“The shedding is all messed up again! What am I doing wrong?”
Does this sound familiar? If you’re a newer tapestry weaver it is pretty much guaranteed you’ll have moments like this and probably quite a lot of them.
Shedding problem: the violet weft and the yellow weft in my fingers are both going under the same warp. This will create lice (the warp will show).
The good news is that you’re not doing anything wrong!
The other good news is that there are a handful of ways to fix shedding problems and once you understand what those are and when to use them, you can fix your shedding problems quickly and easily. Because the not as good news is, they’ll ALWAYS happen. There is no way you can plan your way out of shedding issues for an entire tapestry, so let’s just start by accepting that they will happen and that we have to know how to fix them.
What do you mean by shedding problems?
There are two sheds in tapestry weaving because we’re using plain weave most of the time in this form of weaving. So either every other warp thread is up or down. There are just two sheds. (The shed is the opening you create by raising a particular set of warps.)
In the European style of tapestry weaving that I teach most of the time,* we use meet and separate for our wefts. This means that the weft threads move in opposition to each other and this allows us to move a weft wherever we want it to go in each sequence.
When this pattern changes, usually due to adding or subtracting a weft as you change colors or forms, the meet and separate no longer works and we say there is a shedding error problem.
Need a visual? I explain Shedding problems in the video below.
The video below talks more about shedding problems in tapestry weaving. If you’re getting the blog via email, you can watch the video on YouTube HERE.
Fixing Your Sheds online course
I am running my online course, Fixing Your Sheds, again this year in mid-June. The class has two live components for those of you who like to ask questions in a live meeting format. These meetings will be recorded and the class is just as useful if you watch the recordings later.
We’ll meet once for some live teaching of 1.5-2 hours on either June 18th or 21st. You’ll have some time to look at the other videos, handouts, and learning materials in the class and ask more questions while you tackle some homework questions. Then we’ll have a live Q&A on June 27th to explore what you learned.
The live format can be quite helpful because there are a lot of students puzzling on these questions all at once. I find that the learning progresses faster in these live-run classes because people think of and ask questions you might not have.
The other big advantage of this class is that you get to keep it forever. I’ll be here for you to ask questions of whenever you have them and you’ll also get to participate in a community of like-minded tapestry weavers who are at a similar level in their learning to you.
“This was a great workshop. It really helped me figure out where I was having shedding problems and gave really concrete methods of addressing the issues. Thank you so much.”
*I can’t keep saying “most of the time,” so understand that there are MANY traditions of tapestry weaving and lots of them don’t use meet and separate at all. This leads to other characteristics of the weaving in those traditions that give them their own unique expression. We also don’t use meet and separate all of the time in the European-based tapestry weaving that I teach. For example when using a double weft interlock, the wefts on each side of the interlock need to be moving in the same direction.