Little Booboos and Big Lessons

I am working on a small tapestry sampler, loosely following the Joanne Mattera's book Navajo Techniques for Today's Weaver.  This was published in 1975 and has really good diagrams and explanations.  I have actually attempted this twice before.

There were some issues with the color.  I bought some single ply naturally dyed churro. I  thought it would be perfect but the colors were too muted.  Blah.

I tried again with some random yarns from an estate sale of a talented tapestry weaver.  Maybe a little of Martha's magic would be present.

Much better contrast as evidenced by the black and white photo below.  This is a tip learned from Tommye Scanlon.  During the class in Raleigh she had us use our phones to take pictures of yarn we were choosing for tapestry.

Very basic design concepts like value, contrast and hue are not easily understood by me.  This visual helps.

I played with meet and separate, slits, shading, wedge weave and lazy lines.  But wait...

Do you see it?  As I built the areas up separately for eccentric weft I lost track of my "overs and unders".  The two adjacent warp threads in the aqua and purple are going through the same shed.

No worries this is a play learning warp and I am going to keep playing and learning.

Tapestry, Ikat and Inspiration

The three day tapestry workshop is over, so thankful to have had this opportunity to learn from Tommye.  Today, at lunch this was the state of my tapestry.

I learned so much.  One of the problems with telling yourself you have no drawing or artistic ability at a very early age is you are never exposed to basic concepts.  Tommye took us through basics on color and how to judge light, medium and dark values.   She also covered basic design elements and principles.  Tommye does a tapestry diary every year.  Below is 2015.

It is hard to see the beauty of this in a photo.  Tommye is inspired by the things in her landscape in Georgia, black walnuts, pecans, gingko leaves and many more.

This is Mary Kirchner.  She was the class organizer and assistant.  Mary is also a  talented   artist weaver with a studio in Artspace.  Below are some shots of her  work.

Mary specializes in ikat.



Mary's ikat board with dyeing work in progress.  The yellow you see is a section of yarn taped off so it will not absorb any dye.

The yarns are dyed and numbered to be woven in a sequence to achieve outstanding and dramatic results.