News

Spinning is really relaxing.  Weaving can be all kinds of things; exciting, tiring, frustrating, and, at its most fun, an intellectually challenging puzzle.  Because the weaving process is often incredibly long I rarely think about the finishing work that will be necessary when I get through weaving.  But the finishing work brings crucial qualities to the final piece, mainly what it looks like and how it feels to the human touch.  The finishing process is especially challenging with my handspun churro pieces.  Churro pieces, whether handspun or millspun, tend to be fuzzy looking things.  My personal take is that I...

We have participated in Spanish Market for a very long time.  Irvin’s first Market was in 1976, and Lisa started in 1982.  It was under the two portals, at the Palace of the Governors and on the east side of the Plaza, on Old Santa Fe Trail.  There are only a handful of us who go back that far.  What it means, more than anything, is that Spanish Market has become a blur in our memories.  We remember people we meet there kind of vaguely, even if we spent time engaged in fascinating conversation with them.  I wish I could...

This is actually a fairly complete history of Rio Grande weaving.  A few weeks ago we were a part of a group of amazing experts on the local Hispanic culture of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado that met in Alamosa, Colorado. The participants are all instructors for something called the Hilos Institute.  The Institute is, we learned, about teaching instructors at Adams State University about the culture that a lot of their students come from, so that they can be do a better job as teachers.  And what they wanted us to understand, was how to organize our knowledge...

Chimayo is the style that Irvin and Lisa learned first, before learning to weave the older parts of the tradition.  There is a logic and a mindset that is central to weaving the Chimayo style.  And there’s all of that going back and forth between shuttle weaving and tapestry weaving.  It may be the first style that we learned to weave, but it isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. Let’s start by describing and defining the style the best we can.  A Chimayo has two stripes and a center design.  The bigger the piece is, the more room there...

One of the most common questions I get asked in the shop it, “What happens if you make a mistake?”  My standard answer is, “Either I fix it or I don’t.  And the goal is to find mistakes quickly.” I assume that people ask this because of the nature of tapestry.   They understand that the decoration is inherent to the structure of what we are making and not a surface decoration that could be easily altered.  So when we make a mistake that we want to correct, it means un-weaving the error.  Sometimes un-weaving the error requires un-weaving a...

“Flame 2000” by Irvin Trujilllo   In May of 2000, the Cerro Grande fire burned through the Jemez mountains across the Rio Grande Valley from us.  It resulted in a huge column of smoke which would descend on us for days at a time.  The wind blowing incessantly only made things worse.  It burned out a lot of homes in Los Alamos and caused both Los Alamos and White Rock, where our kids went to school at the time, to be evacuated.  For those of us in the valley, it was just extremely frightening to watch the fire destroy so...