Still love weaving? Take care of your body.

Over the last several weeks I have mentioned the weaving classes I'm teaching at YarnFest 2016 in Loveland, Colorado.

The third class I am teaching is just three hours and it is called Creating Without Pain: Ergonomics for Fiber Artists. This class is for all of you. I spent 17 years as an occupational therapist and much of that work involves body mechanics and learning to live without hurting ourselves.

What: Interweave YarnFest 2016
Where: Loveland, Colorado (believe me when I tell you, and I know because I live in Fort Collins which is just a skip north of Loveland, the view of the Rockies is wonderful)
When: March 31 - April 3, 2016
Why: Because we love yarn and we want to keep working with it for the rest of our lives.

This is the course description:

In my first career as an occupational therapist I taught many people how to use appropriate body mechanics in their everyday lives. Now I apply that knowledge to fiber pursuits. This lecture reviews some basic anatomy and talks about body positioning, common injuries, and pain mechanisms for all kinds of fiber arts. How we treat our bodies is extremely important if we are to pursue our art and crafts for many years to come. I include a discussion about best practices for maintaining your most important tool including stretches, proper lighting and positioning, and when and how to take breaks. This class is not just for weavers. It is for all fiber artists.

Let me just say this again. This class is for all fiber artists. We all need to learn to take care of our bodies to avoid repetitive stress injuries and to maximize our health for the long term. I don't know about you, but I don't ever plan to give up making stuff with yarn and in order to keep myself healthy and out of pain, I need to follow some basic principles.

We'll talk about different challenges for all fiber artists and specific problems with some practices, discuss some of the reasons we injure ourselves with repetitive tasks and how to prevent this from happening, and I'll send you home with some stretches and ideas to improve your relationship to creating to keep your body in great shape.

Mix in some brown

I spun the roving I hand-painted and here is what happened.

I like it! I have picked up various tips about color in spinning from Deb Menz's book Color in Spinning and Ply and Spin Off magazines lately. I know a lot about dyeing with acid wool dyes, but mixing color for spinning brings it to a whole different level than dyeing solid colors.

I used a strips of brown and white roving painted with the same colors in generally the same proportions to make this. When mixed, the brown helped tone down the much brighter colors on the white. I am going to use the same formulas and paint some more so I have enough yarn for a small garment.

My next plan is to track down a fiber that I can use for tapestry singles. This BFL commercially prepared top is soft and lovely, but it is too squishy for a tapestry yarn I think, even if I spun it worsted.

If you know something about spinning, what are your best suggestions for a longer staple fiber (3 inches plus?) that is less fine than BFL which I could use for tapestry singles? And do you know of a source of commercially prepared top? I love prepping the fiber from the fleece, but for large quantities of tapestry singles, I'm interested in getting to the yarn faster. I will leave the hand preparation for my knitting yarns.

Here is what that roving looked like as I was painting it. Quite a transformation, right?

The simple joy of making color

I love dyeing my own yarn. I love it so much that I just don't understand when people say to me, "I don't want to learn to dye." How can that be? You can make any color you want!! And if you run out, you can make more if you took good notes and were careful.

(Any color you want!)

To each their own. There are perfectly reasonable reasons not to be a dyer.

Dyeing can feel like hard work especially when in the middle of a big run. At some point last year I cut way back on the hand-dyed yarn I bring to my workshops and that has made a significant difference in my dyeing joy. Now the pots only have about 4 ounces of fiber in them, sometimes less. I rarely need more than that of a single color. And pots with small amounts of yarn heat up much quicker. And so I can dye more colors in a day. And that makes me happy. Oh I'll still bring some hand-dyed to my workshops, never fear. But much of that work is now done by someone else. (And how many people really noticed they were working with hand-dyed yarn that I created, lifting endless very heavy pots in the process? Not many. 10 gallons of water weighs about 80 pounds. I may not be as strong as I was, but my back is happier.)*

I tried something new this week. I am working on new ways to manage colors in tapestry weaving and have done some experimenting with handspun. I bought some white and brown roving when I just happened to be in was in the yarn store the other day and with the help of the most excellent Deb Menz**, I did this.

I was pretty skeptical about it at this stage. I was sure this was going to turn into two big globs of brown as the dye was setting in the steam pot. But I was wrong. It isn't perfect, but it is a skill worth perfecting.

I will spin this before the next dye trial... and I will also choose my colors a little differently next time. If it spins well and I didn't felt it, this idea will undoubtedly find its way into a tapestry soon.

I also finished these samples for the big dye run I am now doing. I dye samples in quart canning jars so I can do many at once. The first run produced this.

This was the point where I stood on the deck looking at those colors and I thought, I have finally become a dyer. I know what I'm doing and I can pull this stuff off with very few mistakes. While I will tell you that dyeing with acid wool dyes is very easy (it is!), learning what dyes to combine to make a certain color and in what proportions takes a bit longer. After ten years I can say, I'm good at this! I totally know what I'm doing.

I had to tweak about 6 colors and then I had this.

The larger amounts are being dyed now and might even be done by tomorrow. There is just that one little problem of the big tapestry still occupying the loom upon which I want to weave the next piece. It'll take me about 80 hours to finish weaving that one off. Just a few more colors in the dye studio which sounds cool but is my garage, I promise, then I'll be back to weaving... really.
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* One of the great things about acid wool dyes is that all of the dye ends up in the fiber. The water is completely clear (though acidic!) when a color is finished. I can use that water over and over again for subsequent baths.
** By the way, if you want to try doing some hand painting of yarn or roving, I recommend Deb Menz's book, Color in Spinning. It is magnificent. Even if you only dye yarn and don't spin at all, this book is fantastic. In fact, I recommend everything Deb Menz has published. She is something of a color genius.

It's a major award! ...or the value of juried shows

Rebecca Mezoff, Emergence VII, 45 x 45 inches, hand-dyed wool tapestry

It has been awhile since I won a jurors choice award in a show. My piece Emergence VII was chosen as the juror's choice award in the Handweaver's Guild of Boulder show, Conversations. And I will admit that that made me happy. It also made me think again about the value of juried shows or shows of any kind.

This is what the juror, Jo Fitsell, had to say about my piece:

This show well represents both the way boundaries can be pushed and the intense beauty of working within them. The one piece which seems to bridge both worlds, Emergence VII, bravely struts out on its own with plenty to say. Yes, the shapes are large and graphic, but the artist also includes shadow with the power, and captures intrigue by communicating through color. A very powerful piece.

 So thanks for that! It is quite an encouragement to keep working, these little bits of recognition.

I have been thinking a lot about juried shows lately. There are moments where I am quite sure I'll never enter another one, though I've always changed my mind in the long run. This particular show was a local thing and I entered thinking that it was a way to show support for my local guild and to get tapestry out into the community.

I do think that shows are one of the things that can help us push back against the resistance that comes with being an artist. (See Steven Pressfield, The War of Art for a great description of resistance.) For many of us, having a deadline like a show we want to be in actually makes us sit down at the loom every day and produce inches.

Unless it takes us farther from the most important thing--our experience of our creation. I have also found myself working toward some specific show and losing track of what it was I was actually trying to express. I can't let the thought of my piece hanging in a particular venue shape what it is I'm actually working on. And to be honest, not once when I started working on a piece for a specific show did I get in.

I also think a lot about multi-media shows versus tapestry-only shows. When you go to see art, you don't usually see a whole gallery full of the same medium. I think tapestry-only shows are a bit odd actually. I do appreciate being able to go to a tapestry show and having so many examples of wonderful work to study and learn from. But when I stand back and think about the impact of the whole gallery, I wish for something else to challenge my interest somehow. Of course shows could be designed or curated in such a way to address a certain idea all in tapestry, but likely that wouldn't be your general-entry sort of experience.

All I'm really saying is that I think tapestry artists need to broaden their horizons. Let's enter shows about something and that likely contain various art media. Lets put our work out there where artists working in other mediums will see it. Where curators and dealers will notice it and say, "Hey, I didn't know anyone wove tapestry anymore. This is good!"

And if we continue tapestry-only shows, let's consider loosening the guidelines a little bit. Who cares if the warp shows? Isn't the idea the piece is expressing more important than that it follow a particular definition of tapestry? Let's be more human and open up conversations about what we make.

But above all, let's keep making things. Maybe we'll even win a major award!

Still love yarn? What color is that anyway?

Last week I told you about the Tapestry Answers class I'm teaching at YarnFest 2016. I am teaching two other classes there.

On Saturday of YarnFest I'm teaching a color class. It is called Simultaneous Contrast: What Color is that Anyway?  Look HERE and scroll all the way to the bottom. The Weaving classes are last, but we're the best!

Don't be too afraid of that color theory language ("simultaneous contrast"). What it means in reality is that every color influences the colors around it. We are going to play with that fact using yarn and tapestry! Color use is something that often stumps fiber artists. I'm not sure if that is because our color comes in the form of yarn so we can't modify the color or because we just don't have enough experience mixing colors. We are going to use both paper and yarn to learn to mix colors more effectively. We'll look at the amazing things that happen to colors when they are placed beside other colors. And hopefully we'll learn to make better color choices for our tapestry weaving.

What: Interweave YarnFest 2016
Where: Loveland, Colorado
When: March 31 - April 3, 2016
Why: Because we love tapestry weaving! (And also, we love yarn. And there is a whole lot of yarn at YarnFest.)

This is the class description:

Tapestry is a weft-faced weave and so we do get to work with solid blocks of color. Knowledge of color theory can be very helpful when learning to shift colors next to each other in different directions. This class will play with that concept using both paper and woven examples. We will learn how to make adjacent colors look warmer or cooler and how to shift the look of a color based on what is next to it.

This class doesn't require much weaving experience. You should have a little experience weaving tapestry, but the skills needed to weave colors next to each other are something anyone who has done a bit of tapestry technique can handle.

Hint: The red-violet squares are the same

I wrote about the Tapestry Answers class HERE last week and next week I'll talk about the class I'm giving Sunday morning. It is one we all should take, me included.

DIY the heck out of it. For the love of tapestry weaving.

Why exactly is it that we weave tapestry anyway?

I've thought about this a lot lately given that most of my life is spent in pursuit of excellence in this art form. And really, we'd like to think what we devote our lives to matters in some way.

I think that making things does matter. Humanity has a certain drive to use our hands, to fiddle with objects and create something new out of bits of this and that. My long career as an occupational therapist, a career based on improving function through meaningful doing, taught me that health is intimately linked to doing things that are meaningful to us. It is a profound lesson in health and happiness. People who are able to do things that are important to them are healthier and happier than people who don't. That isn't just something they tell you in OT school. It is true.

Tapestry is one of the fiber arts that allow the yarn fanatics among us to use a treasured material to express something in images. Image-making is something humans have been doing possibly since before we were homo sapiens sapiens. The earliest scraps of tapestry-woven fabric found in the archaeological record were quite sophisticated, indicating long practice. We can be sure that humans have been weaving tapestry for tens of thousands of years. How cool is that?

Making things is something integral to the human psyche. I think that is why we weave tapestry. We do it because we love it. It feels good to make something. It feels even better to make something beautiful or shocking or that expresses something that is important to us.

So if we make tapestry because we love it, why are we so serious about it for heavens sake?
Some of you (especially the younger among you) probably have no idea what I mean by that. But those of you who have decades of tapestry weaving experience know.
Tapestry is serious business. Right? Don't we learn the rules at great cost? Isn't there WORK involved? Effort? Long hours of practice with expensive tools? Aren't there definitions of what tapestry is? And a fear that if we make something that doesn't follow those definitions then our work isn't worthy?

Yep. There is. But I think if we do it for love, it has to be enjoyable also.
So let's lighten up. If I want to use a 12/6 warp at 8 ends per inch by golly, I think I should be able to do that without feeling like I'm doing something wrong! (See my last post about warp HERE.)

And so should you. Learn how it works. Take a workshop. Try out different materials. Just because I tell you that knitting yarn is a poor material for tapestry doesn't mean you have to listen to me. Try the knitting yarn for goodness sake. Especially if it is the only green yarn you have at home and you have to have green yarn right now for the tree you are weaving that needs to go into the tapestry about your daughter's first birthday. Just do it. If it doesn't work out, you'll know soon enough.

Of course I think good materials are important. If you use better materials, you'll have a better outcome and you'll be more likely to make a second tapestry. And good technique is also important. If you make something that falls apart when someone breathes on it, that isn't so wonderful. But the love of it is primary. And we learn by doing.

So go out there and weave some tapestry. I can't wait to see what you make!

Tapestry warp: what would you choose?

I did a little experiment a few months ago and wanted to show you the results. I wove these four little samples on a Hokett loom. Speed of warping is a big advantage when you're making samples. Hokett looms are warped in a flash.

I wove these samples with the same weft at 8 ends per inch. The warp was different for each. All four warps were cotton seine twine made by Bockens. The sizes are woven into the samples. 12/15 is the fattest, 12/9, 12/6, and 20/6 is the thinnest. They also make a 12/12 warp which falls between the 12/15 and the 12/9. I didn't have any at the time.

I wove these because my normal weaving practice of 8 to 10 epi with a 12/6 warp doesn't fit the parameters often given for warp and weft sizes. I'd like to suggest that there is a much wider range of possibilities than has been taught in all the basic tapestry texts.

There are many guidelines for figuring out what warp to use. One such authority is Archie Brennan and THIS article on the American Tapestry Alliance website is used a lot.

Archie is certainly correct that the space between the warps is very important. My argument is that when you change that space, you get different effects in your weaving. Most tapestry weavers that I know work closer to the 12/15 side of things. You can see fairly clearly in my photo that the warp ribs in the 12/15 sample are very prominent. We'd expect this from a fat warp. The warp I use the most at this sett is the 12/6. The warp ribs are much less prominent and the surface of the tapestries is smoother. This is something that I like in my work. I also use a weft yarn that is slightly fuzzy and it gives the surface a bit of a bloom. Those bits of fiber further smooth the surface so the warp ribs are not visible unless you're looking very closely.

What warp you decide to use depends a great deal on the sort of image you want to make. A lot of the imagery in my work is created in a very horizontal direction. If you're trying to create crisp shapes that have a lot of verticality, then perhaps you do want to use a fatter warp. If we narrow that space between the warps as we do with a fatter warp, we can get a quicker change in color between two shapes.

I will, at some point, do this experiment again on a larger loom and shift the diameter of the weft used on each warp. There are many variables and if you use a thinner weft you have to weave a lot more, but you get subtler horizontal shapes.

What materials you use depends on what you want to create after all...
(you don't have to follow "the rules")