I’m back to weaving on my favorite loom. I had a few ideas for tapestries while hiking the 500-mile Colorado Trail last summer and one of them is taking shape on the Harrisville Rug Loom.
In the spirit of curiosity and adventurousness that the Colorado Trail hike only strengthened, I am doing some experimenting with this tapestry. Perhaps not drastically so since the forms I like to weave are clearly present. I’m just using different materials than I usually do. It is the first time I’ve ever woven a large tapestry with yarn that I didn’t dye myself.*
For the last 15 years of my tapestry weaving career, on large tapestries I have used Harrisville Koehler Singles or Harrisville Highland dyed by me. That allows me to make the gradations I love and to make virtually any color I can think up. In this tapestry I’m using 100% commercially dyed yarns. I have found that a little shocking sometimes. For example, the photo below where I’m adding the Daffodil color on top of Indigo was one such moment. I would probably never dye this bright yellow color, but there is it. It is an experiment and I’m withholding judgement until it is all finished. If I don’t like it, the sheep are making more wool right now.
The materials I’m using in these pictures are:
White bundle is Faro from Borgs with one strand of undyed 20/2 silk from Treenway
The major color areas are Gist Yarn’s new wool tapestry yarn, Array
The outlines are weaversbazaar 18/2 wool
I did do some sampling for this tapestry. I wanted to get a better feel for the Array yarn in larger areas as previously I had only woven very small pieces with it and I wanted to test out some ideas around using white for the background.
Sample for the wildflower tapestry. Here you can see some of the techniques as well as the silk mixed with the bleached white Faro wool. This is woven from the back.
Sample for the wildflower tapestry. Here I’m comparing the bleached white Faro to unbleached Harrisville Koehler singles. I liked them both but went with the bleached white.
The image below shows the whole sample and how I tag things I want to remember. Tagging samples is important because even though I think I’ll remember what I did three days hence, I will not. In the sample, I played with which direction to grade the colors and with a few different yarns (the two colored bands to the left are Harrisville Koehler singles and the hatching below that is one strand of variegated Treenway silk mixed with Faro).
The whole sample for the wildflower tapestry. Some of the ideas I tried here were rejected at least for this tapestry.
The tapestry is about the joy and wild colors of many of the flowers I saw on my long hike. As I was designing it, I looked through my flower photos and used Photoshop to extract the colors directly from the images and place them in a grid. From those I chose the colors for the tapestry from Gist Yarn’s new Array tapestry yarn line. So instead of dyeing the colors from the photographs, I relied on someone else’s choices. I wanted to stick with all one kind of yarn for the flower colors, so the colors that Array comes in currently were my choices. Sometimes limitations are helpful because instead of spending two weeks in the dye studio trying to get the “perfect” colors, I opened the box of yarn, did a sample, and started the tapestry.
The flowers on the trail were astounding as Colorado got an unusual amount of rain in June and July this year. These were some of the inspiration for this tapestry.
Colorado wildflower
Colorado wildflower
As I’m weaving on my floor looms with horizontal warps (I use a Harrisville Rug Loom and a 40 inch Macomber), I use the reed to watch my weft tension. I talked about this in one of the Change the Shed episodes about this tapestry also. The warps should be traveling straight from the back beam to the front beam through the heddles and then the reed. The reed is the little metal bars you see in the photo below. I can pull the beater toward the fell line and judge whether my weft tension is consistent across the tapestry. If the warps are hugging the inside of the reed or even being distorted, I know that I’m not putting enough weft into the weaving. You can see in the photo below that my tendency so far on this piece is toward not enough weft as the warps are hugging the inside of each dent at the edge.
If the warps are toward the outside of the dent in the reed or are being distorted in the other direction, then I know I’m putting too much weft into that area and I need to back off. This tool which is part of these looms I love, is really helpful if you want a fabric that is flat and square (that is NOT the goal of everyone, so don’t think it has to be yours if you’re new to tapestry weaving). Some upright tapestry looms also have reeds which can serve the same purpose.
The reed on my Harrisville Rug Loom helps me judge whether my weft tension is consistent and thus whether my tapestry is going to draw in or get wider.
If you want to see me weaving on this piece, take a look at the Change the Shed episodes starting in November of 2021. I’ll be working on it probably through January so you can see the progress as it happens. You can find descriptions of what is in each episode on my website here: https://rebeccamezoff.com/change-the-shed
I just updated that page and divided the episodes up by dates so the list isn’t so overwhelming. Go to the end of 2021 for those latest episodes and links to the replay video. You can always join me live on YouTube. The schedule is on that page linked above. I usually do them on Wednesdays at 10:30 am Mountain, but will occasionally be holding one in the evening in the USA in 2022 so that people in Australia and New Zealand can attend live as well as people who work during the day.
*I was trying to think back to my first tapestries and whether this was actually true. I wove tapestries in the Fiber Arts program at Northern NM College with commercially dyed yarn, but even my saltillo for that program was with hand-dyed churro and natural colors. I believe every non-Rio Grande tapestry I have woven was hand-dyed. The dye class I had at NNMC made the difference. It was a semester-long class with Leslie King and was probably the most useful college class I’ve ever had in terms of my life now.
The tapestry below is called The Hours. I think I named it such because it is full of those little hourglasses. They are really fun to weave in Rio Grande-style (where the wefts all move in the same direction). I wove this at NNMC where Karen Martinez was my instructor.