Catching up with Textiles and Tea, Thyme, and pasties from scraps

Yesterday's Textiles and Tea featured Michael Rohde, a chemist turned weaver, who's been active for decades in textiles.

He's very much a devote of the exact, the calculated and the grid. He used to make rugs, and has switched to tapestry. He dyes his yarns and uses very meticulous calculation to get exactly the shade he wants.

Interestingly, when asked about his influences, he talks only of his technical teachers in weaving, not of the fine arts, ideas from which are very evident in his work. 

As you see the pictures, you'll spot borrowings from Josef Albers, Georgia O'Keeffe,  and Chuck Close, among others. I cracked up when he was talking about small tapestry looms and referenced Archie Brennan only in relation to the little pipe looms he created!

Archie Brennan is a towering figure in the world of tapestry design and development, revered by seriously fine tapestry designers, including Sarah Swett and Rebecca Mezoff. 

It's all about where you put your focus, I suppose. Anyway here he is, not many images, he was pretty talky.

Here are the Google Earth images 

he zoomed in to copy for this piece

And here's another blown up pixel idea in action

This below is interesting, cochineal dye used here

So there he is, and there's more on his website. He has two studios, one for large one for small work.

Meanwhile closer to home I arranged to get the Fit tires inflated later by my lovely neighbor, who doesn't know he's getting an apple pasty once they've cooled.

They look like Halloween masks in a way. I found a couple of pastry scraps in the freezer and thought I'd use some of the apples I'd diced and frozen.

While I was out I noticed a little offshoot of the thyme plant, probably a root which had traveled several feet, and suddenly sent up a new plant.  You might call it the march of thyme..

So now there's a thyme plant in the kitchen, very handy. I'll refrain from any further terrible thyme jokes. But the kitchen clock is right up there on the right, okay, I'm done.