What materials you use for your tapestry will, to some extent, determine how much surface variation there is in your tapestry. I’m talking about the bumps you see when the strands of weft don’t quite line up.
If you use a worsted spun wool that is fairly smooth like weaversbazaar or Gist Yarn’s Array, you’ll find that you have slight variations in the surface unless you spend a lot of time lining up the yarns in your weft bundle. I’d like to suggest that these slight surface differences are just part of this medium. One of the joys of seeing tapestry in person is that you can experience these surface details and they add to the piece in most instances.
For example, I’ve been sampling Gist Array’s yarn versus my regular Harrisville Singles for a large tapestry. The background colors in the sample are wool and silk (unbleached and white in these photos). The colored bits are the yarns I’m deciding between.
In the photo below, the burgundy and indigo colors are Gist’s Array. You can see in the photo taken at an angle the slight irregular bumps in the surface. I should note that you can also see the bumps in the wool/silk mix but they aren’t as obvious as a texture because this yarn is fuzzier. The surface of the Array is much sleeker.
Below is the same bit of weaving from straight on. The bumps are much harder to see. In this example, the background color is Harrisville Koehler Singles unbleached mixed with 20/2 silk from Treenway.
As a comparison, the weaving below is done with Harrisville Koehler Singles (hand-dyed by me). The background white is bleached Faro with the same unbleached Treenway 20/2 silk (Kiku if you want to try it). I used 3 strands of this weft together (four in the parts with the silk) and the surface looks much flatter overall. This is my experience of the surface of my larger works that are all done with this yarn. The surface is quite flat and untextured. The silk added to the white does add some visual texture as well as some bumpiness so this isn’t perhaps the easiest comparison to see here.
Here is the same section of weaving in a photo taken straight on. There IS some unevenness to the three strands in this weft bundle but it is a lot easier to keep this yarn even because it is so fuzzy. The strands stick together and stay where I put them. Slicker yarns don’t do that as well.
Does it matter? I will challenge you to go and look at tapestry in person if you can and in particular, study the surface. What materials did the weaver use and what is the result? You might also consider if that result fits with the idea, image, or feeling the artist was attempting to communicate.
And if you’re newer to tapestry weaving, I’ll encourage you not to worry so much if your weft strands don’t line up exactly. Surface texture is part of tapestry weaving. Sure you need to work on getting your weft relays to be nice even turns so that you don’t have huge puffs of fiber sticking out (unless you want that), but some texture is part of this medium. And if this sort of texture really bothers you, consider trialing different wefts.
Does the equipment matter?
It is likely that the surface of the tapestry woven on my Harrisville Rug Loom will be different than the surface woven on the sample loom (a Mirrix Zach) because the upright versus horizontal nature of the warp influences how my hand manages the weft and the different way of packing the yarn in on each loom also has an effect. I never find that this difference is significant, but equipment does matter a little.
Slight ridging happening near the edge of this tapestry sampler.
Perhaps one of the biggest things that influences whether you get ridging or other surface irregularities is loom length. If your loom is very short and the warp tension very tight, it is easy to have one set of warp threads pop forward and create ridges along every other warp. This often happens at the edges, but can happen all the way across a weaving if the problem is severe.
How do you avoid ridging? I talk about how to avoid this problem at much greater length in my Warp and Weft online course, but the short answer is that you have to make sure that each of the picks in a 2-shed sequence gets the same amount of weft. If one weft is pulled tightly across and the other is looser, the warps in the looser shed will start to come forward. Wefts love to follow what came before them, so once a pattern is started, you have to work hard to make it stop. This can happen easily if you are weaving too close to the shedding bar on a rotating heddle bar-type loom (like a Mirrix or Schacht Arras) or even on a treadle loom. Keeping your loom length longer and the fell line near the bottom of the loom is helpful. I wrote more about loom length recently HERE.
Using a shed stick to create space in the shed to pass the weft through. This helps reduce abrasion on the weft when using small looms.
Other issues with equipment or tools can include how you place the weft in the shed. If the weft is dragged through a closed shed or otherwise abraded as you put it in, that can change how the surface of your tapestry looks. How resistant the weft yarn is to abrasion varies, but any weft that is subject to a lot of stress as you’re working with it will show that in the surface of the finished tapestry.
Ways to avoid changing the character of the weft yarn as you work with it are things like using a loom with a shedding mechanism, using tapestry bobbins or other tools to hold the weft, or using a shed stick on simple looms to hold the shed open as you pass the weft through. Bobbin users who pick the shed on upright tapestry looms in the traditional way avoid abrasion by passing the bobbin a few wefts at a time while holding that bit of shed open with the other hand and beating them in immediately with the bobbin point.
Using a tapestry bobbin to hold the weft on a lap loom to keep it from getting abraded. I often use a tapestry bobbin with handspun for this reason. Note that the bobbin here is used in a non-traditional way, but it is still a good tool for holding weft!
How does the warp influence the surface?
The larger the warp thread you’re using is in diameter, the bigger the warp rib will be. Changing the size of your warp can have a drastic difference in the look of your tapestry even if the sett and weft yarns remain the same. You can see this yourself by doing a simple experiment. Warp up a loom with three or four different sized cotton seine twine warps and weave a similar design on each one with the same weft yarn. Which do you like better and why?
I did that in the weavings below which are pictured in my tapestry techniques book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving. The numbers are the size of cotton seine twine I was using. 12/15 is the fattest, 20/6 is the thinnest.* Look at the surface of the weaving. The ribs created in the direction of the warp are much more prominent with the fatter warps. All of these were woven at 8 epi. The 20/6 example created a rather flimsy fabric. The others are all good options for a tapestry. This warp also comes in 12/12.
Rebecca Mezoff. Example of warp ribs at the same sett with different sized cotton seine twine warps.
What do you like or not like about the surface of your tapestry weaving? Have you thought about why it is the way it is and what you might do to change it?
*Cotton seine twine is a fantastic warp for tapestry weaving. There are twines out there that are not actually cabled and they are still labeled seine twine. They also work, though they feel different to weave on. These are frequently labeled 12s or 6s. The 12s is thinner. One of these warps is made in Canada but I’ve seen others come from Europe. I personally prefer the cabled seine twine but we tend to love what we’ve used and after 15 years of using the Swedish warps, I’m stuck in my ways.