Unable to stand the thought of not spending any part of the summer at the Southwest School of Art and Craft, I registered for the weaving class. It is meant as a basic course in 4-harness weaving. I am hoping -- expecting, really -- that there will be some flexibility about what I can weave. I do remember the basics about winding a warp, calculations, etc etc, but would like to get some teaching about winding a warp of several colors and using more than one color in the weft. They have a more advanced studio course, but I thought I would do this one as a refresher first. The tapestry workshop conflicted with a professional conference, so that got me thinking about taking the 4-harness class.
I have also been obsessing about getting a rigid heddle loom. I sold my multi harness loom in order to buy the large tapestry loom, and to tell you the truth, I found multiharness weaving -- even four harness weaving -- put too much machinery between me and the fiber. Deborah Chandler, in her book Learning to Weave talked about how she likes to put a warp on the loom because that is the only time she gets to touch the fiber. That set off alarm bells in my head. The tactile part of fiber arts is very important to me. But I began to like the idea of using a very simple loom (like a frame loom, or a tapestry loom, or a rigid heddle loom) and manipulating warp and weft by hand. Part of that came from looking through the book Time to Weave again.
So I went back and listened again to Episode 14 of Weavecast, in which Syne Mitchell talks to Betty Lou Davenport, who has written two of the books available about rigid heddle weaving (including Hands On Rigid Heddle Weaving), and then reviews the Schacht Flip loom. I decided I was on the right track when Davenport said one of the things she likes about weaving on a rigid heddle loom is that you "weave close to the thread." Hands on weaving, indeed.
By today (Saturday) I had battled a really bad cold well enough that I was interested in doing something creative this afternoon. So I put the iPod in the boombox so I could listen to a book, and got back to work on my tapestry-in-progress Tropical City Lights. The last time I had seen it, it looked like this:
the cartoon behind the warp, the first inches of the black background woven, and just getting to the color part.
I know just enough now about tapestry weaving to know that each time I reach a bit of color or shape, I have some choices about how to produce a tapestry version of it. So I am weaving this with my reference books arounds me, knowing now that creating lines can be done in various ways, for example. So far, in addition to the hatching and weft blending I have done before, I have also tried to create vertical lines by warp wrapping, and finished an uneven shape (eccentric weft, in tapestry-speak) with my first line of soumak. The results after today's weaving looks like this:
My digital camera has become a tapestry tool in more ways than one. Not only do I design with it, I use it to remind myself that the picture actually is on end, and if I want to see it as it will appear when finished, I need to look at it sideways. I spent a lot of time in the tapestry studio with my head to one side before I realized it would be better to rotate a picture:
Aha! There we are. One consequence of weaving a picture side to side is that hatching and weft blending result in vertical images, as in the blue at the bottom of the piece. At first I was a bit taken aback, but I like how it will work out in the image as a whole. I get a surprising amount of the weaving done each time I sit down with it at home. One concern I have is that the line of knots at the bottom of the weaving (on the left in this rotated picture) is curving rather than providing a straight edge. I have to ask around to see if that is something I need to fix now. I am not sure why that is happening, except that perhaps I did not tie that line of knots tightly enough to the sides of the frame when I started.
On the knitting front, I finally finished the back of the Sausalito jacket, and will start one of the sleeves tonight. And finally, as a parting image, a picture of one of the few things in bloom in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park last Sunday.
