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Tapestry weaving can seem like a pursuit that requires A LOT. A lot of equipment, materials, and knowledge.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Weaving tapestry can be quite simple and your materials and equipment do not have to be complicated. If you want to learn tapestry weaving, below are some suggestions for how to get started. There are also many resources for people already deep into the tapestry experience, but this post is mostly for people who are pretty new to tapestry weaving.
There is a lot of joy in getting together with a group of people who love the same things you do. I think we can safely say the people who came to my Taos retreat this month love yarn. Everyone has a different reason for weaving tapestry and those differences are always interesting for me to observe and ask about when I’m teaching. But generally we can all come together around the love of creating and yarn.
In the workshop this month I had a lot of different approaches. One student was motivated to study tapestry for historical and sociological reasons related to her family and their place or origin. Another student was very interested in Norwegian weaving and using that style to express personal images. Someone else was working on recovery from the death of a spouse and the feelings of loss and recovery that brought up. There were students who were interested in three dimensional tapestry, depicting water, interpreting dreams, interpreting life events, or working from inspiration other tapestry artists’ work brought them.
If you wove along with me in the winter trees project in November and December, thank you! I know some of you are still weaving or are just starting your winter scenes now. I wanted to post a little update with my finished projects and a link to those of yours that I’ve collected so far.
If you’d like to join the project, there is a free PDF in my blog post on November 13, 2024 you can download for ideas and guidance. You can find that blog post HERE.
I wove two projects. The first was a pine tree in the snow.
Sarah Swett and I made a class about a particular warping technique six years ago now. Monday we did a live chat on YouTube to talk about our experience with Fringeless, answer your questions, and talk about the tapestry life.
I have to say that hanging out with Sarah and making goofy videos (along with lots of serious ones) was a lot of fun then and clearly it is still fun now. I think the photo below clearly indicates the difference in our knitting abilities and probably also our weaving abilities. All tapestries in those photos are by Sarah and she wore gorgeous hand-knitted sweaters which she designed on every day we shot the class. I was apparently wearing a cheap cotton sweater from Eddie Bauer which is still in my closet.
We answered a lot of questions about four-selvedge warping including why you might want to do it and how we both use the practice. And if you want to see the misspelling of crotchety, I recommend watching the whole video as Sarah shows us her current work in progress. I hope you enjoy the video!
I have had my work at Taos Wools in Arroyo Seco for much of this year now and three pieces have sold this fall. Both of the Inscription pieces went home with new owners and Emergence VII went to one of my long-time students.
Below is a photo of Inscription I as I was packaging it up to bring to the gallery in Taos earlier this year. This tapestry was about words and about losing them a piece at a time. I really enjoyed the color gradation and that bright pink. The yarns are hand-dyed by me. The ideas here came from the work of Anni Albers and it is something I’d like to return to in future.
I really enjoyed teaching a three-day workshop for Taos Wools Festival in October. I taught in this same room last year but they’ve expanded it and now there are some windows. The class was fun and funny and they wove a lot in three days.
We were working with Taos Wools Chica yarn. This is a gorgeous churro yarn that is hand-dyed by Joe Barry himself. For this workshop there were piles of little skeins in all sorts of colors. It was definitely like being in a candy shop!
September has been a marvelously creative month for me and that is largely because two of my dearest tapestry colleagues came to visit a week apart. Cornelia Theimer Gardella was here for a week-long joint residency and then Sarah Swett and her adventurous dog Beryl stopped for several nights.
Having fiber friends is important and these visits remind me why that is. Both Cornelia and Sarah have had a big influence in my own tapestry life. I met Cornelia 20 years ago at Northern New Mexico Community College where we were both students in the fiber arts program. And I got to know Sarah through a little fan-girl following and then an American Tapestry Alliance retreat in Colorado almost ten years ago now. She wrote the forward to my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving.
