It isn’t a common thing to say in the USA, that a tapestry falls from the loom. But that is the translation from other languages and I like it. One of you will remind me where I have heard this. I believe it is the French that say it, but please correct me if not!
I’ve started a new tapestry series and I am still so excited about weaving large tapestries again. I’m forging ahead with the second piece and hope to get it on the loom in the next couple weeks. Those of you who watched me weave wildflowers on Change the Shed know that I started the sampling in October of 2021 and the tapestry began on my rug loom in mid-November.
For me to have woven a piece like this in two and a half months is a bit astounding to me. You see, I work full time and tapestry is slow. It usually takes me a year to weave a larger piece. But I am determined to spend more time on the loom and so I have made choices this year to allow me to do that. To finish this piece in that time which included almost two weeks away from home visiting family, I just wove every day. Most days it was only an hour, but that adds up to 7 hours a week and that was enough. This piece was not complicated weaving and so I was able to roll right along fairly quickly. There were few decisions and it was a joy to see it grow so quickly.
I did two samples for the piece. The first one was looking at yarn, forms, outlines, and how I would do the gradations. From this weaving I decided to use the bleach white Faro + silk background and Gist Yarn’s Array tapestry yarn for the colored bits. I used weaversbazaar fine for the outlines because it comes in so many colors and I wanted to use particular combinations to accentuate the flower colors.
The largest sample for the wildflowers tapestry.
Colors pulled from photographs of flowers on the Colorado Trail.
The other sample I did was playing with Array yarn and various color combinations. It was really fun to use commercially dyed yarns for this tapestry. I love dyeing my own yarn and will continue to do so, but using Array allowed me to get started much more quickly. A set number of color choices also forced me to work with what this yarn offered. Often limitations are the best way to corral my tendencies to want to know all the options before deciding. I am the person who has to walk down every aisle at the yarn store to see what is there before narrowing things down for a project. The same thing happens in the grocery store. Wanting to see all the options for a tapestry leads me to spend weeks dyeing and sampling and this time around, I just jumped in to see what happened.
The colors were based on wildflowers I had seen on my Colorado Trail thru-hike last summer. I pulled up photos of the flowers and pulled colors from the images and put them in a document as swatches. I then chose the colors of Array that were closest to those colors and went with it.
Sampling colors on a small loom. Array is the coned yarn on the table.
You can see my progress in the weaving on these Change the Shed episodes and in the photos in the gallery below. Click to enlarge and hover for captions on a computer. On a mobile device or if you get the blog via email they’ll show up as a long list without captions but you can visit the blog post online HERE.
October 13, 2021: sampling
October 27, 2021: sampling
November 10, 2021: sampling
November 24, 2021: the tapestry is started
December 8, 2021: the tapestry
December 15, 2021: the tapestry
January 5, 2022: the tapestry
January 15, 2022: the tapestry
January 19, 2022: the tapestry
February 2, 2022: at the end of this episode I show the tapestry
The tapestry is named Perception Series: Wildflowers I.
I have yet to decide which of my ideas for this series will be next on the loom, but I’m getting closer. Maybe by the next Change the Shed it’ll be started.
The pup enjoying the snow before it gets too deep for her height-challenged legs.
It is snowing in Colorado and I’m thrilled we’re getting some moisture. I hope the mountains are getting many times what we’re getting today on the eastern edge of the Rockies.
I’m off to do some weaving!