It is no secret that I love my tapestry forks/beaters with metal tines. Many people make them with dog combs. The metal tines slide through the warp easily and if the handles are shaped well, they provide a nice snap for work on tapestries large or small.
Over the years I’ve purchased many tapestry forks from Magpie Woodworks, Thomas Creations (Threads Thru Time), and Timber and Twine. These are beautiful hand-crafted tools and every tapestry weaver should have at least one of these in their toolbox.
But I have had so many students who were unable to get one of these forks or had to wait many months just because when a tool is hand-made one at a time, it takes a long time to produce them and more people want them than can get them.
Jilly Edwards is an artist working in woven tapestry from the UK. She currently maintains a studio in Bristol. I was able to interview her for my online course, Design Solutions for the Artist/Weaver, Season 2 this spring. Jilly is an inspiring artist who is keen to share her knowledge and work with the rest of the tapestry world. I spoke with her for several hours and as always when I write or talk to Jilly, I felt like I’d just had a heart to heart with the dearest of friends.
Tommye Scanlin has published two books in the last year. Her first book, The Nature of Things, is a memoir about her life and work as a tapestry weaver. I reviewed that book HERE. Her second book, Tapestry Design Basics and Beyond, has just been released by Schiffer Publishing (June 2021).
The word fear in relation to tapestry design has come up a lot lately both in the Design Solutions course and in my own work. I’m stuck and have been for a long time. I thought I was unstuck, but still I haven’t started. There is a warp on the loom and a room full of dyed yarn waiting, but the final design decision is something I keep walking away from.
Partly I keep having new ideas. Since ideas are endless, this could mean the tapestry never gets started, so at some point I have to just settle on one of them. The rest of it is just some unfounded worry about it not being good enough!
A very common struggle among newer tapestry weavers is to keep the weaving square. This is all about weft tension or how much weft is going into your tapestry at any one time. Too much weft and the piece will get wider, too little and it’ll get narrower. I find that most students have more trouble with the tapestry getting narrower as they work. The changes can be subtle! It is easy to weave a whole piece not realizing that over the course of it you’ve drawn in a half an inch or more. The only fool-proof way I’ve found to make sure this isn’t happening is to make myself measure the width of the tapestry frequently.
Many of you are now working through my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving, and I’ve been answering some of your questions here on the blog. One recent question from Zach was about how much warp you need to leave for various finishing techniques on the Mirrix Saffron loom. This question got me thinking about loom length and the video below was the result.
Loom length is something that I don’t hear tapestry instructors talking about a lot. Those of us who have been weaving for a long time intuitively understand the limitations of a short warp. But for new weavers, it isn’t something you’d automatically think about.
The question that no tapestry techniques book I’ve ever seen (including mine) addresses is how much weft yarn do you need for a tapestry. Frustrating, right? If you don’t have a yarn stash, how do you know how much to buy?
If you owned a yarn store, you might just grab an extra skein if you ran out and not worry about it. But most of us do not own our own endless yarn supply. We want to make sure we won’t run short but we also don’t want piles of a color we may never use again.
Tapestry weaving has a different structure than other weaving and so the amount of yarn you need is a bit different that if you were weaving a scarf on a rigid heddle loom. However, some of the methods of estimating amounts are similar. There are several approaches you could take to figure out how much weft yarn you need. Warp needs are easier to calculate and I’ll address that at the end of the post.
In my continuing series, Questions From The Book, I’m answering questions that come from readers of my newest book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving.
I have spent some time playing with a tapestry technique called pick and pick lately. This technique is a powerful one in the tapestry toolbox because it allows stripes to climb up the warp.
Weaving is the creation of cloth on a gridded structure created by the warp and weft. In tapestry, making horizontal lines in the direction of the weft traveling from side to side across the warp is easy. Making lines that travel in the same direction of the warp is more difficult.* Pick and pick is a fun technique because we get to play with creating forms and color effects in the warp-wise direction.
The video below demonstrates weaving pick and pick and I give a few tips for making things work out neatly and for catching mistakes. The two Change the Shed episodes I refer to in the video are HERE and HERE.
