Tapestry Weaving

Holiday weaving!

Holiday weaving!

I have seen some wonderful holiday projects this year. Thank you to everyone for participating in this holiday challenge. You can still get the instructions in THIS blog post if you have some holiday time to weave your own project. If you use social media, tag it with #holidaytapestry17. Email me your photo and I'll add it to this post. 

It is really fun to see the variety of weavings happening even with the same subject. Different yarns, different approaches, different weavers all mean the results vary widely. Isn't that reassuring for art-making? Your particular talents will result in something different from everyone else on the planet (it is true of life too I think).

Below is an example of the real reason I do these weave-alongs. I get to see the wonderful things people make, and sometimes people tell me what they were thinking and what materials they used.

,

Continuous warping for tapestry: the Mirrix example

,
Continuous warping for tapestry: the Mirrix example

I've been teaching people to warp a Mirrix and other pipe-like looms with a continuous warp for years now. There are people who immediately understand how it works and don't have a problem with the pattern the warp must follow as you warp. There are other people who struggle with this a lot.

I believe this stems from a particular spatial ability some of us have and some of us don't. (Don't worry, if this isn't your skill, you can still learn to warp a loom. You undoubtedly have many skills the rest of us don't.) I have particularly good spatial abilities. In fact I'd say that my memory is very spatially oriented. I am especially good at remembering places and paths. I hiked the 500-mile Colorado Trail from Denver to Durango in 2003 and can still tell you details about all parts of the trail just by positioning myself there in my memory. When I have re-hiked hundreds of miles of the trail recently, I realized my memory from 2003 was quite accurate. But I most likely can't tell you the plot of a movie or TV show I watched last week and I'll never be able to tell you the name of the actors. I remember books that put me someplace in my imagination and I won't remember much about a book that doesn't--even if I really enjoyed reading it... unless I hold the book in my hands again and can somehow dredge up the sensory experience of the place I was while reading it or can flip through it as an object and see comments I wrote in it.

When it comes to warping, I think this ability to imagine things in space is very helpful. But there are many people who don't have this sort of brain.

What do you need to get started with tapestry weaving?

What do you need to get started with tapestry weaving?

I get a lot of pretty great email, but this one really made me smile. 

" My 10-year-old grandson was given a loom for Christmas last year and there it stood on the piano as they couldn't fathom how a large ball of wool was supposed to go through narrow slots...."

It goes on from there. In this post I talk about what you need to get started with tapestry weaving. And it isn't much!

Four things a tapestry weaver needs to remember

Four things a tapestry weaver needs to remember

Every discipline has something that trips people up when they’re learning it. I've been teaching tapestry for a long time and over the years I've noticed that there are four consistent things that cause tapestry weavers the most trouble. These things are more common for new tapestry weavers, but all of us have moments from time to time when we just don't see why the weaving isn't working.

Here are the four things I see tripping people up the most:

  1. Wait for the popped-up warp

Why do you weave from the bottom to the top of a tapestry?

Why do you weave from the bottom to the top of a tapestry?

Tapestry weaving is in some sense, taking a journey up the warp. It is a process that starts at the bottom and moves upward.

Always.

(okay, almost always)

I know some of you that have watched videos, read books, and even taken courses by some of the weavers prevalent on Instagram may be confused by this. They do teach weaving in the middle of the warp and then filling in around it with a needle. I maintain that this is a poor way to construct a tapestry and I’ll go so far as to even call it wrong. (with apologies for my stubbornness)

Here are my reasons.

,

A tapestry project for the holidays

,
A tapestry project for the holidays

This time of year I start asking myself serious questions about the holidays.

Do I really want to spend half of my Thanksgiving vacation at Dallas/Fort Worth International potentially sleeping on the floor with thousands of other people who were trapped due to a freak snowstorm in New England and the resulting air traffic nightmare? 

Do I really need another stack of things to take care of in my life or could Christmas money go toward helping others or purchasing experiences? (I'm no saint. Santa already told me he is bringing me a drum carder. But he needn't bring anything else. I have plenty of fleece, thanks.)

The holidays are certainly a time where I love cozy time on the couch, good food, friends and family, twinkly lights, and a mug of hot chocolate that might just have a little cake vodka in it. In my head it feels like it should be a time of love, expansion, and joy.

But in reality, the holidays are often a time of tension and of unattainable expectations from others (and ourselves if we're honest).

I think we should use making and craft as a gift to ourselves. Sure, we can make things with the expectation that the final product will be a wonderful gift for someone we love. But make the process of creating it a time for you to experience the joy of making. Have you ever experienced that state your brain enters where you lose track of time and are just enjoying the thing you're focused on? Some people call it flow. Tapestry weaving is especially well suited to creating this state. And we all need a little bit of this in our lives every day and more so during the holidays.