This week I am leading the Mirrix Summer Weaving Challenge. You can find my challenge on Mirrix’s website HERE. Those of you who have taken my Summer of Tapestry course may recognize this challenge because I used a similar idea as the beginning of that class.
Rebecca Mezoff, Colorado Mushrooms, 3 x 3 inches
In the Mirrix challenge, I encouraged you to go for a wander somewhere and to take some time to enjoy really looking at what is around you. When you find something that grabs your attention, focus on the colors of that object or place. You can see the rest of the suggested instructions in the challenge write-up.
I wanted to weave another tapestry for my own challenge response beyond the one I show as an example. This month I was able to go camping with my family for several days in southern Colorado. It had been raining a lot and there were mushrooms growing everywhere. It seemed like every day there were new ones we hadn’t seen before. My nieces are budding mycologists and they took us on mushroom hunts where we identified many of the mushrooms we found.
For my challenge response, I pulled up all the photos I took of mushrooms on the trip and made a quick watercolor note of what those colors are. Mixing watercolors or colored pencils to try to match the color of something either from photographs or in the field is a great way to train your eye to really look at the color. The gallery below contains my mushroom photos. If you get the blog via email, you’ll see them as a long string of images and you can see the gallery view online HERE.
From there I pulled out colors of Gist Array yarn that matched these colors or that I could blend to come close. (The only color Array didn’t have was the bright cherry red, but that color is in production and will be available this fall. In this case, I substituted weaversbazaar.)
My watercolor notes of mushroom colors next to colors of Gist Array yarn plus one red from weaversbazaar.
In the challenge I encourage you to keep the forms simple. I want to encourage you to look at color because as soon as we start adding in forms especially in a small weaving, our critical mind starts to tell us we’re doing it wrong and it is so easy to give up. Weaving should be mostly fun, so for this challenge I want to make sure it remains easy and enjoyable. I wove simple stripes in the example in the challenge as well as the example below.
The amanita muscaria was the only form that wasn’t straight stripes and it definitely takes over the weaving with that bright red. I used pick and pick to indicate the white warts on the mushroom. Amanita definitely stands out boldly in the forest as nothing else out there has this bright red color, so perhaps the Amanita should take over the weaving.
Rebecca Mezoff, Colorado Mushrooms, 3 x 3 inches, cotton, wool
If you’ve taken on this week’s challenge, make sure to post to social media with #summerweavingchallenge. There are prizes and one of them is an online course taught by me. If you’re interested in this sort of sketch tapestry, I teach more about it in my Summer of Tapestry course which you can find on my website HERE. It is a wonderful way to be inspired to weave, learn more about designing for tapestry weaving, and join a fun community of tapestry weavers and see what inspires them.