Blog
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.
I’ve always been a national park junkie. I love visiting them and you’d be right to guess that I have one of those little passport folios where you can collect dated stamps from each park. Our new home in southwestern Colorado is on the doorstep of Mesa Verde National Park which I now call “my” park.” It is marvelous to be able to get there in a matter of minutes any time I want to.
Mesa Verde is a park devoted to antiquities. It was created to preserve the marvelous archaeological sites that exist there. And since it is a national park, we can visit and learn from the rangers and if we’re lucky from the native people who love it most.
Colorado is having a big wildfire summer. This is not unexpected. We've been in a drought for years and this past winter was the worst snowpack in recorded history. Snowpack is the lifeblood of the water system in the west. The Colorado River which feeds five states and Mexico depends on the slowly melting snow to keep it running. This mighty river is dry this year in parts of Colorado right now. I bet you can guess what it looks like in Arizona and California and Mexico.
In 2020 I lived in Fort Collins and the Cameron Peak Fire was and still is the largest wildfire in Colorado history. Many places I loved to backpack were burned and at the end of it all 5 months after it started, the fire had traveled all the way to the edge of Fort Collins from where it started 50 miles away.
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.
I’ve been a sketch tapestry practitioner since 2016. I started making these small pieces which reference something I experienced when I was at an artist residency at Petrified Forest National Park. I had so much fun weaving simple things each day of that month-long residency that I have devoted blocks of time to doing them ever since.
Read the rest of this post for more about the free mini-course and sketch tapestry in general!
The current Tapestry Discovery Box* is about vertical lines. In it I talk both about how to create the illusion of vertical lines and how to do a variety of joins. In general, making lines that follow the warp is pretty tricky in tapestry weaving. It is much easier to create a line or curve in the horizontal direction because there are many more picks per inch than there are warps per inch in the other direction. It is all about the structure of the medium.
