  For me, as for you, perhaps, December and January involve some time looking back at the year that's ending, assessing what worked and what didn't in my art and teaching and life in general, and then looking ahead and tweaking my goals and plans for the coming year.  I'm not talking about making resolutions here, but just trying to be thoughtful about how I do what I do, rather than continuing to do the same stuff and hope for a different result (we know how that goes).   Of course if the past two years have taught us anything, it's the futility of making predictions and plans.  Nonetheless, I find it helps to at least have a general destination and a map sketched on a cocktail napkin. 

My word for the year

I've chosen my word for the year and it is now.  A close runner up was mindful, but I'm already tired of hearing that word; it feels too vague to do me much good.  Now has the punch that I hope will snap me  back to the "present moment/wonderful moment" and remind me to do one thing at a time, and pay attention to it with my whole mind while I'm doing it.  If that sounds like a resolution, well, there it is.

Art-wise, I am grateful that 2021 was surprisingly good!  Of course, after 2020, there was nowhere to go but up.  I did tons of teaching, developed and taught five new classes and improved my Zoom teaching game.  This year I want to improve my video shooting and recording skills, finally.  I've also launched my first two online Feedback groups and I'm really excited about those--more on that in a future post.  And with any luck there will be more in-person teaching this year.  You can see my teaching plans HERE.  

Molly Elkind, paper collage--possible design for small piece? (c) 2022

In the studio, I plan to finish the current piece (below) on the big loom and at least one more medium-large piece in the SkyGrass series.  I want to focus on further developing my own tapestry vocabulary of marks, shapes, and formats.  I plan to continue to explore ideas that I sampled last year around collage approaches for tapestry, open warp and eccentric weaving, unusual yarns, and incorporating stitching.  I think weaving small pieces will be a great way to do that.  The collage above is one candidate. 

Molly Elkind, handwoven tapestry in progress, Faraway Nearby (c) 2022 

Speaking of which, note to self:  I need to get a piece going for the ATA "Tiny but Mighty" unjuried small format exhibit next summer in Knoxville.  

Enough about me.  What are your hopes and dreams for this year?  Whatever they are, I hope they all come true! 

Studio Life

My studio life tends to ebb and flow between a focus on teaching and a focus on weaving; one dominates my time and attention for a time while the other takes a back seat.  While my teaching will be revving up again later this month, lately I've been enjoying the chance to focus on weaving.  I've been developing some of the ideas I came up with while designing the big SkyGrass piece I finished a bit ago.  It seems I might have a whole SkyGrass series in the works. 

Here's what's on the floor loom at the moment.  It will be three panels hung side-by-side when it's done.  Two panels are underway right now; the third will be woven last, at the top. 

Untitled, work in progress
Molly Elkind

Maquette/collage of two panels of three-panel piece in progress
Molly Elkind

Here's the original SkyGrass piece:

SkyGrass, 26" x 45".  Linen warp, wool, linen and metallic weft.  8 epi.
(c) Molly Elkind 2021.  Photo by James Hart.

This is a small piece based on a collage of two painted and printed papers.  

SkyGrass Textures collage

SkyGrass Textures tapestry in progress

SkyGrass Textures, 10" x 4.5"  Cotton warp, wool weft.
(c) Molly Elkind 2021

 

I wove two parts separately, one from the bottom up and one from the side, and then collaged them together.  I like the dimensionality and the object-ness of the final tapestry.  

I'm also getting ready for the Eldorado Studio Tour next month, so I got out and hung all the work I might offer.  There's still some editing and re-arranging to be done, and I hope to add a few more small pieces.  

Here's one of those small pieces underway.  I hope to weave at least three of these and plan to mount them in white frames with mats.  

Monsoon collage, 5" x 5"

Monsoon tapestry in progress.  Not quite 5" x 5"!

This one may end up rather wonky in shape; weaving over two-under two has caused some serious draw-in.  Stay tuned!  

This all has me musing about whether I prefer weaving small or weaving large.  They both have their advantages.  Small pieces can be finished more quickly.  But the weaving and the finishing work can be fiddly.  Presentation is really important--usually you can't just hang them from a velcro strip on the wall.  Large pieces, on the other hand, do have an undeniable visual impact--size does matter.  And there's room to stretch out and really settle into weaving a large tapestry, a chance to live and grow with it that I find appealing.  I enjoy weaving at the floor loom and at a sett of 8 epi the weaving feels less fiddly than at the finer sett of smaller pieces.  

Do you prefer weaving small or weaving large--or, as with me, does it depend?  

Book learnin'--what good is it?

Did any of you see the excellent guest blog post Rebecca Mezoff wrote for the British Tapestry Group? In it she describes how she senses that because she trained as an apprentice to a master weaver rather than attending art school, somehow she is less qualified as a weaver and a teacher.  She questions,  "Is there a perception among tapestry weavers that tapestry is somehow sacred or only for people who study for many years to master it?"  Rebecca goes on to say that among expert weavers there can seem to be some disrespect for those who are "only hobbyists."  Quite rightly, she pushes back against this and against the idea that there is only one proper way to be trained as an artist or to weave tapestry.  As she says in her follow-up comment to the post, "there are many paths to our individual goals."  Amen.  

As it happens, I did go to art school and got an MA with a focus on fiber art (the university I attended did not offer the MFA at the time, "just" the MA).  I focused on paper making and surface design and to my regret now, I did not study weaving at all, much less tapestry, when I was in school.  I did learn some very useful concepts and processes there  . . . but like you, I bet, I also know many fine artists and weavers who are self-taught or informally trained who do amazing and wonderful work.  I'm here to tell you an MA or MFA is no magic bullet!  There is no secret art school knowledge that guarantees success as an artist.  I still struggle to some extent with every design I make.  

That said, it is my passion to share with students some of the terms, concepts and processes that I learned that can make it all go a bit easier.  Lately I've been preparing two slide talks that go over some really helpful design concepts, specifically in terms of tapestry.   Scroll down for the details.  

These are some of the books I've been poring over lately.  It's been a fascinating dive into recent tapestry and fiber art history.  It's a wild and woolly world out there!  I've had a lot of fun looking at and sorting through dozens of the best contemporary tapestries and fiber works, figuring out how to talk about all the diversity in an organized way.  

This Saturday, March 13 at 10:00 a.m. Central Time, I will be with the Weavers Guild of Minnesota sharing a lecture about Tapestry Design Elements and Principles.  That might sound dry and academic, and it is possible I'm a bit of a design nerd.  But I strongly believe that familiarity with some basic terms and concepts that are used to talk about how artworks are put together can be super useful for tapestry weavers.  For me, it's not about throwing around art jargon, it's about knowing how to identify and figure out how the parts of a tapestry are working together.  For me these concepts are helpful in talking about tapestry, interpreting it, evaluating it . . . and diagnosing what might not be working in my own work.  In the talk this weekend, I've narrowed down the usual long list of Elements of Art and Principles of Design to the eight that I think are especially important for tapestry weavers.  We look at each element and principle in terms of how it works in lots of actual tapestries.  

Go HERE to register for this Saturday's talk about Tapestry Design Elements and Principles.  The tickets are on a sliding scale starting at $10, and the lecture will be recorded and available for two weeks to those who register. 

Next weekend, on Saturday, March 20 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern, I'll be presenting a lecture for the Florida Tropical Weavers Guild virtual conference about a particular trend in contemporary tapestry, toward work with lots of texture, relief elements, mixed media and even 3-D work. This topic is of great interest to me  lately and raises interesting questions about what tapestry is and isn't today. HERE is where you can find out more about this talk.   You can head HERE to become a member of the guild and register for the conference.  I'll be presenting this same lecture for the Weavers Guild of Minnesota on May 1, and you can register HERE for that date.  

It hasn't all been book-work lately. . . I'm about halfway through weaving the piece on my floor loom with the working title SkyGrass.  

I'm also designing a new piece but it's changing so often I'm not ready to share yet!

I hope you are immersed in something fun these days.  Stay well.