Weaving Sideways: When to turn your cartoon to weave a design "from the side"

Weaving Sideways: When to turn your cartoon to weave a design "from the side"

I am thinking about tapestry orientation* this week as the third Tapestry Discovery Box course is released. This class is called Sideways and I thought I’d take the opportunity to show a few of my tapestries where I chose to weave the design turned 90 degrees.

Horizontal lines or low-angled curves in tapestry are easier to make straight than vertical ones. There are only a certain number of warps per inch (8 epi is a frequent sett) whereas you can weave many more sequences in the horizontal direction. This influences how you create a tapestry design and which way you choose to weave it, as it will be shown or turned 90 degrees.

Frequently when creating a design I’ll change the angle of a line if I want it to be rendered straighter since steeper angles are stepped in this medium. So right from the design stage, consideration of what the important elements of a design are and what you’re trying to achieve with the image come into play.

Beyond conventional tapestry explorations in California

Beyond conventional tapestry explorations in California

Last month I attended a workshop given by Louise Martin in Pacifica, CA through Tapestry Weavers West. This workshop was all about questioning our assumptions about what tapestry weaving is. There were various exercises to help us push against the things we believed shouldn’t be done in tapestry.

Assumptions can be hard to challenge because we most often don’t know we have them!

One of the things I enjoyed most about the workshop was eavesdropping on conversations of other students with each other and with Louise.* I find the human ability to stick hard to our convictions interesting. Sometimes it makes us strong people in a world where we need to believe in ourselves. Sometimes it makes us blind to other options. And how do you know which is which?

Gradations in tapestry weaving

Gradations in tapestry weaving

I love weaving gradations in tapestry. There is nothing more thrilling than making colors move from one color to another. Sometimes it is the value of a color that changes (light to dark for example) and sometimes it is a change in hue (green to blue for example). And sometimes it is both a value and a hue change.

Tapestry is well-suited to this sort of color change. I’ve used it a lot in my own work and I teach it in a couple classes online (see the notes at the end of this post if you want to learn).

I’ll show you a few of my older tapestries and then one of the newer ones. In reviewing my work, it is a rare tapestry that doesn’t include some form of gradation.

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Sheep, wool, yarn, and friends! Mountain and Valley Fiber Arts Festival 2026

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Sheep, wool, yarn, and friends! Mountain and Valley Fiber Arts Festival 2026

Saturday I made a pilgrimage to the Mountain and Valley Fiber Arts Festival because this year it was held in Durango, Colorado which is very close to where I live.

Fleece judging

The main thing I love about a fiber festival is the fleece judging. This being a small festival, the judging was slated for just two hours. If you’ve seen my visits to Estes Park Wool Festival, you know that those go on for two days and I’m liable to sit there for many hours to learn all I can from the judge.

The judge at MAVWA this year was Andrew Schafer. His knowledge of sheep is deep and he was judging the fleeces based on what a spinner would be looking for. I spent about an hour and a half listening to Andrew judge all the sheep fleeces, about half of which where churro.

Using tapestry techniques to weave rugs

Using tapestry techniques to weave rugs

We often assume that tapestries are a pictorial fabric we hang on the wall. We also assume that rugs are fabric we put on the floor. But a rug can be a tapestry you use on the floor. It is likely a rug will use thicker weft and a wider sett than a tapestry you’ll hang on the wall.*

Last year I created a class called Introduction to Rug Weaving where I use a rug-weight yarn to create textiles intended for the table. The weight of the finished pieces would make very nice smaller floor rugs or even a larger rug in an area that doesn’t get constant traffic.

There is a functional question here. I used to be an occupational therapist so I’m very sensitive to having things on the floor that are going to cause people to trip. A lightweight piece of fabric on the floor is just a tripping hazard and will at the very least need some sort of grippy mat to stay put. A thicker and therefore heavier textile is much more suited to being walked on.

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Finishing your tapestry: a plait or braid makes a neat finish

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Finishing your tapestry: a plait or braid makes a neat finish

As a teacher of tapestry, one of the most frequent requests I get is for information about finishing. And I don’t just mean how to take the tapestry off the loom and clean it up whether you’re tying or needling in the tails. I mean what do you do with the warps that are left sticking out of two sides of your tapestry?*

Think about the finished project before you start

The clip below is from a Change the Shed episode where I’m talking about thinking about how you’re doing your warping and headers before you start a piece because if you don’t, you may not be able to finish the piece as you want. I also put in a plug for experimentation.