My Vermont retreat is always a time full of exploration, good food, and the sense of camaraderie that comes with people staying in the same big house for 5 days. This year was no exception and I enjoyed the five days with another exceptional group of people immensely.

The retreat was about color use in tapestry weaving. This is a huge topic so of course we only scratched at a it bit in the course of 5 days. But many great questions were asked and we played with many potential answers.

I like to start these color retreats by having people look at value. It is one of the most important concepts in design and I find that people disregard it so easily. If you only own a limited number of yarns, it is tempting to just use the one green you have for a form regardless of the value. But if all the values are the same, the piece may be a little dull. So we start with the yarn table. (In this retreat I brought mostly weaversbazaar yarns so there were lots of little balls to arrange.) We also did exercises with the paper you see in the foreground of the photo below. Paper is faster for experiments than weaving!

Students arranging the yarn table at the 2019 Vermont tapestry retreat.

Yarn table arranged by value in black and white.

The Vermont retreat is held at Good Commons, a guest house in the center of the state. This house was the general store of Plymouth and the building is 150 years old. There is a little creek that runs under the back deck which was used for refrigeration and the studio we use for the workshop used to be the store. The owner, Tesha Buss, purchased the place over ten years ago now and completely renovated it. It is a warm, inviting house full of comfort, laughter, and good food. Tesha has become a food genius and for the last five years has been the chef for all my retreats.

Good Commons in Plymouth, Vermont is the perfect setting for a weaving retreat.

As always, there were people at various level of experience in tapestry at this retreat. I like having this range when we’re talking about something like color because I find that ideas flow between the participants on the second or third day once they start to get to know each other a little better. A participant’s table-mate might have observed the struggle someone is having with a concept more closely than I can and have a suggestion of a technique or a color to try. I saw this happening at this retreat, and undoubtedly there were many instances of collaboration I didn’t observe also.

Grayscale yarns used for Rebecca Mezoff’s color tapestry retreat in VT.

This chicken seemed fond of my Mirrix loom at the Vermont tapestry retreat.

The gallery below has further photos from the retreat. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge and hover for captions. Use arrows to scroll. If you get the blog via email, this might be a good time to click over to see it online as you’ll see these photos as one long stream instead of a gallery. You’ll want to see the captions because that is where all the information about what happened at the retreat is. Click HERE to see it online.