This tapestry has a bit of a history. Let's see...
Back in college I worked in the Art History Slide Library where I refiled slides that were pulled for art history lectures. It was about as fun as you're imagining, yeah. But when there weren't slides to refile I had a few other projects to work on. One of which was to re-label all the poorly labeled non-western ancient art slides.
This was not as easy as it sounds because whoever labeled them before me could not write. Seriously. I had to do a lot of guess work for what the slides actually said, and I still feel guilty about the fact that I'd misread (and then mis-re-labeled) all the Japanese 'Moromashi' period slides to be 'Mordmashi.' A mistake I only realized long after I'd relabeled and refiled all the slides in that collection.
I'm sure the next person to work in the slide library and/or professor to teach Japanese art thinks I'm an utter idiot, but the true blame lies with whomever went before me.
Anyway, I ended up looking at a lot of Japanese art while I was doing this re-labeling stuff, and I thought it might be fun to play with subtle color differences and do a landscape scroll. I couldn't find a good one to base my image off of, so I went with this garden instead.
In looking at it, you may notice that there is a lot of blank space up near the top. It was nine rows of nothing followed by I-didn't-count-how-many rows of almost nothing. However there are now more than nine rows of nothing on the top of this tapestry.
This is because there used to be a really, truly, horribly horrible hummingbird hovering above the garden. It was...an eyesore and had a direct relation to my desire to sell this tapestry. Although I couldn't try to sell the tapestry with the bird still intact, so I cut it out and replaced it with plain beads, which was a tedious and lightly frustrating process.
You can still see a ghost of the hummingbird if you hold the tapestry up to the light, since the beads around where it used to be were sewn through with thread so many times. I don't regret removing the bloody bird, but I sure as hell regret including it in the first place.
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