Tapestry Weaving
Rebecca Mezoff
Testing out the Duet tapestry beater from ...

It is no secret that I love my tapestry forks/beaters with metal tines. Many people make them with dog combs. The metal tines slide through the warp easily and if the handles are shaped well, they provide a nice snap for work on tapestries large or small.

Over the years I’ve purchased many tapestry forks from Magpie Woodworks, Thomas Creations (Threads Thru Time), and Timber and Twine. These are beautiful hand-crafted tools and every tapestry weaver should have at least one of these in their toolbox.

But I have had so many students who were unable to get one of these forks or had to wait many months just because when a tool is hand-made one at a time, it takes a long time to produce them and more people want them than can get them.

Testing out the Duet tapestry beater from Schacht

My favorite tapestry technique

My favorite tapestry technique

If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that I teach a lot of things about tapestry. There are times when I want to weave something insanely complicated. If I actually let this wish get the better of me, I might end up feeling like this.
Molly McNeece, Cousin Trapped, watercolor
When this happens, I go back to some old tried and true tricks. My favorite is regular hatching. If you've had a class from me, you've probably tried this technique. I used it in the spirals in many of my Emergence pieces and sometimes I just weave it on a sampler to calm down a little bit, dork dedicated practitioner that I am.
Rebecca Mezoff, Emergence VII, 45 x 45 inches, hand-dyed wool tapestry. All of the spiral form not in the teal bar is done with regular hatching.
There are a couple ways you can do this technique. The simplest is just to overlap two colors in full sequences in a regular manner.

Use two colors and change the points where they relay according to your cartoon or any regular pattern. The example below creates a triangle.

Depending on the two colors used and their values, you may create the illusion of a third color between the two as in this arrow pattern which seems to suggest a green tree.
An excellent example of this technique is in Ulrikka Mokdad's tapestry, Floating in Blissful Ignorance.
Ulrikka Mokdad, Floating in Blissful Ignorance, 50 x 33 inches, wool weft, linen warp, photo: Frantz Henriksen
This detail shows the regular hatching between the peach and the black in the finger.
Ulrikka Mokdad, Floating in Blissful Ignorance, Detail
This technique can also be done with a separate color used for the striped lines independent of the background color.

Rebecca Mezoff is a tapestry artist and educator who loves to scratch puppies behind their ears, eat pepperoni pizza, hike long trails, and teach people about tapestry weaving. You can find out more about her and her online classes here: http://www.rebeccamezoff.com/online-learning/

Note: This blog post first appeared on the Mirrix blog as a guest post. If you feel like you've read it before, you're not crazy (well, not that I can tell anyway), you did.