A collection of possibilities
It takes a long time to weave a big tapestry and there are some questions I need to answer before I start. I use sampling to hopefully answer those questions or at least form better questions. The sample doesn’t always give me a firm answer because a small bit of weaving can only be expanded to a full-size tapestry in my imagination and through various digital means. But it gets me closer than not doing the sample would.
I make extensive samples for teaching both online and in person. My sample boxes for teaching continue to grow. Every online course results in multiple samples as does every new workshop I teach. I rather love these samples. They are a way of marking my life as a teacher and remembering what ideas I was trying to communicate in any particular workshop. Students love to handle the samples and come back to me with ideas of their own generated by these small and often quite boring weavings.
Samples for large tapestries
When I sample for a large tapestry as I’m doing now, I usually take the full-size cartoon and weave a portion of it at the size it’ll be woven in the tapestry. The sample isn’t a tiny version of the large piece but a piece of the whole woven as it would be in the final tapestry (potentially). In reality, I often ask more questions as I weave a sample so I try out different things as I weave along and the sample does not look like a chunk of the final tapestry but a collection of possibilities.
Right now I’m working on an idea that came from my Colorado Trail thru-hike this year. I carried a small watercolor kit with me. I am NOT a painter. I have almost zero experience with watercolor and had no idea what I was doing but I really enjoyed being able to add some color to my journals. One of the things I was playing with was all the colors I saw in the wildflowers. In the photo below you can see of my on-trail doodling in the page on the right as well as the tiny kit I brought along.
Rebecca Mezoff, Colorado Trail 2021 hike art kit
As I work with this idea and turn it into a tapestry, I have a lot of questions about materials. I usually use the same materials in every large tapestry. I do a lot of playing with materials when I weave smaller pieces, but the big ones have always used hand-dyed Harrisville yarns. For this new piece I was wondering about a couple things:
What would it look like if the background of this panel of the tapestry was white. Faro has a bleached white color that is also slightly shiny because it contains Spelsau (a type of long-wool sheep). White is a frightening color to use in a tapestry but I couldn’t get the possibility out of my mind, so sampling was needed.
What about making that area even more shiny and textured by adding a bit of silk to the bundle of the background?
How would that compare to using Harrisville Koehler Singles in the undyed (but also unbleached) color? With and without the silk?
What about the weft for the colored forms? Should I use Harrisville which I have shelves full of already dyed colors or what about the new Gist Yarn’s Array? It has a very different surface. What would that look like for the wildflower colors?
Outlines. Should there be any? What color? Where?
I had already decided the sett and warp size but I needed to make sure these other material and design decisions worked at 8epi on my Harrisville Rug Loom. Would I like these other materials with a 12/9 cotton seine twine? Would the bead be appropriate to the subject?
These are all the glorious things you get to play with when you sample. I don’t have to worry about how the sample turns out because it is just going in my sample box for reference when I do another tapestry with similar questions. I can play with my questions until I find a path forward.
The photo below shows you where I am today with this sampling. If you want to see me weaving it, I was working on this on Change the Shed on 10-13-21.
Rebecca Mezoff, sample for large format tapestry. Materials are Faro wool, Harrisville wool, Treenway silk, and Gist Yarn’s Array for the bright colors.
Rebecca Mezoff, sample for large format tapestry. Comparing materials: bleached Faro wool, unbleached Harrisville Koehler Singles, and Gist Yarn’s Array.
The image below is another tapestry example. It was for Lifelines. You can see that I was sampling for color mostly but there were some other ideas, some of which were used and some were rejected. The irregularly hatched outline in a dark color was something I liked as were some of the hatching fades around the circular forms in the tapestry.
Rebecca Mezoff, sample for tapestry Lifelines
Rebecca Mezoff, Lifelines, 24 x 72 inches, hand-dyed tapestry, wool, cotton
Teaching samples
I also weave a LOT of samples for teaching. For my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving, I wove all the samples myself. Because they were being photographed for a book, they were all finished neatly like the example below, but many of my samples are not in such perfect shape even if I’m using them for teaching. I figure students would rather see the weaving than have me leave them home because I haven’t got them all cleaned up yet. Sometimes I leave them unfinished for educational reasons.
Rebecca Mezoff, teaching sample about hill and valley threads for her book The Art of Tapestry Weaving.
I have plastic bins full of teaching samples. Every time I teach a new course, more are created. Honestly, I think they’re one of the best things about taking an in-person class for the students. It allows them to see possibilities in form and color that they might not have thought of from looking at more formal tapestries. They are the building blocks to learning how to put these elements together to produce a tapestry. A lot of the samples here are very bright partly because this was a color class but also because many of them were used while I was filming my online course, Warp and Weft: Learning the Structure of Tapestry, and it is very hard to see what someone is doing on camera if they use dark non-contrasting colors.
Rebecca Mezoff teaching samples. A workshop student at Midwest Weaver’s Conference took my big pile of samples and carefully laid them out and took this photo.
Do you do any sampling for your weaving or in any other area of your life? What purpose does it serve for you?