Tapestry Weaving

A week teaching in Taos and a return home in the snow

A week teaching in Taos and a return home in the snow

The week before last I was back in Taos teaching at Mabel Dodge Luhan House. We had a lovely week of tapestry weaving with a group of alumni, most of whom come back every year.

This retreat focuses on the design questions of the participants. This year I added another component and some of us looked at how to make vertical forms or lines in tapestry. Some of the participants used these ideas in their tapestries or samples for tapestries.

Making vertical forms in tapestry weaving is a challenge because we’re working on a grid and all vertically-oriented shapes have to go against that grid to build upward. That means that tapestry has a very stepped appearance. This is the nature of this art form and in a lot of cases I encourage students to embrace that.

But most of the time we want to make a stable textile and so all the regular factors of technique and materials come into play when weaving vertically oriented forms. During the retreat we talked about using techniques like double weft interlock, various other joins, sewing slits, using slits to suggest vertical lines, and other means of making marks that read as vertical lines.

I live here now

I live here now

It seems like most of 2023 has been devoted to looking for a new place to live and at long last, moving. My hope is to feel all settled in by the end of the year and feel some stability again. Moving is a royal pain. Our realtor said it best. “Moving sucks no matter what.” But it will eventually be done and we have new views and ideas to embrace.

I am most interested to see how this new perspective influences my art-making. This place is rural and very quiet. It is near Mesa Verde National Park which is a dark skies park and the skies are indeed very dark. Sometimes the Milky Way is so bright I have difficulty picking out the constellations at all. I am grateful to have landed in such a beautiful place with such plentiful access to the outdoors and far fewer people than the Front Range of Colorado.

Weaving shapes versus weaving line-by-line

Weaving shapes versus weaving line-by-line

Some of you will be surprised that tapestry weavers weave a line at a time at all! There are reasons to weave this way and I spend a fair amount of my own weaving time using this method.

How do you know whether you should weave a shape at a time or line by line? There are reasons for both and the truth is that you’re probably going to use both methods depending on your design and the equipment you’re using.

This is the topic of the Tapestry Discovery Box which opened on October 15th. The box is a collaboration between myself and Gist Yarn. Gist produces a lovely tapestry yarn called Array and every quarter they’ll send you 7 new colors of this yarn chosen by me along with access to an online course which uses the yarns to address a few tapestry techniques.

Taos Wools Festival 2023

Taos Wools Festival 2023

I had a wonderful time in Taos last week. The three-day Tapestry in Taos workshop focused on using churro yarn hand-dyed by Taos Wools to depict something about our environment there. I had a committed group of students and we enjoyed being near the center of town at Revolt Gallery.

Driving into Taos the night before the workshop, it was raining hard and then the rainbow pictured at the top of the post appeared over Taos Pueblo. It seemed a good omen for the week since we were weaving about the Taos area.

A race to the moving truck...

A race to the moving truck...

I’ve been racing to get small tapestries off looms. I said on Change the Shed that I was clearing off looms. That wasn’t a lie, but the reason I am cutting tapestries off looms is that I have to move them. It seems smarter to finish tapestries and cut them off the loom than try to protect them in progress. Thus the cutting off of five tapestries last month with one more to do.

The moving truck(s) are coming and all must be packed. We have lived in Fort Collins for over nine years now and I lived here for three years when I was here for graduate school. It is time to move away from the Front Range of Colorado. Fort Collins is a beautiful place and an easy place to live, but we’re tired of driving through the traffic of I-25 every time we want to see friends and family all of whom seem to live on the other side of the big cities.

So we’re packing up and moving on. I’ll have more details about all of it in a few weeks when the dust has settled. Packing is no picnic and the dogs seem to be perpetually worried they’re going to end up in one of the boxes. The new studio is full of sunshine and has room for me to work.

Back to Taos!!

Back to Taos!!

Taos calls me back again and again. I lived near there for most of a decade and never tired of visiting and hiking nearby. I now teach there several times a year and next week I get to go back again! I’m teaching for Taos Wools Festival which happens October 6 and 7. My class is earlier in the week (I might be able to sneak one more person in if you want to come!).

Taos Wools Festival is a brand new festival.

There are no tapestry police: Sarah Swett and Rebecca talk tapestry

There are no tapestry police: Sarah Swett and Rebecca talk tapestry

Sarah Swett and I had a fun time talking to all of you on YouTube as we discussed tapestry weaving, Fringeless four-selvedge warping, and not nearly enough about our dogs, though we were reminded to bring them into the mix! The recording of the chat is below and I’ve included some “show notes” below that.

Spending time with people who are deeply passionate about making, materials, and playing with ideas is invigorating to me and that is why people like Sarah are part of my world. We talked about many things mostly in the realm of tapestry weaving. We talked about the value of limitations and how important playing is to learning and growing.

Part of my mission in teaching tapestry weaving is to remind people that though this is an art tradition with a lot of history behind it, there are no tapestry police. You can make whatever artwork you want and utilize any fiber techniques you want to get there. Sarah is a fantastic idea of someone who uses the techniques of tapestry to experiment with all sorts of fiber ideas. Enjoy the chat and if you want to join the class which is full of more Sarah wisdom with some nuggets from me as well, there is a discount code in the video that is good a bit longer for 20% off.