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James Koehler was a contemporary tapestry artist living and working in New Mexico. He was my teacher and the teacher of many other tapestry artists over a span of about 20 years. He passed away unexpectedly ten years ago today, March 4, 2011 at 58 years of age.
Many of you probably took classes from him also. Perhaps you visited his studio, were in a class with him through your guild or a conference, or were even one of his apprentices at some point.
Oh my but I get this question a lot. Should I weave from the front or the back? Or if you’re brand new to tapestry weaving, your question might be, WHAT??? What does that even mean, weaving from the front or from the back?
I’m spending some time addressing questions from readers of my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving on the blog, and this is one I get not only from readers but from students in my workshops and online courses.
I demonstrate this in the video below, but the short answer is that the side of the tapestry that will be showing when hung on the wall or used in some other manner, is the front. Tapestry is a one-sided fabric in almost all cases* and it is important to know which side of the weaving will be showing when it is displayed.
Here is a little bit of what has been going on in my world. Most of it is at least tangentially tapestry related.
While scrolling through Instagram in January, a post popped up of a lovely tapestry loom which I have long admired.* The Crisp Ruthie loom is a high-warp tapestry loom which is no longer made and hasn’t been since perhaps the 1980s. I know a couple tapestry weavers who have one (Joan Griffin and Tommye Scanlin) and love them. So my scrolling stopped when I saw the Ruthie and when I read the post, thought, someone is going to be the lucky new owner of that loom! After reposting to my IG Stories, I had a shocking thought. What if I bought that loom? Certainly it is somewhere far away and who wants to ship something so heavy across the country?
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 for people who are pretty new to tapestry weaving.
At the end of the post is an actual list you might use to shop with.
Those of you who have been following me on Change the Shed on YouTube since March have seen first hand how I make decisions as I’m weaving. For me, many of my tapestry design decisions are made before I start the weaving. But often color choices aren’t really clear until the tapestry is underway. In a small piece I am unlikely to weave a sample, so I am experimenting while working on the actual tapestry.
In the December 9th episode of Change the Shed I was struggling with a value choice that I didn’t trial before I turned the camera on that morning. After briefly considering (silently) how embarrassed I was going to be when I made live “errors” to a fairly wide audience, I decided that letting it play out on camera was just fine with me.
Have you ever been several inches into a tapestry and had an overwhelming feeling that it just wasn’t working out? Maybe the colors are wrong or the forms just aren’t weaving well or you’ve chosen the wrong weft materials.
On one of my recent pieces for the Pandemic Diaries series, I got about 3 inches into the weaving and realized I really hated what was happening with both the forms and the colors. I am weaving this piece as a way of cheering myself up at the end of a very long year and in the middle of a difficult election season in the USA. (WHY do our election “seasons” last so long? It feels like it has been an eon since this started.) To me, the piece is funny, though in a sarcastic, wry way, being a riff on the saying, “Going to hell in a handbasket.” The border of the tapestry is supposed to represent flames and though I did cartoon the forms I would weave I did not plan the colors beyond picking out a pile of warm colors and choosing them as I went. I hated the result.
“Reckoning with myself” is just my way of saying that I’m working on stuff. In Part 1 I was musing about space to work and a few tapestry designs I’m still working on. I still don’t have an answer about the big tapestries, but I can say that I spent a fun weekend enlarging the cartoon for one of them using my projector and a roll of paper my grandmother had labeled like this:
