Sarah Swett and I made a class about a particular warping technique six years ago now. Monday we did a live chat on YouTube to talk about our experience with Fringeless, answer your questions, and talk about the tapestry life.

I have to say that hanging out with Sarah and making goofy videos (along with lots of serious ones) was a lot of fun then and clearly it is still fun now. I think the photo below clearly indicates the difference in our knitting abilities and probably also our weaving abilities. All tapestries in those photos are by Sarah and she wore gorgeous hand-knitted sweaters which she designed on every day we shot the class. I was apparently wearing a cheap cotton sweater from Eddie Bauer which is still in my closet.

We answered a lot of questions about four-selvedge warping including why you might want to do it and how we both use the practice. And if you want to see the misspelling of crotchety, I recommend watching the whole video as Sarah shows us her current work in progress. I hope you enjoy the video!

I have had my work at Taos Wools in Arroyo Seco for much of this year now and three pieces have sold this fall. Both of the Inscription pieces went home with new owners and Emergence VII went to one of my long-time students.

Below is a photo of Inscription I as I was packaging it up to bring to the gallery in Taos earlier this year. This tapestry was about words and about losing them a piece at a time. I really enjoyed the color gradation and that bright pink. The yarns are hand-dyed by me. The ideas here came from the work of Anni Albers and it is something I’d like to return to in future.

September has been a marvelously creative month for me and that is largely because two of my dearest tapestry colleagues came to visit a week apart. Cornelia Theimer Gardella was here for a week-long joint residency and then Sarah Swett and her adventurous dog Beryl stopped for several nights.

Having fiber friends is important and these visits remind me why that is. Both Cornelia and Sarah have had a big influence in my own tapestry life. I met Cornelia 20 years ago at Northern New Mexico Community College where we were both students in the fiber arts program. And I got to know Sarah through a little fan-girl following and then an American Tapestry Alliance retreat in Colorado almost ten years ago now. She wrote the forward to my book, The Art of Tapestry Weaving.

Some time before my class at Harrisville Designs in New Hampshire, one of the students in the class, Kerri Keeler, emailed me that she knew about a tapestry just a few miles from our workshop that we should visit. She offered to take care of the logistics and I told her if she could set it up, I would be happy to encourage the group to go.

So Wednesday night during our color retreat, we caravanned to Peter Pap Oriental Rugs to see the lost Frida Hansen tapestry, Sørover.

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.