Making circles is a tricky thing in tapestry weaving. To weave a circle we believe is round, you have to trick the eye or make it really big. Tapestry is woven on a grid and to make a form perfectly circular means you basically take a square and cut the corners off. If your tapestry is huge, then this illusion is not as hard to make, though it IS still quite difficult to make a perfectly round circle given fiber’s propensity to squish and move about.
If your circles are small, it is all the harder because you don’t have very many warps to convince us that what is a shape with steps is really round.
A circle in tapestry is often just a square with the corners cut off!
I frequently have students ask me to teach them how to weave circles. I mostly resist though a few pages about it crept into my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving (see page 248-9). My biggest tip for weaving circles? Make the bottom and top flat and make the sides (which are also flat) much longer than you think they need to be. The bottom, top, and sides should be about 1/3 the total diameter of the circle. It’ll become an egg if you don’t make those sides even longer than that because tapestry packs in and if you’re using a cotton warp, it’ll pull together even more if you steam finish it.
So weaving circles is a guessing game in part. Sure, you get better at it the more you practice, but at the start, you’ll have a bit of trial and error. The diagram of the blue circle here is just a visual to help you get an idea of what is involved. It is not a pattern to follow! Your sett or yarn might dictate that you have higher steps or more steps in the middle or some other curve rate to create the circle you need. Every time you change one of the variables involved (warp, weft, sett, how hard you beat, size of the circle, etc), what you need to do to make us believe that circle is round changes.
In an effort to improve my circle-weaving, I have been working on a tiny tapestry diary weaving this week. I’ve been doing a lot of these sorts of small quick weavings for Summer of Tapestry.* I also have been doing some dyeing in conjunction with my other new class, Dyeing with Acid Wool Dye and for a Change the Shed episode, I dyed five colors of red-orange in jars.
Dyeing in jars is fantastic for tapestry weavers or other people who only need small amounts of a certain color of yarn or fiber. In this case I dyed about 25 grams of tapestry yarn in five colors in quart jars.
Dyeing five different hues of red-orange in quart jars. This is the dye and leveling compounds ready for the yarn to be added.
This photo is the one I used as the inspiration for my tapestry diary piece. For whatever reason, I wanted the round view of these colors and so I found myself weaving circles.
Five dye jars from above with my dye notebook. This was the start of the tapestry diary design.
The purpose of these small, relatively quick tapestries is to spend some time immersed in a view, an experience, a color, a story. Weaving these tapestries is a great way for me to relax because I can release all the judgement I have about tapestries that I’m weaving for sale or show. Most of what I weave these days falls into this category and maybe that says something about my state of mind the last few years, I don’t know. But what I do know is that this work is fun and it leads me to discover new ways of weaving and subjects that I’m interested in.
Here is the start of the tapestry. I put a Fringeless warp on one of my copper pipe looms and wove the piece sideways.
Fringeless warp on the copper pipe loom. The jig is still installed here. The next step is to pull that out and then I can weave.
Here I’ve woven four of the five circles. I wanted them to be slightly different sizes and spacing which is a trick when designing so you don’t struggle so hard to make things “perfect”. It is harder to compare shapes that aren’t evenly aligned or quite the same size.
Circles in progress
The astute among you will notice that I have split the warps for those circles. Because this is a Fringeless four-selvedge warp, I had the option of doubling the sett when weaving them. This does allow more finesse in the circle’s curves. I really struggled to pick up those warps and then realized that I was weaving at 20 epi in those sections. That is definitely not a preferred sett for me but I continued until the circles were finished.
Circles finished.
It is hard for me to resist turning the weaving circle challenge into a life metaphor. Isn’t a lot of life just an approximation in which we’re trying to come close to something and mostly hoping that we get close enough so other people or ourselves believe that we’ve achieved the thing?
I wove on this piece on Change the Shed on July 27, 2022 HERE. I had finished the circles before starting that broadcast, but I talk more about this piece and my choices as well as the joy of dyeing my own colors.**
*Summer of Tapestry is a 6-week online workshop where I encourage you to take some time to experience your surroundings whether that be on a summer trip or right out your front window and then weave something small and quick about it. It encourages us to pay attention to our surroundings but it also helps us learn to simplify and weave without judgement. And the more you weave, the more confidence you gain and the more your skills improve.
**If you’re interested in seeing some of my dye process, the video below has excerpts from a longer Change the Shed episode on July 20, 2022. If you’re getting the blog via email remember you can always go to my website to see the posts with all galleries and videos showing up there. You can view this excerpt video on YouTube HERE.
Excerpts from the Change the Shed episode about dyeing yarn or fiber for your projects