#24

© Helen Hiebert, 100 x 100 Paper Weavings, #24, 14″ x 8″, SOLD

Hello from St. Louis, where I arrived today to attend the annual meeting of The Friends of Dard Hunter. I’m staying in a cute boutique hotel called The Moonrise, where all of the artwork pertains to … the moon!
This project has been more nostalgic than I anticipated. I looked through a folder of old papers (not too many due to two facts: I’m not a hoarder and I’ve moved and purged so many times). My father (a nuclear physicist who now suffers from alzheimers) began writing this letter to me when I was 3-1/2 months old. It is quite moving (this is a photocopy, by the way) and I can barely start reading it without beginning to tear up. He gave it to me when I turned 21 (aka became an adult) and it is a piece of paper I will always cherish. The leaf printed paper is from Two Hands Paperie and reminds me of the season changing from summer to fall in East Texas where I grew up. My dad raked the leaves into piles in the back yard and we loved to jump into them.

© Helen Hiebert, 100 x 100 Paper Weavings, #25, 12″ x 6″, $100

This is another handmade abaca paper with a pseudo watermarked alphabet layer in fine cotton. The kozo paper is from Hiromi Paper‘s colored kozo line (this is smoke) and is subtle and perfectly uniform (except for the wrinkles I made when weaving the thick bits through the thin slits).

© Helen Hiebert, 100 x 100 Paper Weavings, #26, 10″ x 8″, $100

I covered a 4-panel lampshade for my daughter with four different beaded images similar to this one and gave it to her for Christmas one year. One of the panels popped off of the frame, and anyone who knows abaca knows that once it has contracted it will not expand, so finally I decided to remove (and save) the paper panels from the wire frame. This is one of them – the beads are embedded in between two sheets of paper. I wove it with pieces of painted tyvek (that stuff they use to wrap houses). I rubbed acrylic paint onto the tyvek’s surface, and the color picked up its fibrous texture.

Don’t forget that you can view all of the weavings to date here. I’d love to hear about which ones you are drawn to and why. Leave a comment below!