I’ve been focusing on my tapestry diary for the last couple months. I started doing these small tapestries based on things I see around me again because I am teaching an online course about this practice (see Summer of Tapestry). But I quickly remembered that the process of weaving small, quickly finished tapestries in which I explore something I saw or a feeling I had are a great way for me to remain grounded when the world feels a little haywire.
It has encouraged me to finish some of the tapestries from Iceland which, though a bit larger than my normal tapestry diary piece, are still in the same vein. I’ve planned a few more tapestries from Icelandic inspiration and I’ve also finished quite a few small pieces from Colorado inspirations. I talked about the rose tapestry in THIS blog post. I titled that post “What would you weave if you knew you could not fail?” because that is such an important part of weaving these small things for me. There are no rules. I have no expectation of ever showing these pieces. I am not worrying about technique or whether they are “good”. I’m just playing.
I finished the Icelandic cape tapestry which was a complete experiment. I loved doing it and think it is a pretty funky and interesting nod to an old tradition of making these capes in Scandinavia.
Rebecca Mezoff, Cloak of Iceland, 2.5 x 8 inches, Icelandic wool, cotton warp
I got the idea for this small tapestry from a book in the Icelandic Textile Center’s Library along with THIS video, Auður the Deep Minded. The video is one an Icelander showed me. The marvelous sound you hear at the beginning is the rocks of the warp-weighted loom knocking together. The cloak the women in the video are wearing was the inspiration for this tapestry.
The book is The Warp-Weighted Loom by Hildur Hakonardottir, Elizabeth Johnston, and Marta Klove Juuhl. It is a gorgeous book and I searched in vain for a copy I could purchase. I have a direct connection to a university library system though and was able to get an ILL copy of it for a few months. I will be sad to return it!
A tiny version of the cloak
All of my Icelandic tapestry diary pieces use Icelandic yarn or fleece. Much of it I spun myself. In this piece, the ground cloth is woven with two colors of Plötulopi which is a pencil roving that people knit with without spinning. I wanted it to be a bit stronger for tapestry weaving so I added some light twist on my spinning wheel. It makes an excellent tapestry yarn. I haven’t figured out the yards per pound (ypp) for it, but I think it is slightly thinner than a worsted weight yarn like Harrisville Highland and of course it is a single.
The images below show the construction of this little tapestry. The ground cloth is done with two colors of Plötulopi and the locks are two colors of Icelandic fleece. The brown is a lamb fleece and you can see the curl in the tip that indicates this in the photo above. The white was an older sheep and the fibers were also a bit thicker. I used a four-selvedge warp.
I was working on this tapestry for part of the June 22, 2022 broadcast of Change the Shed. If you want to see how it was woven in more detail, take a look at that video HERE. It was the first thing I was weaving that day.
I wanted to weave this piece to showcase the long outer coat of Icelandic fleece. Before adding the locks, I separated out the undercoat. The outer coat is called tog, the softer undercoat, thel. I pigtailed the tog around a warp as I wove it in to secure it from being pulled out. This procedure was diagramed in The Warp-Weighted Loom. The ground cloth holds it all together nicely. It is a sturdy piece of fabric and I can imagine that cloaks made in this fashion were thick and warm.
At the beginning of the tapestry there are tog locks inserted after every two sequences of the ground cloth. Toward the end I made the ground cloth more visible by putting the tog in every 6 sequences.
I was able to see a warp-weighted loom replica at a museum in Reykjavik. In the configuration used in Scandinavian countries in medieval times, the weaving is done upwards with the warp being held tightly below by hanging rocks.
Warp-weighted loom display at the Settler’s Exhibition, Reykjavik, Iceland
I’m still working on my Icelandic tapestry diary pieces. The windows piece is one I’ll be finishing this week. The inspiration came from a couple banks of windows, one in an industrial building in Skagaströnd, the other a lighthouse on that peninsula. You can see me weave that piece on Change the Shed and there are more details about it in the class that just started, Summer of Tapestry.
What are you weaving this summer? Let us know in the comments!