Tuesday, October 8, 2024

Open Studios Tour: the Studio



I was planning to add some videos of my participation in the local Open Studios Tour this coming weekend. However, I can’t seem to get my videos to fit the format here, so I’ll just add photos. I’m starting in the studio, which is probably the last place visitors will be, as my studio is upstairs in my home, and I have work through a good bit of the house, as well as in the studio.

As you go in, there are a few small tapestries hanging together. These are each about 8x10” or less.


The pastel sketch on the easel is a ‘maquette’ or a design for a tapestry. The tapestry itself will be seen in a later post.


Another small tapestry on the end of my yarn shelves.


The bins in these shelves are filled with the Swedish yarn I use in my tapestries, sorted by color families. The upper left shelves also hold my sketchbooks from over the years. Many of my tapestries come directly from my sketches.


I have a number of oil paintings in the studio, and the one here of boats was a maquette for a tapestry. The tapestry itself was stolen from a gallery in North Carolina. If you should ever see the tapestry, please let me know!

This is my work table. It contains the materials I’m using in the tapestry I’m currently working on. There is also a small loom on it now, as I have a small tapestry in progress as well as one on the large loom.


My large loom is a 6-ft wide Shannock loom. It also has a tapestry in progress on it. A tapestry this size will take me several months to weave. I can weave about an inch across the width of the tapestry in approximately 8 hours.


There are a few tapestries behind the loom, including a few from my ‘Selfies’ series, “The Caregiver,” and “Not the Enemy,” and “The Photographer.”


This small work table is where I paint. I got the Unicorn tapestry poster at the Cloisters Museum in New York, and the triangular tapestry hanging from the loom (upper left) is my duplicate of the ornament I was privileged to make for the White House Christmas tree during the Clinton administration.

 

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