The sixth Tapestry Discovery Box opens April 15, 2024 and it is all about wedge weave. I’ve admired contemporary wedge weavers for a long time. It has become a popular technique and I often see wedge weaves in art shows.

The technique is an eccentric tapestry weaving technique and in that sense it has been used all over the world for as long as weaving has existed. The use of wedge weave where the technique patterns a whole textile, however, is most often seen in Diné (Navajo) weaving. It was a popular style from 1870-1900 when it disappeared from use for a century or more. It is said that tourists didn’t like the scalloped edges this weaving technique creates and the weavers stopped making them around 1900.

I started putting together a list of resources from my past blog posts and newsletters of the things that I see give tapestry weavers the most trouble. I wrote the first blog post about this February 22, 2024 and realized there was at least one more blog post worth of things high on the list of most-frustrating.

In the February 22 post I covered these things:

• weft tension

• choosing yarn

• getting the last warp tight on a continuous warp

• design and getting the effects you want

Let’s add a few more to the list.

How many times as a newer tapestry weaver have you felt frustrated because you’re weaving along and suddenly your wefts are in the wrong shed?*

Wait, what is a shed anyway?

How many of us who have been weaving tapestry a long time remember those days when every time we added or subtracted a weft in our design our sheds were wrong? Or we are trying to fill in a dip between two forms or add a new color into a pattern and there were either lice or the wefts just wouldn’t go where we wanted them to go?

Ten years ago I left my job as an occupational therapist to be a full time artist and fiber art teacher. In that moment I didn’t know I wouldn’t return to healthcare. All I knew was that the job I thought was my perfect forever-job (pediatric outpatient OT), was ruled by a boss and a system I couldn’t stomach any more. I had only been at that job a year though it was my 17th year working as an OT.

Whether you’re just beginning or have been weaving tapestry awhile, there are some things that trip most weavers up at some point. Over all the years I’ve been teaching, these are the things I’ve seen the most often that give people working in tapestry difficulties.