Your summer adventure kit | Tapestry looms, tools, and materials

Your summer adventure kit | Tapestry looms, tools, and materials

This week on Change the Shed I talked about my travel tapestry kit. I’ve definitely talked about this before on Change the Shed as well as on the blog, but since many of you here are new to my summer shenanigans, here is what I’m currently using for the kit I take with me when I leave the studio.

I do have different items in the kit depending on what I’m doing. If I’m backpacking, I’m bringing a kit that is hopefully less than 8 ounces and includes a Turkish spindle and flick carder. If I’m traveling by car, I might have significantly more gear and larger looms with me depending on how much time I’ll have to weave.

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Summer of Tapestry free mini-course

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Summer of Tapestry 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 now of bringing a small loom with me when I’m hiking or traveling and weaving something about what I experienced or saw. I often call the practice sketch tapestry because my goal is to capture something interesting about the experience, not to replicate whatever it was necessarily in any 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 life. The inspirations I’ve woven something about are things that I remember months and years later.

I’ve linked many of these sorts of tapestries on my blog over the years and you can find some of these stories under the tapestry diary category. The concept is simple. It is a way of paying attention to something in my experience that caught my eye or had some sort of meaning. Making a tiny piece of art about it allows me more time to sink into the experience and I find that I remember the things I wove about clearly in the future.

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Tilting warping bar on a continuously warped loom like a Mirrix | Questions from The Art of Tapestry Weaving

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Tilting warping bar on a continuously warped loom like a Mirrix | Questions from The Art of Tapestry Weaving

Many of us like to use tapestry looms or frames with continuous warping. This usually means that you have some kind of warping bar that revolves with the warp around the loom. This way of warping is helpful because you can weave something a lot longer than your loom is tall. But one problem I see on any loom with continuous warping is that the warping bar can become tilted as you’re weaving. If you don’t notice this problem, it can have consequences for how square your tapestry is. It is easy to miss the tilt as it starts happening because we tend to weave with something between the layers of warp. That makes weaving easier visually, but it also hides the bar from our immediate view.

Both the classic Mirrix looms and the Schacht Arras tapestry loom have this kind of continuous warping with a warping bar. You can also do it on any pipe loom. In the video below I demonstrate the problem and talk about how to fix it.

Wedge Weave fun

Wedge Weave fun

The sixth Tapestry Discovery Box opens April 15, 2024 and it is all about wedge weave. I’ve admired contemporary wedge weavers for a long time. It has become a popular technique and I often see wedge weaves in art shows.

The technique is an eccentric tapestry weaving technique and in that sense it has been used all over the world for as long as weaving has existed. The use of wedge weave where the technique patterns a whole textile, however, is most often seen in Diné (Navajo) weaving. It was a popular style from 1870-1900 when it disappeared from use for a century or more. It is said that tourists didn’t like the scalloped edges this weaving technique creates and the weavers stopped making them around 1900.

Troubleshooting, Part 2

Troubleshooting, Part 2

I started putting together a list of resources from my past blog posts and newsletters of the things that I see give tapestry weavers the most trouble. I wrote the first blog post about this February 22, 2024 and realized there was at least one more blog post worth of things high on the list of most-frustrating.

In the February 22 post I covered these things:

  • weft tension

  • choosing yarn

  • getting the last warp tight on a continuous warp

  • design and getting the effects you want

Let’s add a few more to the list.