Online Tapestry Techniques Classes Reviews plus registration announcements

The first run of the online beginning tapestry techniques class is going fabulously. The students are engaged, and quite frankly, amazing. They have already taught me loads. Here are some examples:
  • Hockey pucks are a great way to prop up your Mirrix loom so you can get the yarn spool under it while warping. This was from a Canadian of course!
  • Making butterflies is a great thing to teach people sitting in a cancer center waiting room at the hospital. It is even better if you can teach your son and he can teach them how to do it while he waits for his grandma's treatment. Dealing with the car-load of resulting butterflies is a small price to pay for waiting-room engagement.
  • Sometimes you just have to accept that the current body of work you are creating is going to be called "The Learning Experience Tapestries."
  • Purple nail polish DOES help you weave better (at least if you are from the wine country of northern California!)
  • People DO actually weave in the middle of the night. (I sleep then; don't expect help at 2am)
Here are some of the things they had to say about their experience so far (and thanks to all of you amazing weavers for allowing me to share your thoughts... and for being so appreciative!).
You have been incredibly responsive to everyone's questions, with answers that both convey additional knowledge or information and engagement with your learners.  Your videos are very personal and engaging as well (I enjoy your written cryptic comments and corrections, as you might imagine).  It takes the right type of teacher to do well in an online environment and I believe that you are going to have great success in this medium.                                                      --Summer Larson, California
I love this course! Rebecca's thoughtful consideration for her students comes through in all of the videos, written materials, and discussion areas. I felt like I was there in the studio with her. Highly recommended!              -- Gina Pruette, Santa Fe, New Mexico
This is a great class! I am learning a lot. I just wish I could skip work so I could work on learning tapestry.                        -- Catriona Mortell, Ann Arbor, Michigan

On April 30, Trish wrote this about weaving headers and splicing, "Thanks for all the help so far and we are only three days in! Already worth more than the cost of the course!!!"
She added to this on May 8,
Things already worth the price of admission -- EACH of them
Double ended butterflies
Consistent bubbling -- the hand dance
Weft tension
Easier ways to warp the Mirrix -- not getting the heddles mixed up and messy
Having a height adjustable table or using an easel to get the work dropped down in front (I HAVE a height adjustable table and had not lowered it. WHAT a difference.) 
                                               --Trish White, British Columbia, Canada
Dawn commented at the end of the first week of class about her experience:

I’m about 12” into the sampler, spending most of last week reading Rebecca’s handouts, watching and re-watching her videos and asking questions. AND WEAVING! I question what made all of the difference this time around. I truly believe it has to do with having her right there with us “online”. She has been so responsive to questions, her videos are actually fun to watch as she adds her fun personality to the videos which keep me from drifting off and getting bored. The videos are also just the right length - not too long - not too short. She demonstrates precisely the technique being taught. The camera work and close ups are taken professionally making them easy to see and to follow. I actually understand WHY things need to be done for certain techniques. This class now has me thinking and designing in my head, and understanding the path it will take to achieve those designs.             --Dawn MacFall, Macfiberfall studio, Pine River, WI                     

The class is offered in three ways.
  1. You can take each of the three month-long classes individually (Part 1, 2, and 3). All these classes come with in-depth moderation and teaching from me.
  2. You can take all three of them together so you can work through the modules as quickly as you wish. This option also comes with intensive moderation and teaching from me. This class starts June 23rd.
  3. You can take all three of them together as in #2 but get no moderation or teaching from me for a significant price break, also starting June 23.
Part 1 is offered again starting June 9. Go to my website HERE for more information or click the link at the bottom of the page register.

Part 2 is also open for registration for all of you currently taking Part 1 (and those brave souls who want to skip part one and move straight to Part 2 -- you might want to email me about this option just to make sure). Registration is below.

Registration for the three-in-one options will be opening in about a week when I finish tweaking the slightly different presentation of this class.

Feel free to contact me with questions about the classes. And if you know of someone who might like an online tapestry class, please send them my way!

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Click below for more information on my website including a trailer video and a FAQ page that will answer many of your questions.  

HERE!!!

James Koehler's tapestry process... the last video

I was bumming around the internet looking for an image of James Koehler's work to show my online class and I found this video now posted. This is a part of a longer movie which I have, but didn't know that it had been shown on PBS and is now online. I was working in his studio when this was shot. In fact he tried to get me to do the ball-winder scene, but I thought better of it. This video gives you a little peek at the process he used for creating tapestries.
The structure gives me limitations. If one understands the limitations of the medium you're working in, you also understand the possibilities. The other lesson that the loom has really taught me is the importance of being consistent in decision-making in my life. The rhythm at the loom, the passing of the shuttles through the tapestry, the back and forth motion, all of that has helped me develop as a person.       --James Koehler, 2010




Note: Just to be clear, this is not my video. It was made by Karen Cantor of Singing Wolf Documentaries and you can find it HERE.

Mora Valley Spinning Mill

I finally found someone to go to the Mora Valley Spinning Mill with me. This is, according to them, the only working mill in New Mexico at the moment. It used to be Tapetes de Lana. Their mission is to create jobs for the small community of Mora which is a beautiful town in the valles above Las Vegas, NM. So far they have been quite successful. DY agreed to make the trip up there with me in search of some good churro. Obviously I don't currently use churro in my work, but DY needs plenty of it and Mora provided. I have some hope of eventually being able to get some good tapestry yarn from them. Locally sourced wool spun by local people would be wonderful.

As you may remember from THIS POST about the Harrisville spinning mill, I am fascinated with mills. This one is practically in my back yard and until Wednesday I had never been there.

Our tour started in the store where they have some beautiful hand-dyed yarn. There was an old theater in the building that they were working on renovating and a community room that is the meeting place for the people of Mora.

The mill is definitely a mill! It is smaller than Harrisville, but some of the equipment seemed familiar. I asked the boss Joshua how he fixed the machines when they break. He just pointed to Jimmy, the genius mechanic. Mostly they can't get parts so they just make something and keep on going. That is the spirit of New Mexico all the way.

Here is the back end of their carding machine which wasn't running when we were there.

Loops of roving going into the spinner.

The all important guy who knows how to create the yarn the client wants. They will do a special mill run for you with only 20 pounds of fleece.





They have a new churro yarn. It is a thin single and well-spun. They only carry it in natural right now, but I suspect they'll be dyeing it soon. I bought a pound and hope to try dyeing it myself soon.


 
That sign to the right of the door turned out to be true. If you go to the mill to buy their yarn, you get 40% off. That was one great yarn run.

The Mexican place right down the street has good tacos if you go. And it was snowing as we left (April 30th!) and they had a roaring fire both in the mill's art gallery and in the restaurant.

If you need an inexpensive loom that needs some love but would be perfectly serviceable, the mill has a whole room of old looms, most seemed to be counterbalance, that they need to get rid of to make room for new enterprises. I'm sure they'd love for you to take one off their hands.

It was a great day out in rural New Mexico. We drove home over the Sangre de Cristos in the snow through Penasco and left a prayer at Santuario de Chimayo before heading back to Santa Fe. But that is a New Mexico story for another day.
 
Links for this post
Mora Valley Spinning Mill: http://moravalleyspinningmill.com/ 
Santuario de Chimayo: http://www.elsantuariodechimayo.us/
DY Begay: http://navajo-indian.com/

To sign up for my newsletter click HERE! I send updates twice a month often with information I don't post on my blog.

Weft tension: how to control the amount of weft used in tapestry weaving

The Latest Catastrophe

I often get questions from students similar to the one I found in my inbox this morning. I thought some of you might be interested in the solution to this common problem.

The student started the email with, "Hi Rebecca, Here is my latest catastrophe. I am so discouraged."

She went on to say:
I think it is a tension problem. I am currently weaving pick by pick.  There are exactly the same number of rows of weft all the way across!!!  So what the heck is going on?  You can see the left side is packed way tighter, but that’s not the answer.  And it makes it look even more weird.  I need to sort out these issues or I think I won’t have the confidence to weave at all.  There is so much time invested to just throw something away.  I so much enjoy the process of weaving but I want some confidence that I won’t have to throw all my projects away.  I so hope you can help me.


The good thing is that I took one look at this photo and knew exactly what the problem is. She is weaving this on a two-foot Shannock and was thinking that this was caused by a warp tension problem so she tried to improve the tension on the left side of the piece. I can't feel the tension so I don't know if it is even, but that isn't the problem in this case.

The problem is WEFT tension, not warp tension. It is true that if you have a section of warp that is looser, you'll get a bubbling up of the weft. But that isn't what is happening here. One of the most important things in tapestry is to get the right amount of weft into your warp, and that is something that an experienced weaver learns to adjust constantly and mostly without thought.

Look at the warp spacing in the photo. The warps on the left where the fell line is rising are very close together compared to the rest of the piece. When warps get close together like this, there isn't anywhere for the weft to go because the space becomes so small, so it pushes up. Often people try putting less and less weft in in this case to try to fix the problem and that is the opposite of what has to happen. This piece is effectively now being woven eccentrically on the left side which only exacerbates the problem as you need even MORE weft in eccentric weaving to maintain warp spacing.

Consider what happens with the wefts in cross section:


In this diagram, the warp threads in cross section are shown with the large black circles. Each weft thread has to have enough slack to travel over and under each of those warp threads. The warp is under a lot of tension and when you don't put enough weft in to travel the extra distance, the only option is for the warp threads to move closer together.

When your warps start to get too close together, you need to put more weft in. Said another way, when your warps get crowded together, you need to increase the bubbling in that section. Make those bubbles bigger, not smaller. The extra weft you put in will start to push the warps apart and you won't have this problem of the rising fell line. (Notice that she is also having difficulty even covering the warp with the weft and has had to pack the left side of the piece very hard to keep the warp covered. This is a situation where you'll often see lice.)

Conversely, if you have areas where your warps are spreading apart, you need to put less weft in. Often in areas where there is a lot going on, the warps start to spread out. I will flatten my bubble or use no bubble at all to encourage the warps to come back together in this case. I also sew my slits as I go to help avoid this spreading warp problem.

Weft tension, or the amount of weft put into the warp with each pick, is something that has to be constantly adjusted. Watch those warps as you weave and then check to make sure your warp tension is even. If it is, you need to watch the amount of weft you're putting in carefully. You can change the areas in one pick that get more or less weft. Areas of warp spread can get much less weft (straight line), areas of warp crowding can get much more weft (bigger bubbles which increases amount of weft).

Here is a video that shows this bubbling problem.

The entire video is part of my new online tapestry techniques class. Visit www.rebeccamezoff.com/online-learning/ for more information. Part 3 of the class has a whole module on weft tension.

This student's piece was an extreme case where I advocated unweaving or filling in the low areas and then aggressively working to get those warps on the left to move apart. Do you have other ideas of how to fix this problem? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below if you do!

For continued updates on my fiber adventures, subscribe to my newsletter (I'm going to a wool mill tomorrow! You can bet I'll have something to say about that!). The subscription box is in the upper right corner of this blog, or click HERE.

Resistance to possibility.


I was just reading a blog post by Tommye Scanlin which resonated with where I am right now. Beginning a new tapestry is hard. I have no problem whipping out a knitting pattern and grabbing the first yarn that might remotely work from my stash, but starting a tapestry is a whole different ball game. Somehow knitting just doesn't scream commitment like tapestry does.

As Tommye says, it is hard as rocks (of course she was weaving rocks so maybe she has a better position from which to say that). I like to think that other tapestry weavers have similar struggles with beginning and that this is somehow different from other art mediums. I suspect I am wrong about the other mediums. It is probably just as hard.

Tapestry somehow seems difficult because of the fear of beginning something I absolutely hate. It takes so long to weave a tapestry that the fear of making that mistake can be paralyzing. I often think about a design for months or even years before I even write something down. I fuss with it more, draw various iterations. Eventually I just have to start. Often what primes me is starting to dye. Sometimes I dye a bunch of sample colors in jars if I am really stuck. This gives me the opportunity to see multiple colors with less effort and time in case I make a real stinker.
But ultimately I have to get over the indecision and pick colors and start weaving.

And sometimes all that stuckness that I work out through dyeing means that I have this much yarn for a very small area of a tapestry.
At least I have choices.
...and as it turns out in this case, not enough yarn for the major color areas of the tapestry. Back to the dye pots.


As Tommye quoted,
"Begin at the beginning," the King said very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
(Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland)




And this is my life...

Here is a wonderful video of Bhakti Ziek working on a commission for Community Hall at Whitman College, Princeton. This is not tapestry weaving (it is jaquard), but it is a wonderful tribute to fiber. She ends the video saying, "And this is my life."

I am not sure how it happened, but weaving is also, in part, my life.
When I design a weaving, I'm thinking about the weaving process from the beginning to the end. And so I'm not just doing a painting and then referencing it into a textile, I'm designing a textile.  
I think one of the tricks to being a weaver is staying involved. Just being able to be present with each step as it is.                                                                     --Bhakti Ziek



I am sending a newsletter tomorrow with a little bit about the changes in my life recently. If you aren't a subscriber, you can add your email by clicking HERE.