Wednesday, July 23, 2014

Convergence 2014: Breakfast CERF+, Tagging Along with Tapestry Weavers @ RISD Museum, Meeting of Internet Connections

Craig Nutt in his space suit

My Friday morning started off with a great talk about being covered in case of a studio disaster.  Craig did a great job of making it entertaining with comparing it to unexpected alien incidences, ie. "Alien spacecrafts can cause serious property damage."  It was really informative and although I don't live in an area where we get hurricanes, flash-floods, tornados and random combustion, there's a lot that can STILL go wrong (including alien abduction).
Craig works for CERF+ (Craft Emergency Relief Fund) which is a resource for Artists.  He showed us a lot of informative video clips and gave us some great resources, but also drilled into my head that Homeowners Insurance does not cover for anything business-related. Yikes.
After breakfast and thanking Craig for his talk, I again wandered down to my hotel lobby to decide what to go see and ran into Rebecca again.  I asked to tag along with her, Cornelia and Lyn to RISD's Museum of Art, so we began our trek up-hill. 

(Lyn, Cornelia, Rebecca walking through the park)

Dale Chihuly's work never gets old to me

(Have you seen Disney's Frozen yet? this reminds me of that hall of artwork in one of the songs)

Myself and Rebecca: Selfie

They were on the hunt for a pizza place that serves Vegan and Gluten Free which was really delicious. There I learned that Lyn Hart was the weaver that woven the full sized Condor Tapestry at the Grand Canyon!  I'm sure I caught it on Rebecca's blog or something, but Lyn's work is phenomenal.  Check out her Condor coming off the loom HERE.  I'm just so excited to be around so many amazing tapestry weavers.  I'm glad that my Porcupine Mountains Residency is coming up, I'll be back on to some tapestry weaving while I'm there.


I split off to take a look at some of the shops around the pizza place and took a long walk by the capitol back to the hotel. Look at the clouds! Every day I was in Providence looked like this. I lucked out by missing the beginning of the week downpours.

So as I was talking with Rebecca, I mentioned Mandy Pedigo, and Rebecca said that she was her assistant, so through some tweeting we met up at the HGA General meeting.  Mandy and I have chatted a little bit via Twitter about my Double Weave Pick-up Video, which she told me was helpful to look at when she was trying to figure it out herself.  I also had the chance to meet two other fiber art students, one who is moving to Ypsilanti to go to the Fiber program at Eastern Michigan University.

Next thing I knew Inga Marie Carmel was tweeting at me about my piece in the show.  We have only been in contact online through Lynne Bruning and her eTextiles Lounge. I told her I was in the lobby and we met up, then chatted for a long while at the AVL reception. We tried to hit the hot tub, but alas, it was broken the entire time.  :(  WE made plans to do lunch the next day and she'd introduce me to Suzi Ballenger, another eTextiles person that I only know from the interwebs.

(AVL Reception at the hotel)

(AVL program on a laptop)

I have to say that the AVL Little Weaver Looms were enticing. Sometimes I think that I have enough things that I need to weave on my Macomber right now with 6 shafts and I can still add 4 more shafts to my loom.  And then I look at the complex weaver's guild and think "wouldn't it be nice to have 32 shafts to do 3 different patterns in triple-weave pick-up..."  I think I know what shaft-envy feels like now.

After the HGA general meeting and the Rep Rally I think I need to pick up the book for the weaving COE (Certificate of Excellence) first and maybe start picking away at that. Both Inga Marie (goes by Marie) and Rep-Organizer Barbara Nelson told me that they learned a lot from doing even part of the COE. So that's another book to put on my list.... COE before AVL loom. Focus.

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