Blog
In July I took a road trip.
To Indiana.
It wasn’t really planned but an opportunity came up for my wife and we decided to drive. I admit that I wasn’t looking forward to the part of the drive between the last of the Colorado Rockies and our friend’s swimming pool,* but it turned out to be just fine! Nebraska and Iowa are surprisingly beautiful and I had some fun with my little loom along the way.
I started a four-selvedge tapestry with the word Notice in it sometime long enough ago that I can’t place the circumstances… but fortunately I know I wove it on Change the Shed and I have a whole archive of them with thumbnails to help me find what I was weaving in any particular episode. If you want to find something interesting to watch, you can access those archives HERE.
The copper pipe loom has been hiding under my Harrisville rug loom for awhile now. Seeing the current state of my studio, you can understand why it has gone unnoticed for some time.
I’ve spent the last three Mondays taking a natural dye class at Bluebird Dye Gardens with Laurie Hall. The class was specifically about shibori and we practiced various forms of it. It was wildly fun and I’d do the whole thing over in a heartbeat. We spent some time in her huge dye garden to get a feel for the work that goes into producing those marvelous dye plants. It also just gave us a moment to get our hands in the dirt. Laurie grows a wide variety of flowers and has a healthy madder bed.
If it isn’t obvious, I think it is definitely true that natural dyeing is far more complicated than the synthetic dyeing I do in my work. There are so many details with natural dyeing and things change with every plant and fiber being dyed. This post is full of pictures and I don’t even know all the names of the dye plants much less the details about the chemistry.
How many years have we been using Mirrix looms now? For me it has been at least 15 and for some of you it has been much longer! A classic Mirrix loom is a really fancy pipe loom. These looms are sturdy and they hold as tight a tension as you want them to. They have a shedding device and you can swap out the spacing spring at the top of the loom to help you create different setts easily.
Did you know you can replace the bottom spring in an active warp when you start a new tapestry?
The good news is that you’re not doing anything wrong!
“My sheds are all messed up again! What am I doing wrong?!”
Does that sound familiar? The good news is that you’re not doing anything wrong! Shedding problems in tapestry weaving will always happen. Isn’t that a relief to know?
The other good news is that there are a handful of ways to fix shedding problems and once you understand what those are and when to use them, you can fix your shedding problems quickly and easily. Because the not as good news is, they’ll ALWAYS happen. There is no way you can plan your way out of shedding issues for an entire tapestry, so let’s just start by accepting that they will happen and that we have to know how to fix them.
In tapestry, we often want a very particular color. In the video below I talk about the example of finding a skin tone for a tiny piece of a tapestry I’m weaving on Change the Shed.* It turns out, skin tones are tricky!**
Color or sample cards can be useful for finding the colors you’re looking for in any commercial yarn. …
As tapestry weavers we have the advantage of being able to blend colors to get the hue or effect we want. I show this in a small way in the video here. It is quite astounding what can be done with weft bundling and color in terms of changing the hue you see when thin wefts are mixed together in the bundle. Of course a working knowledge of color theory can help you know what to put together to shift a hue in the direction you want to go.***
This question used to really bother me but now I love it because it gives me an opportunity to think about why I weave tapestry at all. The answer also relates to almost everything else I do for fun: knitting, drawing, birding, hiking, reading…
For me weaving my tapestry diary or sketch tapestries is all about the process. My tiny tapestry diary or sketch tapestry pieces are often just 2-4 inches and they’re too small to hang on the wall without being mounted. It is about slowing down, paying attention, and making something with my hands. I’m the same with knitting. I have piles of shawls I’ve knit because I love the process. I can’t possibly wear them all so sometimes I give them away, but the making of them is all that I really care about.
