This is the year of new tapestry books! Today’s example is Micala Sidore’s new book, The Art is the Cloth: How to Look at and Understand Tapestries from Schiffer Publishing.

This book is not quite what I expected it to be. I thought it would be a book with a fair amount of text that gave us some guidelines for how to understand what we’re seeing when we look at tapestries. I think I can be forgiven for that considering the book’s subtitle. Instead, it is a book with hundreds of images of tapestries and almost no text. It turns out this is a fantastic advantage for my education. You see, I’m really good at words. I like to string them together, often use way too many of them, and though I love pictures, if I can read about something, I’ll use my brain to mull the words instead of studying photos.

This book is ALL about the photos.

Jean Pierre Larochette and Yadin Larochette along with Yael Lurie (illustrations) have produced a wonderful new book about tapestry. I read the whole thing this weekend and I highly recommend it. In fact, if you are a practicing tapestry weaver interested in French tapestry techniques, this book is an important one and absolutely should have a place on your shelf.

It contains information from a fairly wide swath of tapestry practice. Jean Pierre Larochette is an Aubusson-trained tapestry weaver with 60 or more years of experience who brings his practice to light quite poetically in this beautiful book. His daughter, Yadin Larochette, is not only a skilled tapestry weaver herself, having learned in her family’s workshop, but is also a textile conservator and provides a wealth of information in the last half of the book to help tapestry weavers create long-lasting textiles.