What was the question?
 These last months have involved an inordinate amount of movement: packing, unpacking, packing again, doing travel laundry. I can make yarn wherever I am, thank goodness, but since I like my summer days to look like this:  as they did last summer, rather than this  as they seem to this summer, it takes a certain amount of effort to make sure I'm not mentally half out the door all the time. Happily, while I was off on some trip or other, my husband made me this fabulous light table:  He started with old wooden shipping box, fixed strips of LED lights to the bottom, and put a piece of frosted glass on top,  so when I'm home I can at least draw warp and weft, remember the pleasures (and frustrations) of my backstrap explorations of the last year, and work on this other project -- a thing that you probably already figured out about from the drawings in previous posts-- that i'm calling a comic instructional memoir.  pen and ink -- wonderful except when you inadvertently go over instead of under the knitting needle at the top of the loom... There is still a lot of work to do -- not only writing and inking (then re-writing and re-inking), and hopping back and forth between contemporary and medieval technology, but also scanning, fixing ink blots, deciding about color (yes? no? watercolor? digital color?), figuring out about printing (me? someone else?), actually getting them printed etc, but eventually I hope I'll be able to talk about it more specifically as I get closer to getting this new zine into my etsy shop to keep company with How To Weave A Bag On A Box. And in the meantime, I will pretend my days are only full of these:
and these,  and that more packing is not hovering on the horizon.
Happy summer, my friends!  The amazing Shirley Medsker, my very first weaving teacher, now of Netarts OR, contributed her uncle's rose quartz to the installation On the far wall just to the right of the blue and white piece (Blanket of Snow), is a small tapestry called "Hooray," that pretty much expresses how I feel about this show.  The Installation team at the Latimer Center brought my dreams to life.  The tapestry wall and the bench from which the previous photo was taken Symmetry and asymmetry, movement and quiet, high and low-- their placement of the pieces pulled me around and through the room again and again.  They even added an oscillating fan so the cloth is in motion as it was in my studio with the doors open -- only better.  It is so interesting to design a body of work for a particular space and then see it there --  to walk behind the swaths of fabric and peek through,  STRIPES: Needlepoint comic in three panels on the stage of this former two room school house. and contemplate other work installed in ways I'd not have imagined.  It is also particularly marvelous to work with people who love and understand textiles of all sorts. The Latimer Center built a custom climate controlled textile repository behind the gallery where they stabilize and/or repair historic quilts and house their textile collection.  .Yesterday I left my campsite at the beach at 2 AM (the full moon made it feel like dawn), and drove for 12 hours to get home, and though I had a lovely nap in a park just off the Interstate east of Portland, and a delicious breakfast in Hood River,
I'm just a teensy bit out of it today. But so what? My shell peas are fattening nicely, the raspberries starting to get ripe, and this show fills me with glee.  So you know how just over a year ago I went away for a weekend and did a little experimenting with a backstrap loom?  And remember how I gave a little report at the end of July about my month (a whole month!!!) of weaving on this loom -- only to find myself writing again and again, and again about the loom and the cloth I couldn't stop making, not to mention the upcoming show at the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center in Tillamook, OR where said cloth would actually be hanging on public view?  Well all that cloth is now there, and both it and I will be at the opening reception on 9 July, 2017 from 12 - 4 PM. Be great to see you! And for those of you for whom it is just a teensy bit too far, I hope to to have pics of how it looks in real life, rather than just how I imagine it to be, for the blog post after this.  In the meantime, Weave on!
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Sarah C Swett
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