Fall has come to the desert, the signs are unmistakable… The white wing doves vanished seemingly overnight after a rain storm blew through a few weeks ago. Turpentine bush which looked like nothing more than a long dead bunch of sticks during the blasting summer heat now punctuate the desert with their sunny yellow blooms & sticky, narrow green leaves. Our A/C is off, our windows are open, & I don’t turn on music very often now, preferring instead to hear the birds joyful chatter as they sing their little gizzards out. The sun is lazy climbing out of his bed behind the Catalinas & no longer greets me when I sit outside with my coffee. Instead, the shimmer of stars & the moon’s glow gently illuminate the still desert & beam between the slats in the ramada roof under which I sit while the hooting of owls, the conversations of coyotes & the occasional rustle of a mouse keep me company. The days’ light has changed from the blue white tip of a hot flame to something golden & living… now when I walk outside, I don’t squint & hurry about my business in order to get back inside to escape the blistering scald of heat; instead the light makes me linger, immediately makes me alert & curious to look about, the sky is the color of soft cornflowers, & everything seems clear & magnified-- alive.
They say all good things will come to an end, so that must apply to bad things as well. After spending a solid week of researching & educating myself about the legalities of roads & their use in the NM county where our land is located, it has basically come down to wait & see what happens next. Waiting sometimes has a way of evolving into forgetting, which is what I am allowing myself to do, forget the trauma of the day & move on to happier & more interesting things in life.
Like learning to live in a new way… I recently made the decision to adhere to a gluten free diet. A couple months ago I visited a physician that practices nutritional medicine to find an alternative treatment for the muscular & joint pain I suffer related to a condition I have called fibromyalgia. Most “regular” docs don’t really know what to do with fibro patients except offer narcotics, something I have been trying very hard to avoid. To make a long story short, this new doc put me on a special detoxification/elimination diet that lasted 28 days-- the diet excluded a plethora of foods, most of which are known allergens. After the 28 days I was allowed to reintroduce the foods that had been excluded. While I was on the diet, I started feeling extremely wonderful & was able to forego taking any kind of pain reliever. I was also pretty amazed to find that my belly stopped torturing me after meals… I had no idea that might be related to something other than my own physical peculiarity. I started researching gluten sensitivity during that time & was very surprised to find that the symptoms were extremely similar to those of fibromyalgia, so I decided not to add gluten back in, which had been pretty prevalent in my diet. I am still feeling great, better than I have in the last few years actually, & I’d have to say that my pain symptoms are at least 90% better & my belly is very happy. Now, I have been learning how to prepare some of my favorite things gluten free, or “GF”. The biggest epiphany was discovering a baking mix that makes great bread… PB&J sandwiches forever! And I found GF beer! So far my favorite is New Grist. Now, I just have to figure out pizza crusts & tortillas-- Dennis bravely consumed the “test cases” with me, but they weren’t quite up to my expectations… back to the mixing bowl!
Good things come in large trucks… since I last posted, my new Shannock loom arrived! I consider this to be the first stage in preparing for the Grand Canyon Condor Tapestry project & I am so very excited! Here is the moment of delivery, the truck arriving & the friendly delivery guy very carefully unloading the heavy crate:
Dennis carted the pieces in one by one & the next day we had it put together in about an hour, except for the heddle bars which I’ll connect the first time I warp it. Then he very patiently helped me move it around several times as I re-organized the studio. We used nifty little coaster pads under the feet that allowed us to slide it around to avoid developing hernias. As we put it together, Dennis, himself an engineer, was really impressed with Shannock’s ingenious design. Even though the loom is much bigger than the Tissart, its spare design makes the studio look less cluttered.
If you noticed in above photo that there is a warp on the student Shannock, you are right, I am weaving again! I have been spending time the last couple of weeks working on the first round of exercises I received from Silvia Heyden for her distance mentoring program I am participating in. We have three months to complete this assignment; it is due the beginning of December. It is a compilation of exercises in value that utilize sketching & weaving. I’ve completed the sketching & I’ve just started the weaving portion on my student Shannock.
A little hard to discriminate the design at this point in the weaving, but it is a value study of the fleshy ribs of a saguaro cactus being woven on its side in the required grey scale. I set the warp up at ~7-8 epi so I could weave with weft bundles & decided to use a linen warp, a Bockens 8/3. Another aspect of preparing for the Condor tapestry, I am beginning to think about what materials would be best to use, so I’ve decided to incorporate “experiments” like this into the Heyden exercises. Not sure I like the linen as much as the cotton seine twine I prefer, I love its smooth feel… the linen seems to get quite hairy & feels very rough on the hands & it is also more expensive that the cotton. For weft, I’m using combos of my own natural dyed Burnham’s Trading Post wools & alpaca, YMM wools, Norsk Fjord wools, & Bockens linen.
I have been thinking about weaving cactus for a very long time, but trying to figure out how I would represent the spines has had me baffled until I discovered this very interesting “yarn” sold by Habu textiles. It is fishnet made of linen & coated with persimmon for waterproofing that has been cut into lengths. In the area of weaving that represents the highlighted edge of the saguaro’s rib, I laid it in on top of the last pick of weft in the same shed. I like the effect of this one I’ve done so far. As I get more ribs woven, I think the form of the saguaro will become more easily discernible.
Dennis & I are off in a couple days for a trip to the Florida panhandle, back to the area we left when we moved to Tucson 12 years ago. I have not been back since we left, although Dennis has traveled there for work & one year went back to help his mother after a hurricane. We are going to visit her & we will also see Dennis’s two sisters, but we are staying on the beach nearby. I am not sure how to feel about going back, I know there will be changes, but the beaches of the Gulf are so very beautiful as are the environments of the long leaf pine flats, swamps, bays & bayous that I used to love so much; I will really enjoy seeing all of those things again. I moved there at the age of 14 with my parents when my father was stationed at the Air Force base & left when I was 37, living there for 23 years through the wild & quite lawless “activities” of my late teens, through the hard years of my first marriage, & finally near the end of my time there meeting Dennis & completing nursing school. A lot of water has washed across the beach since then.
