Tapestry Diary, Tapestry Weaving
Rebecca Mezoff
Practicing color: a free mini-course

Every year I run a class I call Summer of Tapestry. It revolves around a practice I’ve had for many years of bringing a small loom with me when I’m hiking or traveling and weaving something about what I experienced or saw. I call the practice sketch tapestry because my goal is to capture something interesting about the experience, not to replicate what I saw in a realistic way.

I find that the practice of really looking at something and then weaving about it makes me pay attention instead of just rushing blindly through the experience and more generally, my life. The inspirations I’ve woven something about are things that I remember months and years later.

Practicing color: a free mini-course

Choosing weft colors for tapestry weaving: Overcoming choice paralysis!

Choosing weft colors for tapestry weaving: Overcoming choice paralysis!

I was chatting with an online student this week about what colors she needs to jump into the Warp and Weft course. Choosing colors can feel pretty daunting especially if you haven’t worked with color a lot. And color use in tapestry weaving differs from other art mediums because of the nature of the material (yarn) and the structure of the weaving.

When you’re new to tapestry and faced with so many color choices, how do you pick those first yarns and how many do you need? A commercial yarn line might have 60 colors or it might have 400. Both of those can feel overwhelming.

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Questions from the book: How tight should my warp be?

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Questions from the book: How tight should my warp be?

I am frequently asked this question by readers of my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving, and by students in my online classes. The best way to really know how tight the warp should be is to feel the warps of experienced tapestry weavers. But if you aren’t able to come to an in-person workshop or retreat any time soon, the video and discussion below will help you figure out what the right warp tension is for you.

When I got my first Mirrix loom I was thrilled with how tight I could make the tension. The looms come with a little wrench that you can use to tighten the wing nuts beyond what you can do with just your hands. I use a cotton seine twine warp which is very strong and can take a huge amount of tension. So I’d tighten that Mirrix warp very very tight. It was far tighter than I can get the tension on my beefy rug loom.

Sometimes distractions come in the form of kisses

Sometimes distractions come in the form of kisses

So then this happened.

We are dog people. We haven’t had a dog in 9 years and it was time. Emily and I have always had large dogs but when we took care of a friend’s dachshund/corgi mix for a year, we realized how fun small dogs can be. They’re sure easy to bring with you. So we started looking for miniature dachshunds and these two came home this month.

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"Wow, I was scared but this was very easy."

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"Wow, I was scared but this was very easy."

C wrote this in response to a question about how their first warping went on a small tapestry loom. It made me think back to my first tapestry warping and how I felt exactly the same way.

I was warping a very large frame in Navajo-style from a book. The loom was given to me by my grandparents. My grandfather made it. But I was on an occupational therapy travel assignment in Seattle and my grandmother, the only person I knew who had any experience with this sort of warping, was 1300 miles away and unable to help. I managed the warping using one of Noel Bennett’s books, but it wasn’t pretty.

The Tapestry Discovery Box evolving community

The Tapestry Discovery Box evolving community

Over the last couple years I’ve been fortunate to find such a connection in Gist Yarn. This small yarn company based in Boston is all about yarn, weaving, and making connections among people. They’re operating principles include supporting diversity and sourcing their raw materials locally.

The Tapestry Discovery Box is a collaboration I’ve been working on with Gist for the last year. The first box went live in January. The boxes include Array tapestry yarn and a new course with a project from me shipped out every quarter. . . .

We’ve had so much fun in the first two boxes. Below are some of the work the participants have been creating.

The first box was about Openings. My example tapestry was of a door and window, but people interpreted the theme in many different ways. The technique we were playing with was weft bundling. I was amazed at the different color effects people got with the very same set of yarns.

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A fleece followed me home... wool fumes overwhelmed me

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A fleece followed me home... wool fumes overwhelmed me

Last week I took a two-day workshop with Maggie Casey as part of the Estes Park Wool Market. All in all I spent four days up in Estes Park immersed in wool, sheep, yarn, and making. By Sunday afternoon I found myself driving down Big Thompson canyon with a huge smile on my face, wool fumes from the four fleeces in the backseat wafting around me. Even dodging the tourists stopped in the middle of the narrow, winding, road to look at bighorn sheep didn’t penetrate the wool bliss.

I love diving into materials. And wool is a material that can do so much. I didn’t know this until I learned to spin.

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Steaming small tapestries: Questions from The Art of Tapestry Weaving

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Steaming small tapestries: Questions from The Art of Tapestry Weaving

What do you do after your tapestry comes off the loom? There are many ways to finish a tapestry, but my favorite thing to do is steam it.

The finishing chapter in my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving, talks about using steam as the final finishing of a tapestry (see page 265). Recently, students in a couple different online classes have asked me for a video showing how I do this, and so this blog post was born..