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I’ve been waiting for Tierra Wools to reopen. I have found myself driving between my new home in southwestern Colorado and Taos or Santa Fe, NM fairly often and this route takes me right past Tierra Wools. They close for the winter so every time I’d go by and see the gate across the driveway I’d think, April 1. April 1. April 1.
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.
I started putting together a list of resources from my past blog posts and newsletters of the things that I see give tapestry weavers the most trouble. I wrote the first blog post about this February 22, 2024 and realized there was at least one more blog post worth of things high on the list of most-frustrating.
In the February 22 post I covered these things:
weft tension
choosing yarn
getting the last warp tight on a continuous warp
design and getting the effects you want
Let’s add a few more to the list.
I've always felt fairly private about my tapestry designs as I'm working on them. Since my apprenticeship ended 14 years ago, I rarely ask anyone for feedback on my designs unless it is a commission. Designs are fragile little beings that can be crushed by other people so easily and they need time for me to be sure enough about them to let others see them.* It is both a protective instinct that makes me guard my ideas to give them space to grow and also a fear of being criticized. No one wants their beautiful butterfly of an idea crushed by a careless comment from another human.
How many times as a newer tapestry weaver have you felt frustrated because you’re weaving along and suddenly your wefts are in the wrong shed?*
Wait, what is a shed anyway?
How many of us who have been weaving tapestry a long time remember those days when every time we added or subtracted a weft in our design our sheds were wrong? Or we are trying to fill in a dip between two forms or add a new color into a pattern and there were either lice or the wefts just wouldn’t go where we wanted them to go?
Way back when my book was brand new, so sometime in early 2021 most likely, Longthread media recorded a podcast interview with me. They re-released it this week and I had a listen in the car a few days ago. It is always reassuring to find that you sound reasonably intelligent and like you know something about your subject. While I do know a lot about tapestry weaving and my own history and I suppose I am of at least average intelligence, giving interviews does often lead me to wish I’d had a little more sparkly brilliance somehow or at least remembered to say something I forgot to mention. That feeling of regret can be pretty strong. But in this case, the interviewer was excellent and the resulting chat I had with Anne Merrow is fun to listen to.
I had the great joy of seeing Bhakti Ziek’s show at Form & Concept Gallery in Santa Fe this week. The show is a retrospective of over 50 years of her weaving life.
Bhakti’s work is full of narrative. The large installation piece that anchors the show, Wheel of Life: The Passing on of Knowledge was her thesis project at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1989. The work uses various dye techniques and a lampas structure. Each panel is 44 x 33.5 inches. There are many stories behind this work including a reference to her father who was a cello player. The piece’s main narrative about Christian monks in 552 AD who relieved China of some of their silkworms by hiding them in their hollow walking sticks thus ending China’s silk supremacy. The story of this work has a spy-thriller feel to it.
