Leaf Me Alone (Final!)

It's finished! This is the first sister-piece to She Can't See the Forest through the Trees and probably not the last.  December 30, 2019 is when I warped Delilah for this large Leaf Me Alone piece.  I have had lots of projects going on at the same time as I do with any large weaving (as you can see by all of my blog posts in the past 2 years!). I really need the extended time and mental space to get something like this piece finished properly. I finally got that with the second week we were in quarantine with COVID and then some solid full days-off that I set aside with goals to finish so that I could go skiing without stressing out about getting this done. 

I dyed the warp and weft in 2014, I wound the warp in 2017...I have finally come to the realization that dying and creating warps en masse doesn't work for me. I need to do one piece at a time.  I'm quite tired of looking at blue and green at this point! I'm really excited to be able to get back to the piece with the really long name, particularly because it's grey and black.

When I get to a point on a big piece like this where I can see an end in sight, it's important for me to have an exhibit in mind to submit to so that I will spend all my extra time finishing it. The driving exhibit for Leaf Me Alone is with the Handweavers Guild of America's Convergence Conference, I submitted this to the Mixed Media exhibit, we'll see if the juror likes it enough to invite it to Knoxville this summer. It looks like I might be able to squeak it into some other submissions this year too (Michigan League of Handweavers Biennial Exhibit). 

I feel like I've typed at length about this piece. How it represents my need for creative quiet space and less busying myself with socializing or even leaving the house. I'm so much happier, more productive and at peace at home with my little nest of kitties and Bryan. 2 days ago I read the following from my "Meditations for Women Who do Too Much" book and it describes some of the feeling that this piece can allude to for me:

Exerpt from "Mediations for Women Who Do Too Much" 

by Anne Wilson Schaef, Revised and Updated Edition 

It's taken me nearly 40 years but "alla my stuff" that I cherish most is my personal time and taking care of my emotional mental space. I spent years of my life with "Leaf me alone" running, yelling in my head which turned into anger, sadness and resentment.  Now I make sure to take a lot of time for all the crazy that's in my head!! Luckily it comes out of my heart and finger tips as these new pieces of artwork.

Leaf panel for Leaf Me Alone

Regardless of the emotion I feel behind my word pieces, I always hope that different viewers pull from their own personal experiences to relate to my works like these. We are all human experiencing things with very different stories or the same stories and we all have a huge range of emotions that need to bubble up and out.

All my Leaf Me Alone workings thus far....if you want to look into more ramblings. 

The Long Answer to "What are you knitting?"

    One of the projects that I keep in my purse to keep my hands busy is knitting my thrums.  I've been tying the short pieces of rayon thread together and knitting them into strips for a few years now. I currently, finally, have a definite reason to be knitting them. I get asked all the time "what are you knitting? (or making)" and this one is hard to describe. Fabric. That's the short answer...and this is the long answer:

    Thrums are the leftover pieces of thread or yarn left on a loom when the weaving has been cut off. They pull off the bars they were tied on to easily so I just throw them in a bowl of them that I have started. I began keeping them because I think they're just so beautiful, these little knots of leftover hand dyed rayon, and decided I'd just make more fabric with them.

    They knit up with a far different texture than the weaving they helped produce. I don't knit anything fancy, just open and loose knit so it ends up being a very stretchy open-knit fabric. 

Past knitted strips

The video I posted is a time-lapse of tying thrums together during a zoom meeting, knitting and then using the dissolvable fabric to make the knit strips into leaves.  It's another one of my tedious processes which is the kind of process I enjoy. Below you can see the difference between a leaf with the woven fabric versus the knitted fabric. It's quite pleasing to have some more texture.

Woven Leaf on the Left, Knitted on the Right