Rebecca's 8 Tips for warping a tapestry loom

Travel Warping hacks!

Okay, many of these hacks refer to warping a Mirrix loom. But most of my students are using them and these are the questions I see come up again and again. A few of these ideas apply to any tapestry loom.

The video below shows some of the things I do to make warping this loom easier. It isn't a hard loom to warp, it is just different than the big floor looms many of us are used to. There are no warping boards in Mirrix-land.

Here are some of the points I cover in this video.

1. Leave at least three inches of threaded rod for stability. You don't even want to know what happens when you don't do this.
2. Which direction do I start warping, up or down? I know you're on the edge of your seats waiting for the answer for that one!
3. How to keep warps from getting twisted with their neighbors. (no alcohol is involved here--and can I just say that if this particular thing drives you nutty, just buy the bottom spring for your loom. Seriously.)
4. Double selvedge warps. I'm not the only one who does this... and I love it!
5. Using a guide thread. Nope, I don't do this, but it can be helpful if you struggle with your selvedges or weft tension.
6. Moving the warping bar down. Don't forget to do this... or your warp will be much shorter!
7. How to put the heddles on without throwing the loom through a window. To be honest, I like putting heddles on the Mirrix. The texsolv heddles are wonderful and somehow I don't have trouble seeing the pattern or getting them on without mistakes. Of course that could also just be because I've warped a lot of these looms. Don't resort to violence (I always advocate a glass of wine if you're allowed). Here are some easy hacks to help.
8. Block the second layer of warp from view. So easy. So helpful. Just do it. I like gray but any color works.

As usual, if you receive this blog post via email, you need to visit my blog in your internet browser to see the video. Go to http://rebeccamezoff.blogspot.com. Or go see it on my YouTube channel and subscribe while you're there!

My last tip is that perhaps we all need a studio assistant as helpful as Topaz.

All the tapestry bits... pieces from around the world in Line Dufour's Fate, Destiny, and Self-Determination

I was invited to participate in Line Dufour's Fate, Destiny, and Self-Determination installation at Regis University in Denver, Colorado. I have been excited to see this show because the thought of hundreds of little colored shapes made by all different artists all over the world and put together in one exhibition is pretty exciting. And I got the chance to see it in Denver this weekend and  to show one of my large pieces.

The main Fate piece has two "ends" which you can see in the first two photos here. All the little pieces from all over the world are scattered between them.

Fate, Destiny, Self-Determination (detail) and Rebecca Mezoff, Emergence I

This project was created by Toronto tapestry artist, Line Dufour. She was interested in the impact of social media on our practice as artists and its ability to connect people working largely in isolation. It also allowed her to bring together artists who contributed pieces to the project. She is also thinking about issues of physicality and the actual making of objects.

Tapestry weaving is a slow, laborious and manual practice, a contrast to the speed at which social media weaves word threads of connection to others.

You can read the rest of the above excerpted article in HandEye magazine HERE.

Rebecca Mezoff, Emergence I

Sarah Swett, Line Dufour, and Alex Marriott

David Johnson

Margaret Sunday, Penelope Dissembling in Fracutopia

Penelope Dissembling in Fracutopia (detail)

Viewing this piece was delightful. I walked around and around it and every time I saw new things. It is great fun. Bring a child for the best viewing. They notice everything.

Visit the project's Facebook page HERE, and if you are a weaver, make a shape for the project!

Dragonflies are handy that way... weaving curves with Sarah Swett

Much of the time life just hums along, the same as usual. But now and then there are a few days that shift that regular world a little or a lot. Last week's workshop with Sarah Swett was one of those seismic shifts. The workshop was called Follow That Line! and it was held in Golden, Colorado, at The Recycled Lamb. It was put on by the American Tapestry Alliance.

Sarah Swett, Dinner Dazzle (detail)

I have tried and tried to put words to the experience that was this workshop and I just can't sum it up in any way at all. Here are a few snippets and some photos. I guess this is my journey, so go find your own!

I learned not to hold the way you do things too closely. Opening fists clenched tightly around "the way I do it" opened me up for immediate experimentation and, I quickly found, fun. It wasn't really hard to let go. No one could resist entering Sarah's world of imagination... and I'm not much of a closed fist kind of person anyway.

The truth is, there are a million things about tapestry. There are so many ways to go over and under a set of warp threads. So many things we debate--warp, weft, looms, finishing, starting, selvedge technique, tension, image.

Just over and under. Really.

This is some of what Sarah said. But mostly she lives by example.

I want to know what is going to happen and I don't... until I weave it.
Set things up so it is impossible not to do what you really want to be doing.
Try to be really clear.
Start the day as you mean to go on.
Dragonflies are handy that way...
Be consistent.
There is too much information in a photograph.
Jack Lenor Larsen's "unfortunate fringe" might be just the thing.
Try it. (She didn't say that one. But she might have. I think it is what she meant by the whole workshop.)

Sarah Swett, Cucumber Sandwiches, 14 x 12 inches, hand-woven tapestry, wool, natural dyes

Sarah Swett, Scribbles, 14 x 18 inches, hand-woven tapestry, wool, natural dye

Sarah Swett, margin notes

Cheryl Nachtrieb (Recycled Lamb owner), Sarah Swett (tapestry artist, educator), Barb Brophy (ATA Education Board Chair), Rebecca Mezoff (resident goof)

Rebecca Mezoff, workshop sampler

By the way, the rumors are true. The tapestries pictured here of Sarah's are all woven with her handspun weft. A significant portion of them also have handspun warp.
And yes, as shocking as it is to some of us, she wet finishes them. That means they are washed. In water. Given a bath. Wet. And spun in the washer.
Whew. I'm still trying to open the fists clenched against the weft finishing ...

You can find Sarah's virtual world on her website here: http://www.afieldguidetoneedlework.com/

Now go weave something.

Creative Crossroads: The Art of Tapestry at the Denver Art Museum

Last Friday I was able to return to the Denver Art Museum for another look at the current tapestry exhibit.

The show starts with large three historic tapestries.

The first is Birth of the Prince of Peace. It was woven in an unknown Flemish workshop, probably in Tournai, in 1510 - 1530. It is an allegorical tapestry and here we see the new mother receiving her son (the prince of peace) from her attendant. The baby is difficult to see now as those yarns have faded in color in the five centuries since it was woven.

Birth of the Prince of Peace (detail)

Here is the whole piece being admired by the group from the American Tapestry Alliance who went for a tour.

Birth of the Prince of Peace

The second piece was a table covering called The Five Senses, woven in England in 1610. It is the piece in the center between Birth of the Prince of Peace to the left and Village Festival to the right. In the photo below, Alison McCloskey and Stephania VanDyke are giving us a tour of the show.

They know this piece is a table cover because the images at the top of the piece are upside down. The detail below is of the sense of smell.

The Five Senses (detail)

The third of these old Flemish and English tapestries is Village Festival which was woven at the Brussels workshop of Urbanus Leyniers from 1705 - 1747. It was based on the paintings of David II Teniers (Flemish 1610 - 1690).

This piece got 300 hours of restoration work and is about 9 by 20 feet. During this time period, poor quality silk was used and the parts of the tapestry that were silk (large parts of the sky, part of a pig, other parts that they wanted to be shinier), have largely disappeared. Alison McCloskey, the conservator who talked about this work, said that metals were added to silk at that time. The metals made the silk weaker and it breaks easily.

Village Festival (I have also seen it called Peasant's Feast)

Last spring I was able to see this piece being restored. There were bits of silk all over the floor under the frame they were using to do the stabilizing, like shiney snow. Fortunately the weft that was wool and the wool warp are intact.

This is the frame they used to restore the piece. It has two large rollers on each side and they can scroll through the tapestry as they work.

Village Festival on restoration frame at the Denver Art Museum

There were two conservators working on stabilizing this piece. They do not do any reweaving of areas. Alison told us that reweaving is invasive, yarns don't age in a compatible manner, and it is difficult to remove. In the photo below you can see the twining technique they use every few inches to connect the warps. The silk bits have mostly fallen out of this part of the tapestry and the warps are exposed.

Village Festival, detail of restoration

They use two strands of DMC embroidery floss for these stabilization twinings. Alison said that the floss is the right strength for the tapestry and it comes in such a wide variety of colors, they can match what they need so it disappears into the tapestry.

Here is a detail of Birth of the Prince of Peace which I saw being restored a few months prior to Village Festival. You can see the DMC floss. This tapestry, though a couple hundred years older, is in better shape. There are some old repairs and multiple slit sewings that had to be removed. The old repairs were either done in an orange color or the colors have changed in the intervening centuries. The conservation team did remove some of those old repairs especially in the faces of the figures where they were extremely distracting.

Birth of the Prince of Peace, restoration in process

The photo below shows a few of the old repairs in an orangish, thicker tapestry weave. They are the blotches that don't seem to fit. You can also see where the slits have been resewn repeatedly. Alison thought there were perhaps 20 different resewings over the 500 years this tapestry has been around. You can see more images of the restoration of these tapestries in THIS POST.

Birth of the Prince of Peace (detail of repairs)

And what with all the drinking and merry-making, someone has to pee...

Village Festival (detail)

Though I find these old tapestries fascinating, I fear we are in danger of thinking that tapestry is ONLY a historical practice and is irrelevant today. The tapestries in the rest of the show make us think about what tapestry has been over the last five centuries, how it has changed, and perhaps a little about what it means today. It would take an exhibit ten times this size to really explore these ideas, but Alice Zrebiec, curator, has made a good start in Creative Crossroads just with objects from the DAM collection.

Here are some overview photos from the exhibit followed by some more details.

left to right: Josep Grau Garriga, Mark Adams, Irvin Trujillo, James Koehler, Ramona Sakiestewa

Irvin Trujillo, Saltillo Shroud (right), Don Leon Sandoval, Las Cinco Estrellas (left)

Irvin Trujillo was at the opening dinner and he talked about this piece a little bit. You can see more photos from that night HERE. Below is a detail of the work which is done in wool, silk, and metal thread. Irvin says that this piece is a tribute to the Mexican saltillo serapes and their influence on Rio Grande weaving in New Mexico. His father never wove in this form because he didn't want to acknowledge his Mexican heritage. Irvin says that this piece and the prominent center figure is a sort of "coming out" from the shame of his father. Also, there was that thing about pop biscuits.

Saltillo Shroud (detail)

There is a very large Navajo rug by Ason Yellowhair (1930 - 2012), woven in 1983. There is an interesting photo of Ason weaving another rug with her chair on top of her dining table so she could reach the weaving line on her traditional Navajo loom.

Ason Yellowhair, Bird and Flower Pictorial Rug (detail)

This massive piece that you see from all over the gallery was woven by Josep Grau-Garriga (Catalan, 1929 - 2011). He studied with Jean Lurcat in France and then returned to Spain where he became the director of the Catalan School of Tapestry. He took traditional tapestry into a sculptural form which, in this piece, was meant to be viewed in the round.

Josep Grau Garriga, Tapis Pobre

The very large, Flight of Angels, designed by Mark Adams (1925 - 2006), was woven in 1962 by Paul Avignon in Aubusson, France.

Mark Adams, Flight of Angels

Flight of Angels (detail)

Flight of Angels (detail); Mark Adams' signature with the atelier's mark

Ramona Sakiestewa is an artist/weaver of Hopi heritage.

Ramona Sakiestewa, Katsina 5

Rebecca Bluestone, Four Corners/8, 1997

James Koehler had a piece in the show and you can see more photos as well as watch five videos the museum made about his work and practice HERE.

There are many delightful surprises in this show. I hope you'll visit to see these in person as well as the ones I haven't shown you.

Denver Art Museum to the left and the Denver Public Library straight ahead.

Imagine 300 hours of this on just one piece?!!!

The James Koehler videos from the Denver Art Museum, Part 5: Weaving Process

This post is the continuation of my series of blog posts discussing the five Denver Art Museum videos about James Koehler.

James Koehler was a fast weaver. Anyone who weaves many hours a day is a fast weaver. But James had a real ability to focus. He could tune out everything and just weave. When there were students and apprentices in his studio as there often were, he was frequently pulled away from the loom to answer questions or supervise an apprentice's activity (I could wind balls of yarn like a champ, but when I got to work on re-hemming his tapestries, that made him nervous... which frankly made me nervous). But when we all went home at 5 pm, he worked. I frequently would return the next day to find that a piece that had several inches left to weave at 5 pm was off the loom. Sometimes he had even done the finishing and the tapestry was rolled up, ready for the photographer.

I talk some about why I weave on a floor loom and what I like about weaving all the way across using the beater on the loom. James wove much of his work all the way across. All the pieces like this Chief Blanket piece we are discussing in these videos were woven one pick at a time all the way across the loom. To do the joins he used in this piece, he had to weave it that way as everything was interlocked all the way across in some sections.

I weave all the way across whenever I can in part because I learned that way, but also because I use this join and a lot of irregular hatching to move color around. When using hatching, the color areas are interpenetrating and you can't weave one section before the other. If my color blends are going throughout much of the piece, I have to weave all the way across.

The other reason I talk about in this video is the nature of the fabric created. I don't see this reason talked about much at all among tapestry weavers. My tapestries certainly feel like a fabric. They might even make a nice blanket. They are fairly soft, thin and flexible. James' work felt similarly. When using the beater on the loom, it is possible to get a very even beat and to create a fabric that is not thicker in some areas than others which also means that it hangs very flat on the wall.

However, weaving all the way across is not possible all the time if you want to utilize the full range of tapestry's potential. James' Harmonic Oscillations pieces were woven somewhat differently. He wove up each curve and often outlined the edge of it before filling in to as close as flat as he could, beating with the beater bar on the loom, and then building up the next wave. I often weave up in shapes with the intention of outlining something or completing a section faster than another one. I like the flexibility of using a floor loom as it allows me to weave both ways in the same piece depending on the imagery I'm creating.

Just a note on what Barb says about an iron. Neither I nor James uses an iron on our tapestries. I use a steamer. For the most part, I don't want to squish the tapestry at all, I just want to use the steam to get a little shrinkage in the fibers to make the tapestry lie completely flat. James used a Jiffy steamer, but any clothes steamer that can be used horizontally (with the tapestry lying flat on a table not hanging on a hanger like a shirt would be) will work.

Below is the last of the five videos. See the links below if you missed the other four.

If you receive these blog posts via email updates, you'll have to visit my blog on the internet to view the videos or look for them on YouTube. http://rebeccamezoff.blogspot.com

This is the fifth in a series of five posts about the James Koehler Denver Art Museum videos.
Here are links to the first four posts:
Part 1: Color
Part 2: Flat Tapestry
Part 3: Meditation
Part 4: Teacher

Here is one of the Harmonic Oscillation pieces. This one was woven sideways and each of the curves would have been woven up to the curve and then he put in an eccentric outline before continuing weaving straight across the grid. In this case you can see that the eccentric outlines were done with a lighter color which really accentuates the curves.

James Koehler, Harmonic Oscillation LXIII

I want to thank the Denver Art Museum for giving me this great opportunity to speak about James Koehler, my experiences as his apprentice, and his work. James died in 2011 but we do hope his work lives on especially through his students and his student's students.

The sweater the dog ate...

There was a time in my life I lived in a rural off-grid cabin without running water. That means I peed under a tree and took a shower in town. But it was a good time and the stars were very very bright. Through a rather surreal plot twist, a friend from that time came back into my life because, well, she is in the same PhD program as my wife (I didn't marry the rural cabin owner. I'm okay with a composting toilet, but I found that I really like a shower every day a lot more than I thought I did).

And I'm immensely glad to have her back. Kelsea is a knitter. She made this fantastic sweater. Her favorite sweater. And then she took care of a dog who decided to eat one of the buttons. He swallowed the button (it wasn't found) and chewed a large hole in the yarn underneath in the process.

This is the initial mess with a few live stitches picked up.

I wasn't sure I was up to the task of repairing this. I am a fiber junkie, but I don't have the best knitting skills. I am kind of a stockinette or garter stitch sort of knitter. Sometimes I'll throw in an ssk or a yo, but really, I like it pretty simple.

This repair required picking up live stitches, reknitting a portion (I didn't have the pattern), and then Kitchener stitching the rows of live stitches together--and I had to do it backwards! I also had to secure four rows worth of severed yarn and reattach the new knitted fabric to the rest of the ribbing. I suppose the very best way to fix this would have been to rip out the ribbing back to the hole and reknit the whole thing, but I didn't have the pattern, I don't have the same knitting tension as Kelsea probably does, you would have been able to tell the difference between the older worn sweater and the new yarn, and basically I'm lazy about this kind of thing.

But I was gifted two marvelous bags of fleece from my favorite local shepherdess in exchange for this repair, and I was determined to save the favorite sweater.

So here it is.

Thank goodness that button is big. Since the button that went through a dog's digestive track was not found, this one was moved from the collar.

This project was one in the pile of UFO's which I spoke about in the Love the One You're With blog post. I'm making good headway on that pile. My bedroom floor has been a veritable sea of blocking.

Stay tuned for the last in the James Koehler videos tomorrow.

The James Koehler videos from the Denver Art Museum, Part 4: Teacher

This post is a continuation of the series of blog posts about the Denver Art Museum's videos of James Koehler.

Barb starts this video talking about passing on the knowledge of tapestry. I agree with her about this. Though weaving tapestry is a rather crazy way to spend a life in some respects, the rewards are great and passing on those things to a new generation of weavers is important. It is why I do so much teaching now myself.

In the video I talk about seeing a piece of James' at a lecture and knowing that that was what I wanted to do. That is quite literally what happened. I was a student at Northern New Mexico Community College in their fiber arts program and James came to give a lecture one afternoon. At NNMCC I was studying traditional Rio Grande Hispanic tapestry weaving which is a wonderful tradition with many expectations and rules. Once I understood the possibilities of contemporary art tapestry, I knew I had to leave that program and learn the techniques necessary to create my own vision of tapestry art.

It is true that the inspiration for James' Harmonic Oscillations pieces was a sine wave. Once he started playing with this mathematical form, he was able to create tapestries with these waves that looked like they were three dimensional.

If you receive my blog via email updates, you'll need to view it in your browser to see the video. Just go to http://rebeccamezoff.blogspot.com.

Here is one of the Harmonic Oscillations pieces which were designed from sine waves.

James Koehler, Harmonic Oscillation XL

James did love teaching. There are crazy stories from students about workshops he was teaching while he was sick in his last year when he just kept teaching. I struggled for a long time with feeling angry at him for not taking care of himself. For not stopping when he knew he was sick. But he couldn't. He was teaching in southern New Mexico just a day before he died.

The Rhythms of Nature pieces were ones he did very near the end of his life. I believe this one was woven around 2010 as it was included in the Albuquerque Interwoven Traditions: New Mexico and Bauhaus show.

James Koehler, Rhythms of Nature III