Tapestry Weaving

Hot Flash: a tapestry

Hot Flash: a tapestry

It might be that we don’t talk about peri-menopause enough. I don’t know. I won’t belabor it, but I do think it can make a hilarious subject for a tapestry.

(A whole bunch of people just clicked away, didn’t they! I bet those of you left are over 40 and female… thanks to you my sisters).

In one of the Q&As I did for the Design Solutions class I was talking about the work of Pat Williams and how much I love it even though it is so different from my own work. And then I thought, why not? There isn’t any reason I can’t weave something funny and graphic.

I tend to do a lot of playing around with my tapestry diary/sketch tapestry practice. I figured that I could try a design like this, call it part of my tapestry diary which totally takes away any feeling that it has to be any “good”, and I’d see what happened. Then I decided I wanted to weave it larger and enter it in the American Tapestry Alliance’s Unjuried Small Format show, Renditions. So a 10 x 10 inch design was born.

Yarn adventures in Tacoma: teaching, Clara Parkes, and all the other bright stars here...

Yarn adventures in Tacoma: teaching, Clara Parkes, and all the other bright stars here...

I was thrilled to be able to teach at the first annual Red Alder Fiber Arts Retreat in Tacoma last week. I had a great time and thought you, dear reader, might like to see what happened at this conference.

I’ll start with the workshops I taught. The students were so much fun. I am not sure if this is a Pacific Northwest thing or if this particular show (which was Madrona until this year) just brings in people who are easy-going and eager to learn, but my classes were full of such bright souls. I taught Is Tapestry for Me? which was a 2-day beginning tapestry class. And I taught a one-day color class where we played with optical mixing.

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A France adventure: the tapestries of Dom Robert

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A France adventure: the tapestries of Dom Robert

On my tapestry tour with Cresside Collette in France last May, we visited the Museé Dom Robert in Soréze. I posted a video with some thoughts about this visit to Albi, Soréze, and the museum in THIS post from June of 2019. I’d like to show you more of the photos that I took of Dom Robert’s tapestries.

Guy de Chaunac Lanzac, otherwise known as Dom Robert, lived from 1907 to 1997. In 1930 he entered a Benedictine abbey as Brother Robert and became a priest in 1937 and was ordained as Dom Robert.

In 1941 he met Jean Lurcat who inspired Dom Robert to become a tapestry cartoon designer. His tapestries were woven primarily by Tabard and Suzanne Goubely in Aubusson. Though tapestry weavers in the USA might be disappointed to realize that these large-scale tapestries were not woven by the same person who designed them, this is common practice elsewhere in the world even today. Dom Robert was a tapestry cartoon designer, not necessarily a weaver. He clearly understood weaving techniques and his cartoons seem very approachable to me as a tapestry weaver.

His work includes 150 cartoons, mostly woven in Aubusson. Numerous copies of his cartoons were often made and most are in private collections.

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Habits not resolutions: Weave every day.

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Habits not resolutions: Weave every day.

Historically speaking, I think we can safely say that I’m rubbish at New Year’s Day resolutions.

I remember a New Year’s Day when I was a pre-teen deciding that I was going to write a letter to someone every single day of the year. This was in the 80s before the internet though I probably had learned to type on my electric typewriter by then. But my resolution was to put pen to paper and hand-write someone a letter. Every. Single. Day.

I made it to January 8th.

As humans we certainly love to make grand promises to ourselves of how we’re going to change our lives starting with this one day which marks a new calendar year. But it is just another day and we are still the same people we were on December 31st (though hopefully a little more sober).

Archie Brennan: builder of a worldwide tapestry community

Archie Brennan: builder of a worldwide tapestry community

Archie Brennan passed away on October 31, 2019. He was an artist, a teacher, and someone who had a significant impact on the face of tapestry today. Archie began his weaving career at 16 years of age with a seven-year apprenticeship at the Dovecot in Scotland. He was eventually became director of the tapestry workshop and also established the tapestry department at Edinburgh College of Art.

Please take some time to get to know a bit about his life, his work, and his thoughts about tapestry weaving. I believe it is important and helps those of us who are contemporary tapestry weavers place our practice in the broader historical context of this art form. Archie, perhaps more than anyone else in recent history, was able to express the shift that happened in the early 1900s from reproductive tapestry where paintings were copied in great detail to an artist/weaver approach where the weaver also designs the work. He was instrumental in creating this shift first through his work at the Dovecot Studios as a weaver and their director, then in other parts of the world.