While I'm waiting for a couple dyepots to get hot enough, I thought it would be nice to post to my blog after all this time. July sure did fly by! We went down to Salt Lake City to visit Jess and Cory and had a wonderful time there as we always do. The drive is beautiful through the Gallatin Canyon, through the corner of Yellowstone National Park and Island Park. I love the look of Idaho and it's rather barren landscape and then it is always fun to hit Utah because that means we are almost there and I love the beauty of the Wasatch mountains. Being with the kids is always fun and so it was just a great get-away. We got home on the Fourth of July in time for fireworks. Very few fireworks are illegal in Montana and so there is quite a display throughout the neighborhoods. This is the first year we could enjoy the view from our third floor condo and it was beyond impressive. When you go to a city display, it is usually just one or two at a time but this was a constant barrage of fireworks the whole panoramic view and we could see the Bozeman city fireworks too. After about an hour I went in to keep Amigo, our scaredy Maine Coon cat, company. He hides in the shower when things get too overwhelming for him and he'd been in there long enough.
My trees tapestry is finished and I nearly have it backed and ready to hang. After sewing down the hems, I always sew a cotton backing almost up to the edges of the tapestry. I think that this makes the messy back with all those ends look neater and also gives some protection from moths should they find there way back there when it is hanging on the wall. Now I need to come up with a better title for it and get a photo to post here. It will be shown at the MAWS conference in Bozeman this August and then at the Flying C restaurant over the Community Food Co-op in Bozeman in December. I will have some of my tapestries and purses exhibited there and I'm really excited about that.
I have the cartoon finished for my latest tapestry and it will be about 16" x 22" so very close to the size of the last one. I find that lately I need to work larger than I had been to get in all the detail that I want and I just don't think I have the patience to work with setts and wefts that are very fine. It's more comfortable for me to just make the tapestry larger. This is the first time I will try to weave the image of running water. In the spring I took several photos at Bozeman Creek trail and so I have drawn and redrawn and combined a couple of them to make the final image that I want. What I am dyeing now are the colors for the creek and sky. The first batch I did yesterday were way too dark although I think I have the hue right. Today I am doing 2 batches that are half of yesterday's and a quarter so I can see what I want to use. These are Cushing dyes which I am using in powdered form, not making a stock solution from them. I dye fleece and then blend lots of colors on the drum carder for each yarn but I didn't have anything in my dyed fleece collection to get the colors I wanted for this. My dream is to sometime have a palette of colors that I always use and so I can have what I want on hand and just replace it as it gets used up so I'm not held up starting a tapestry when I need to dye and spin like this. I'm getting closer to the goal but there always seems to be new color that I need. This nice hot afternoon, I will be carding so I have some fibers ready to start spinning over the weekend. It would be nice to have the loom warped next week and be able to start weaving. Once I have a cartoon, I'm impatient to get weaving already.
