Sample, Sample, Sample!
Updated: Sep 5, 2022
I spent the last full week of August at the John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC as an Assistant Instructor for my friend and tapestry mentor, Allie Dudley. They were teaching a course called "Tapestry in the Scottish Tradition," which was rooted in Allie's tapestry training and heritage (their mentor is Tommye McClure Scanlin who, in turn, was mentored by the great Scottish Tapestry artist Archie Brennan).
Besides getting the students up and weaving, and from time to time sharing my tapestry insights, I was able to spend much of the week sampling, which was a refreshing change. I tend to dive head-first into a tapestry once I have an idea in my head - leaving any troubleshooting for when I weave up to a challenging place on the loom. But this time I got a chance to test drive a few percolating concepts in my head, which brought me even more insights and additional rabbit holes to wander down someday.
Here's what I tried and discovered:
1. Warm Up - Pick-and-Pick, Soumak and Color Experiments: In my first sample of the week, I wanted to play with some new yarns as well as creating shapes in pick-and-pick, especially practicing changing colors at the edges where things can get messy. Some other successes I want to hold onto include working with a brighter color palette, forcing myself to publicly mark where I had to make an adjustment pass to keep everything in shed, creating shapes in soumak and leaving tails intentionally exposed. (Sett: 8epi, warp: Kotimainen Liina 12/15)
2. Doubleweave Tapestry: For my next adventure, I wanted to play with double-weave on a pipe loom. Basically, after wrapping the warp on the loom, one layer was woven with the warps in the "front" and the other with the warps in the "back." Bringing the two together allowed there to be places where the layers merged before diverting again. This meant twice the work when weaving each layer separately, so progress was slow! I did love that I needed to physically turn my loom 180 degrees when switching up which layers I was weaving. Whenever I got tired of working on one side, I would turn the loom around and the fresh perspective always stimulated new ideas!
I tried a few different techniques, but found that doubling the epi in the "shared" layer (in other words, weaving 2 over, 2 under) made the transitions between the layers much smoother. The multiple layers let me play with creating mini and full-width pockets (some of which I stuffed and sewed shut), exposed warps (when creating shapes in one layer and then merging layers), and folds at the ends that reminded me of the spine of a book.
My favorite part for this experiment was creating something that needed to be touched and manipulated to be fully appreciated. Lots to think about there! (Sett: 10epi, warp: Kotimainen Liina 12/15)
Video of Experiment #2: "Doubleweave Tapestry" - Video credit: Mary Jones
3. Four-Selvedge Tapestry: Finally, I got to try a very small experiment in four-selvedge tapestry. This operates similar to doubleweave, the idea being that by weaving at a doubled sett (2 over, 2 under) you actually have a "pocket" shed (1 over, 1 under) where all your ends can rest - making double-sided weaving a breeze with minimum finishing. You also (should) have completely finished ends once you cut everything from the loom. You set this up with a jig on the loom, which you can theoretically make any shape to fit the piece (Allie wove a super-cool one in the shape of a house!)
I stuck with just a boring rectangle since I only had 24 hours left in the studio and my goal was to wrap my mind around the setup. Thankfully, one of our amazing students had dabbled with this and lent me her custom-made jig! See below for what the set up looked like. Each of these warp loops on the jig was then attached to the pipe loom with a loop of linen that "grabbed" the tapestry warp as you would in clasped-warp. Tensioning these was tricky do get a solid, flat edge on each end.
The real downside to this set up is that eking out the last few rows of weft must be done with a needle and it's incredibly arduous - it took me almost as long to weave the last quarter-inch as weaving the rest of the tapestry (granted, I didn't try many complicated shapes on this one given the time crunch). I really do like the idea of intentionally shaped selvedges (these happened unintentionally on my piece, see below). I'll definitely keep this technique in my back pocket - though I'll definitely need more practice! (Sett: 10epi, warp: Kotimainen Liina 12/15)
Overall, my biggest takeaways was just how fun sampling can be. The stakes are low, and the opportunity to get inspired pretty high. I've tentatively made a commitment to be sampling a different technique on my pipe loom every month for the next year to broaden my horizons and lean into playfulness in my practice.
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