Where to begin?

Last September, I took my very first tapestry weaving class at the Arrowmont School of Crafts. It was a wonderful week and what I loved best was the ability to focus on that one thing - the art. Someone else dealt with the cooking, the cleaning and the teaching. I just needed to show up and glean all that I could. And I did! What I have learned since is that many of the weavers keep blogs and in reading them I have been inspired to keep my own. Even if all it does is function as a journal for me.

So this first entry will recall my class at Arrowmont. The class was creating a sampler and learning the basic techniques of tapestry weaving. The beauty was in not having a plan, but allowing the time to just see what you see. I had chosen to work in black and white since I have a heating hall full of black and white family photos. I thought that was the weaving would already have place to be displayed.

I started to see building in the shapes and started to think how I could make a building out of the next technique. That worked well until we got to color blending. All was dark and would blend to white - why? I took the night off to think about it. Somewhere in that time, I realized that what I want is to live in color - full, free color. So I went back and blended to white as a light coming from an arch. Through the arch is another world of random color. Even the arch is not created in straight lines, but allowed to be eccentric. The random coloes and the arch also caused the weaving to expand beyond it's borders. There's no confining it!

So I keep this piece where I have my morning quiet time to remind me my life to be as full of color as it can be. I look forward to seeing where all this goes.