““Wow, I was scared but this was very easy.””
C wrote this in response to a question about how their first warping went on a small tapestry loom. It made me think back to my first tapestry warping and how I felt scared to approach the task.
I think this was my first ever tapestry.
I was warping a large frame in Navajo-style from a book. The loom was given to me by my grandparents. My grandfather made it. But I was on an occupational therapy travel assignment in Seattle and my grandmother, the only person I knew who had any experience with this sort of warping, was 1300 miles away and unable to help. I managed the warping using one of Noël Bennett’s books, but it wasn’t pretty.
Nevertheless, I dug in and learned interlocks and square shapes and then diagonals and curved shapes. I used Brown Sheep Lamb’s Pride Worsted as it was the only recommended yarn I could find in Seattle in a yarn shop. I didn’t know anything at all except how to keep trying. I had an 8 harness floor loom by that point and had woven a lot of fabric on that, but tapestry just seemed like an entirely different medium (and indeed it is!).
I recently dug out that first weaving which I have kept for 20 years now. It is a great reminder of beginnings and comparing it to the things I know now about tapestry weaving, a very encouraging thing to look at!
My grandmother Marian is the young woman at the spinning wheel getting a lesson from her teacher as an adult learner. My grandmother was the bravest adult learner I know. She got her bachelor’s degree at age 60.
It is easy to forget how hard something so foreign is when we are new at something. I’m sure we all have examples of things that we wondered whether we could master even though we very much wanted to. I lean on my occupational therapy training a lot when it comes to teaching adult beginners in tapestry weaving. Us grownups are positive we can learn anything we put our minds to and we expect to do it quickly. While it is true that we might grasp the concepts conceptually fairly quickly, putting them all together and learning the motor skills takes a great deal more practice.
Little kids can learn new motor skills in a flash. Some of you have probably had the experience of learning to ski alongside your 4 year old and finding that before you figured out how to gracefully get off the ski lift, the kid was zooming down black diamonds. The adult learner has a lot more practice ahead of them to learn those motor skills (black diamonds OR tapestry weaving), but we’re also more likely to stick with it and turn our ideas into beautiful tapestries with practice.
I’m pleasantly surprised by this first tapestry of mine. It has all kinds of problems from weft tension to poor warping to counting errors to odd interlocks. But I kept it for a day like today. For a day when I wanted to remember that I have learned a lot in the intervening years and that is because I practiced. Don’t throw out your first efforts! They’ll cheer you a great deal a few months, years, or decades down the road.
Have you kept your first tapestry weaving or the results of some other adult beginner endeavor? Congratulate yourself for how far you’ve come since then. It is important to celebrate the middle because making art doesn’t have an end!
These days we have online classes with videos to help us through warping our first loom. I sure wish I’d had that when I was fussing with turnbuckles and lashing the warp on way back in 2003. I’m glad the Introduction to Tapestry class helped C get that first warp on the Saffron loom. A little advice, some videos, and some supportive words from a teacher and other students can go a long way to make a foreign thing seem easy!