Tapestry-A Day for Women

FORT WAYNE, Ind.(WANE) - Tapestry-A Day for Women is designed to provide a day of renewal and self-growth for women of all ages through educational, motivational, and inspirational activities in an atmosphere of camaraderie.

Proceeds raised support the Tapestry Parkview Endowment Fund and provide IPFW scholarships to select women in the field of health sciences. Since its inception, Tapestry has raised more than $200,000 and seventeen women have received scholarships.

Indianapolis native Elliott Engel returned to Tapestry as the morning keynote speaker with his presentation on the lives of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Using anecdotes, analysis, and large doses of humor, Engel recounted their story of engagement, marriage, and poetic contributions. Engel is an international lecturer and professor at North Carolina State University.

The luncheon keynote speaker was Clinton Kelly, co-host of TLCs What Not To Wear. His presentation, Seven Steps to Developing Healthy Style-Esteem, outlined how building a wardrobe for your outside can improve how you feel on the inside.

Kelly has served in numerous editorial positions at major fashion magazines. He received a bachelors degree in communications from Boston College and a masters degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Parkview Health was recognized as Tapestrys founding partner and sponsor. Ruth Stone, Tapestry project manger, thanked all the other businesses and groups who have supported Tapestry with their funds, products, and/or services, and announced there will be 14 breakout sessions at this years event.

A highlight of the afternoon was the announcement of this years Dedication Award recipient. Each year, Tapestry is dedicated to a female role model whose positive activities have encompassed all aspects of her life.

The 2009 recipient is Patty Martone, who for decades has touched and enriched the lives of many as an educator and administrator with Fort Wayne Community Schools, as a writer and chronicler of Fort Wayne, and as a tireless volunteer who is passionate about whatever she commits to.

Martone and her husband, Tony, have been married for more than 54 years and have two grown children. "I awaken every morning with a purpose. My activity has been my salvation, said Martone." As she puts it, I may be rapidly approaching 80, but she hasnt slowed down a bit.

For more information on Tapestry-A Day for Women go to www.ipfw.edu/tapestry.

Taken From Wane.com

Her Tapestry Saga Is No Yarn

In a tiny apartment across from the Hard Rock Hotel, a 72-year-old nomadic artist who goes by the single name Sola has spent the past three years weaving a vibrant tapestry of Las Vegas that will blow your mind.

Embroidered and textured palm trees frame casino properties. Turquoise blue pools dot the landscape. MGM Grand, woven in metallic green, anchors the south end of the Strip. Golden beads mark streetlights that extend north toward the mountains.

Marquees announce Elton John, Danny Gans, Cher. Air-conditioning units sit atop the Sands Convention Center. Hotels, civic buildings, Hard Rock guitars, motel signs, office parks and side streets all clamor for attention.

She put more than 8,000 hours into the piece, working alone in her tidy, sparse apartment, sometimes measuring buildings and counting windows at night from the tops of parking ramps and Strip towers. If a hotel has 54 stories, she wove 54 stories from the ground up.

Holidays, birthdays, weekends, every day.

“I’ve reduced life to the simplest focus — my tapestry,” she says, glancing at the 11-by-7 1/2 foot work that leans against her living room wall.

Today, with the help of Marty Walsh, owner of Trifecta Gallery, the tapestry moves to Atlantic Aviation, the former Las Vegas Executive Air Terminal, where it will hang until it is sold. As she has with her other tapestries, she will donate the profit to arts and other organizations.

Sola has been weaving cities since the 1980s, when she wanted to create a portrait of Vancouver, British Columbia, for the 1986 World’s Fair, but didn’t know how to draw or paint. Textiles were her only sure terrain.

She mostly weaves Olympic cities, traveling to different countries, then moving on. She plans to be in London for the 2012 Olympics. She’ll know in October where she’ll be for the 2016 Olympics — Tokyo, Madrid, Rio de Janeiro or Chicago. She hopes it’s Rio.

She came to Las Vegas after reading about Strip implosions and felt an urge to document the city before the buildings were gone. Already, her piece is outdated — the Stardust (imploded March 2007) is on the Strip in her tapestry, and the Tropicana marquee lists “Folies Bergere” (closed last month after 49 years).

Recycling yarn from thrift store sweaters, Sola literally wove Las Vegas from the fabric of the community. Stretching a swatch of a coal gray Gap sweater, she says, “See, that’s parking lots.”

She’s friendly, chatty. Maybe that’s what happens when you spend all of your time alone, creating and building a city from yarn and string — you feel like talking again.

She has no valuables, aside from what will fit into a rolling suitcase, and buys furnishings at thrift stores and gives them back when she leaves. She wants to own nothing: “I wear the same clothes every day. I just wash them. It frees up income and imagination if you don’t have a lot to take care of.”

Fleeing is her history. As a child during World War II, she was sent away from her family in London during the blitz. She stayed with a host family in a village in Wales, roaming the hills and picking wool off fences, then returned to London after the war. In the ’60s, she settled in Toronto and opened coffee shops and other venues for folk singers and rock stars passing through.

Her daughter lives in Vancouver. Her mother, 96, lives in London. Friends are spread across the globe. Her income comes from knitting hats that sell for about $40 in Vancouver. “Thank you, Gap, for using such incredibly beautiful materials,” she says, stretching a stylish hat, one of hundreds stacked in her bedroom.

Sola shows no sign of fatigue. Trim and fit, she talks about wanting to live to 100.

“If I can touch yarn for 10 hours a day then I am in absolute heaven and I want to do it for as long as I live.”

She heads soon to Vancouver, where she’ll stay through the 2010 Winter Olympics. A cartoon map of Vancouver is taped to a door. When she leaves her apartment for the last time, she will peel it off, fold it up and tuck it into her suitcase. It will be the last item removed.

Taken From LasVegasSun.com

Temple's $1m Tapestry Helps Save Costs

by DARYLL NANAYAKARA

A TAPESTRY - sewn with threads made of gold - was on display at Ngee Ann City Civic Plaza as part of a thanksgiving and prayer ceremony by the Singapore Seu Teck Sean Tong Yiang Sin Sia temple.

The session for the Taoist temple at Bedok North, which ran from last Friday to yesterday, saw close to 240 devotees chanting prayers for three days and drew a crowd of more than 10,000.

The tapestry, which is about 5 by 10 metres, adorns altars at the temple's religious ceremonies and costs more than $1 million.

But could the money have gone to better use in the current economic climate?

Not necessarily.

Mr Joe Lim, the temple's spokesman, told my paper that the temple already donates more than $200,000 a year to various charities and the new tapestry is more durable.

This means the temple need not spend more to replace or maintain it in future.

The money for the tapestry came from the temple's sponsors, devotees and donations collected at the temple's seven branches in Singapore and Malaysia.

Mr Lim added: "In the past we used regular fabric, but it was damaged very easily due to wear and tear over the years.

"With this gold-threaded embroidery, we believe we can use it for the next 50 years without having to replace or repair it."

The temple had commissioned the tapestry in the early 1990's to "preserve the reputation and image" of the temple.

It would be inappropriate "if the temple holds religious ceremonies using cloths that are torn and dirty", Mr Lim said.

In 1992, temple devotees came up with $600,000 from their own pockets and arranged for a group of villagers in Shantou, China, to sew the gold-threaded tapestry by hand.

The finished product was completed in 2000 and bears motifs of mythical creatures and other symbols of worship.

Mr Lim added that donors were aware of the temple's decision to invest in the embroidery.

Devotee Jeffrey Eng, 49, said: "The temple announced its plans to members. Such a project is good because the art of putting together such a tapestry is rare."

This is because very few craftsmen now know how to sew it. "This is a dying trade. If we tried to get this done again, chances are it would be almost impossible because it would be hard to find people who are still doing this by hand."

Taken From AsiaOne.com

Tapestry Of Picasso's Guernica Marks Whitechapel Gallery Reopening

The Whitechapel Gallery in London's East End has marked a £13.5 million expansion by welcoming a version of Picasso's anti-war work Guernica, 70 years after the original was shown there.

Turner Prize-nominated artist Goshka Macuga helped convince Margaretta Rockefeller to lend the Whitechapel the 20ft long tapestry for a year, which has been on long-term loan in the United Nations building in New York since 1985.

It was commissioned by tycoon Nelson Rockefeller, Margaretta's late husband, in 1955.

Seventy years ago Picasso's monumental painting, which depicts the 1937 Nazi bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, was shown at the Whitechapel for two weeks, attracting 15,000 people.

Polish-born Macuga, 42, said she was inspired to revive the spirit of that event.

Knowing that the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid would not agree to let the painting travel, the Whitechapel approached the Rockefeller family.

Macuga said the tapestry had been given extra significance as an anti-war symbol since Colin Powell delivered his flawed evidence on the apparent existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in the run-up to the invasion in early 2003.

Then the Guernica tapestry, which normally hangs outside the UN Security Council chamber, was covered by a blue cloth - apparently to make television pictures of Powell clearer.

The excuse fooled no one.

Macuga said: "If you are starting a war you are not going to do it in front of an anti-war symbol."

To accompany the tapestry, Macuga created a hollow round-table for people to hire for discussions, filled with war and anti-war propaganda. She commissioned a bronze cubist-style bust of Powell, which she said represented "a figure who is falling apart morally". In 2004 Powell admitted the evidence he submitted to the UN on WMDs could have been wrong.

The commission, sponsored by Bloomberg, marks the gallery's reopening after its £13.5 million Heritage Lottery Fund-sponsored refit, which has almost doubled its exhibition space.

Iwona Blazwick, the Whitechapel's director, said: "The expansion enables us to be open all year round so there will always be something for free to see."

It reopens to the public on April 5.

Taken From Telegraph.co.uk