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I’ve been a sketch tapestry practitioner since 2016. I started making these small pieces which reference something I experienced when I was at an artist residency at Petrified Forest National Park. I had so much fun weaving simple things each day of that month-long residency that I have devoted blocks of time to doing them ever since.
Read the rest of this post for more about the free mini-course and sketch tapestry in general!
Do you have a closet full of various looms but you struggle with choosing the right one for a project? Or are you a beginner and need some help choosing the right loom perhaps after choosing one that isn’t working?
The answer I find myself giving first for so many questions in fiber art is: It depends.
Last fall sometime I purchased a couple new looms from Everlea Looms in Canada. I had seen a few students using these looms and had others ask me about them, so I wanted to try one for myself. I ordered the 11 inch and the 8 inch versions. In the video I review the larger loom and talk about what I like about it.
You'll notice that there are two of the smaller looms in the video. Jana at Everlea sent me a bonus loom that I didn't pay for (thank you Jana!). But I want to make sure you know that I am not being paid to review or talk about this loom. I purchased the original two because I genuinely wanted to try them and am always looking for substitutes for my Hokett looms.* I showed the second smaller loom at the end of the video and it is made with lovely hardwoods. Both kinds of wood seem excellent for weaving tools, at least in the hands of Everlea Loom's maker!
Remember when blogs were popular? Then they weren’t. Then they were again and now it is all about Substack. But that is just a blog, isn’t it? An electronic way of writing and communicating with people online.
I’m still writing this blog 18 years after I started it. The very first post was about a tapestry I finished called This Time I Dance. I’m not sure what prompted me to start a blog on April 20, 2008, but I did. It was on Blogger back then.
I found this image of that tapestry.* Blurry and with a black background, it does remind me of that tapestry and the one I did after it in the series. My teacher was photographing all his work on black backgrounds back then, so that is probably why I did this. The photo was probably taken on a light background and then photoshopped onto black. I have no idea where the original image is.
My original plan when I was "young" was to be a birder when I retired.* I am pretty sure I may never retire unless forced to, so I've come to the realization that embracing birding right now is the thing to do.
After all, the world feels like it is exploding before our eyes and though we do what we can, marching with 800 of our neighbors with modified Burger King crowns on our heads doesn’t quite take away the helpless feeling. A birding app, a field guide, and a pair of binoculars have helped me ground myself when I feel like all the molecules in my body are going to fly apart never to be reunited.** The bird feeder, bird bath, and a friend who likes to go birding help too.
This tendency to peer through the windshield (as a passenger of course) and yell, WESTERN KINGBIRD!, started a year ago with the Ute Mountain Mesa Verde Birding Festival.
Ah yarn, the most fabulous of materials!! I suspect many of us love yarn quite passionately and we’d fight fiercely for our stashes. My tapestry yarn stash is full of a wide variety of yarns, but I have favorites that I come back to repeatedly depending on what I am weaving. The most important consideration in my opinion when choosing a weft yarn for tapestry is what idea you’re communicating and what material will do that the best.
The question that no tapestry techniques book I’ve ever seen (including mine) addresses is how much weft yarn do you need for a tapestry. Frustrating, right? If you don’t have a yarn stash, how do you know how much to buy?
If you owned a yarn store, you might just grab an extra skein if you ran out and not worry about it. But most of us do not own our own endless yarn supply. We want to make sure we won’t run short but we also don’t want piles of a color we may never use again.
Tapestry weaving has a different structure than other weaving and so the amount of yarn you need is a bit different that if you were weaving a scarf on a rigid heddle loom. However, some of the methods of estimating amounts are similar. There are several approaches you could take to figure out how much weft yarn you need. Warp needs are easier to calculate and I’ll address that at the end of the post.
