I’m pleased to announce three shows that feature my work:

Bipolar Prison is currently on display at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles as part of their exhibition The Woven Pixel. That exhibit is up until May 10, 2026.

Renewal will be in the show Text Machines: Scarlet Thread of the Digital Order (1883-2025) at Stanford Libraries (Green Library), which will run from late May through the end of the year.

And Eternal Love (aka my wedding dress) will be exhibited at The Henry Ford June 7 through September 13 in Fabric of America | Our Fashions, Textiles, and Technologies. (It might also be coming to the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles in late fall – stay tuned!)

I’m delighted to have so many exhibits – and especially excited to have my wedding dress on display at The Henry Ford. The Henry Ford is a major museum – they get over 1.5 million visitors a year. And to have my work selected out of the 1,000,000+ items they have in their collection is a huge honor.

Beyond that, it’s also an opportunity for me to see and reflect on a piece that has deep meaning for me. As my wedding dress, of course, it would have meaning anyway. But it was also my turning-point as a maker. I spent over 1,000 hours creating the dress, over the course of a year, and it is as near perfection as I have ever gotten. Up until then I had seen myself as a dabbler in this and that, but when I saw the completed dress, I thought, “This is a masterpiece. I can do more.”

And that, in turn, spawned a whole series of more ambitious work – Bipolar Prison, for example – and a lot of research into various things artistic. And, finally, led to my changing careers to teach visual design and color in weaving.

Despite all that, though, I still didn’t think of myself as an artist. A researcher and teacher, but not an artist. The researcher runs deep in my blood – both my parents were scientists, and I went to Caltech. And while I had an exhibit here and there – including one or two museum exhibits – I thought of them more or less as flukes.

But with three works on exhibit this year, it’s getting progressively harder to dismiss them all as happy accidents.

After looking back on the things I’ve made recently, my work isn’t just about creating technical perfection. It’s about saying something – which, to me, is the differentiation between art and craft.

I felt that my work was scattered, though, without a uniting theme (which is what I would expect from a working artist).

After much thought, though, I’ve realized that it actually does have a uniting theme: transformation. Bipolar Prison is about the rapid changes from depression and mania; Eternal Love, of course, is about stepping across the threshold to marriage, making a lifetime commitment. Renewal is about rebirth, both on a personal level and as a universal theme. Unraveling is about the conscious decision to transform oneself.

So that, artistically speaking, is a theme on which I can build a body of work.

As an artist, I’d naturally like to do more exhibits – so I am thinking about how best to accomplish that. Still noodling and researching, but I feel like I’ve crossed the threshold. Given my theme of transformation, perhaps that’s another work, waiting in the wings!

On a much more mundane (but very pretty!) level, I’ve finished dyeing my second set of sheets. You may recall the Fire & Water blanket that I dyed in my last post:

(Hi, Pepper! She is an inveterate photobomber, but a delightful one.)

I had planned to do two sets of sheets, one in fire colors and one in water colors, to go with the two halves of the blanket. In my previous blog post, I’d finished the Fire sheets:

I LOVE them.

But, of course, the set wouldn’t be complete without Water, so I dyed a second set in blues and greens:

And here’s what it looks like with the bed made up (astonishingly, without any photobombing cats!):

I LOVE these. So much more fun than plain old white sheets.

And, since no blog post would be complete without a cat or two, here is Nutmeg, hanging out in her kitty hammock. She’s grown up into a beautiful cat!

That’s all for today – stay tuned! I hope to be posting a bit more frequently.

I’m back home in San Jose. I enjoyed my stay in San Miguel de Allende, and I think I could have been happy living there. But it was not home, and I realized it would never feel like home, no matter how long I lived there. So I’ve returned to the Bay Area, and plan to stay here indefinitely.

Once I made that decision, events started steamrolling along. The first order of business, of course, was to find true love. In other words, cats. (What, you thought a mere human would be involved?? Pfft.)

That wasn’t a conscious decision on my part. Well, sort of. I had planned to adopt two cats after I got back, but with two weeks left in Mexico and then a week and a half of travel before returning home for good, it was clearly too early to go looking for them. Nonetheless, I went cutescrolling through the Internet (SO much more fun than doomscrolling) looking at kittens, “just to figure out what I’m looking for”.

Ha. Next thing I knew, I’d fallen in love with two beautiful kittens: a ridiculously fluffy marbled tabby and an equally fuzzy black kitten, a bonded pair of sisters. I had wanted a black cat, in honor of The Fuzz and Fritz, and also because black cats are generally the last to be adopted. That seems ridiculous to me because I personally think they’re the most beautiful of all cats. (Plus, black cat hair looks good on everyone, right?) But, since people have no taste, black cats are less likely to find loving homes and thus also much more likely to be euthanized. So I thought I’d do a good deed as well.

I flew back to San Jose on December 20. I had only two days in San Jose before flying out to visit family for a week, and I had a TON to do and catch up on. So naturally I spent one day visiting the kittens. (Because, let’s face it, you gotta do the important things first.)

Like all beings on dating apps, they turned out to be considerably older than they were in their profile pictures. Instead of fluffy little three month olds, they were six months – more like young cats than adorable kittens.

Like I cared.

I filled out the eight-page application so the rescue could do background checks (they are, appropriately, very protective of their kittens), and was approved. There was one small problem, though. I was still living out of a suitcase, with everything in storage. So I asked if the foster mom could keep the kittens for two more weeks while I finished moving.

That set off twelve days of frantic unpacking. How does one fit two large looms and 500+ pounds of yarn (not to mention clothes etc.) into a 700 square foot apartment? With precise CAD drawings, fourteen trips to IKEA, and a zillion Amazon packages. Plus lots of 12-14 hour days assembling furniture and unpacking boxes.

But I skidded in just under the deadline, kittenproofing the last room day the kittens arrived.

And here they are!

Here is a video of a kitten on the attack:

And here they are, both in action:

Their foster names were Macie (tabby) and Pepper (black), but I will likely change that to more permanent names. I am leaning towards “Gorgeous” and “Beloved,” but both names could describe either kitten! So stay tuned over the next week or so as I get to know them better.

The looms are not yet arrived – the Megado will arrive at some unknown time in the next few days (exciting!) and Amazing Grace (the TC-2) still needs to be disassembled and moved. Once they’re here, this place will feel a lot fuller! But hopefully not too crowded.