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The Tapestry Discovery Box courses are back! I am re-releasing the Tapestry Discovery courses starting this week and I thought it might be interesting to tell you how they came about. There were thirteen Tapestry Discovery Box courses and the last one dropped in January of 2026. The advent of this course series is closely tied to Gist Yarn's development of Array tapestry wool. But first…
Choosing weft colors for tapestry weaving can feel a little overwhelming when you’re a newer tapestry weaver. There are many choices and they can seem overwhelming. Some tapestry yarns come in over 400 colors! How is a person supposed to choose among them when they’re all so pretty?!!
I am re-releasing the Tapestry Discovery courses so that everyone can have a chance to enjoy them. These courses were originally part of a subscription product done in collaboration with Gist Yarn and they came with a box of yarn. I made the choices, you wove with them! In the re-release, there is no yarn kit. Part of learning tapestry is figuring out how to choose colors and that is something we’re going to be doing in these courses this time around.
Not just any yarn will work for tapestry weaving and if you’ve tried to use a knitting yarn like Cascade 220 or Knit Picks Wool of the Andes,* you know that these squishy yarns are difficult to use for tapestry and don’t get the best results.
A good tapestry yarn isn’t lofty, doesn’t have much end-to-end stretch, and comes in a lot of colors. Most tapestry weavers bundle thinner weft strands in a bundle to not only achieve the weft bundle size they need for the sett they’re working at, but to increase their color options by blending hues in the weft bundle.
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.
Ah yarn, the most fabulous of materials!! I suspect many of us love yarn quite passionately and we’d fight fiercely for our stashes. My tapestry yarn stash is full of a wide variety of yarns, but I have favorites that I come back to repeatedly depending on what I am weaving. The most important consideration in my opinion when choosing a weft yarn for tapestry is what idea you’re communicating and what material will do that the best.
The question that no tapestry techniques book I’ve ever seen (including mine) addresses is how much weft yarn do you need for a tapestry. Frustrating, right? If you don’t have a yarn stash, how do you know how much to buy?
If you owned a yarn store, you might just grab an extra skein if you ran out and not worry about it. But most of us do not own our own endless yarn supply. We want to make sure we won’t run short but we also don’t want piles of a color we may never use again.
Tapestry weaving has a different structure than other weaving and so the amount of yarn you need is a bit different that if you were weaving a scarf on a rigid heddle loom. However, some of the methods of estimating amounts are similar. There are several approaches you could take to figure out how much weft yarn you need. Warp needs are easier to calculate and I’ll address that at the end of the post.
In the Change the Shed episode on 2/11/26 which I showed in the video above, I had a moment where my brain couldn't remember which way to twist the two different yarns I was using. One yarn was a bundle of 2-ply yarns from weaversbazaar, the other was a bundle of Harrisville Koehler singles I had dyed. If you're going to twist your weft bundle, these two yarns need a different twist direction. I explain that in the video here including what S and Z twist means.
