Room for the loom

I have taken over yet another room in the house, this time for the yarn stash. This is the smallest bedroom. It was sort of mustard and baby poop brown, which made the room feel very small and close. I painted it Secret Scent by Behr, with a white ceiling. It's a gentle lavender and I love it.

Tapestry, like quilting, requires a bit of a stash. Getting a gradation of values with yarn can be even more challenging than with fabric. But there are interesting tricks. Please check out Sarah Swett's blog post on value, Go ahead, I'll wait. Really, her post is genius and so beautifully written too.

I got to meet and take a workshop from Sarah almost three years ago. I was too new to spinning (and knew nothing about tapestry) to fully appreciate how lucky I was to spend time with her. The class was on mixing colors and values in wool for spinning, but it covered so much more. This was my first ever selfie, taken with Sarah at the workshop.

The class was very meaningful to me, in a lot of ways. I was wrestling with the decision to curtail my teaching travel and dealing with creative burn out. I learned a lot in a few days, and about way more than how to blend wool.

When deciding how to set up a room I often start by checking out what will be seen first. Does anyone else do that? I consider what little vignette will be seen when passing by the door. I'd like it to be intriguing, welcoming, to pull us into the room and then see that there is more to discover.

There's more to do, clearly, but setting up the loom room meant unpacking six more boxes. We're getting there. I'm on the fence about bringing up the floor loom, it will fill up the room fast, but I'm sure not going to use it in the basement. We're still waiting for the old house to choose its new family. There's been a lot of interest in the last couple of weeks, we're hoping for good news soon.

A Good Day to Dye

It was something I swore I would never do. I'd given it a shot years ago, and decided that dyeing fabric was something I didn't need to do. I mean, it's not like there aren't a million zillion fabrics already out there, just waiting to be discovered and then chopped into lovely little bits. But....

Finding yarns for tapestry in a range of gradations (especially in the US), is a real challenge. In fact, finding yarns for tapestry is rather complicated all the way around, there are so many variables. Just as with fabric, the medium values are easy to find. It's the lightest  lights and darkest darks that are the biggest challenge.

Just as always, I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how this hand dyeing thing worked. Wanting just small amounts of each color for now, I knew that I wanted to use mason jars and a canner for steam setting the dyes. Figuring out how much dye to use to achieve the desired depth of shade was the stumbling block. Different sources varied widely as to how much to use, so my first batches were way, way more intense than I was looking for.

But the colors came out so clean and bright and pure, it was still super fun to just toss the skeins in the dye and just see what happened.

After a while I just started mixing colors, adding black to skeins that came out too close in color to be useful, or blue, or red.

After my first day of dyeing, I was pretty darned happy with my yarns. It's a pretty good selection, if I do say so myself, especially considering I had no idea what I was doing! Not quite the light lights and dark darks, but hey, that just means I'll have to dye another day.

Rest is Not Idleness

Taking some time off to heal and consider my options is not as easy as it sounds, especially not for someone who is used to a lifetime of going at full steam ahead. Taking a step (okay, a leap) back from the physical challenges of travel, and starting physical therapy, have proved to be just the thing for my dodgy old neck and my creative burnout.

This has been my summer of weaving. I've always turned to learning a new craft when my creative juices run dry. I think it's a "making" thing. It's a new label, being a maker, but it perfectly defines me. I have been a maker all of my life, and when taking a break from making quilts, it was only natural that I should need to make something else.

The tapestry bug has bitten me, hard. I'm talking the weaving kind of tapestry, not the embroidery kind. I've taken two tapestry classes this summer.

Starting last spring, Rebecca Mezoff offered a three part, comprehensive online tapestry class. She's just charming, and the class format included lots of personal interaction. I highly recommend the classes. The sample to the left is from one of the early parts of the process.

In August I attended the Michigan League of Handweavers' annual workshop retreat. What fun! Just as in quilting, weaving is bent and shaped into so many intriguing art forms, just waiting to be explored.

While there, I took a tapestry class from Nancy McRay. It was awesome! The sample above is from her class. Three days of the quiet strumming of tightly warped looms, extremely individualized lessons and wonderful encouragement, were a balm to a healing soul. (Not to mention the nightly hugs from grandbabies, the retreat being in their town.)

And here is my class final project for Rebecca's class. That's a pumpkin growing there, just in case you couldn't tell. The tapestry is only ten inches wide, so I'm having to edit, edit, edit to try to tell the story. I'm really pleased with some of it, other parts, not so much. I'm still thinking of spaces as in fabric for applique, and that's holding me back a bit. But I'll get there, probably in about a million years, but then, if it could be mastered in a day how inspiring would that be?

And now for something completely different

Part Three: Learning Curves

As the previous posts have suggested, I'm learning to weave. I'm taking a tapestry weaving online class from Rebecca Mezoff. She is charming, delightful, and an excellent teacher. I've learned so much over the last couple of months, and not just about tapestry.

It turns out that I am the sort of student who would challenge me as a teacher. I wanted to know all of it, and now. In the first few passes of yarn through the loom, I knew that I was hooked. This is a new way of playing with color, and my mind just sort of boggled at the possibilities.

Part Two: Demi Duites, Pick and Pick and Weft Joins

I chafed a bit when I learned that we wouldn't get to angles until part two, and curves would remain a secret until part three! I wanted to know it all, now. I will admit to some very ungracious grumbling. And then I recognized it. I'm that student. On the one hand, it's sort of a miracle to see from the teacher's perspective, seeing that moment when the door to all the new possibilities opens up in a student's mind, when a student totally gets it. On the other hand, it's super hard to contain the excitement and discipline myself to learn to crawl before trying to fly.

When it came to tapestry, I got it. I am the sort of person who is used to catching on to things quickly, at least anything involving needlework. It's in my dna, just as much as my green eyes and freakishly long legs. But tapestry is not needlework. There are no needles involved at all. There is an entirely new vocabulary to master, not the least of which is the interaction of warp and weft.

Part One: Hatching 

We're only part way through part three, and I'm excited to see what comes next. I can't say enough good things about Rebecca's class. It's part self-directed, but with a great deal of interaction with Rebecca. She responds to questions very thoroughly, sometimes even creating new videos to clarify a point for a struggling student. If you are at all interested in tapestry, check it out. You won't be sorry.


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It's called OLAD

Obsessive Loom Acquisition Disorder. OLAD. I knew about the malady, but never expected to be infected so quickly. Looms have very specific functions, designed for specific styles of weaving, sort of like the way sewing needles are designed for specific tasks, only taking up way, way more floor space. And I've got it bad.



My OLAD was still manageable when I had just the Baby Wolf and the Mirrix, each designed for specific purposes.

This sweetie is a terrific loom, but it has its limitations. It's considered a portable loom, so it's not quite sturdy enough for weaving rugs. (With all this fabric around me, I see many, many rag rugs in my future.) And, it only has four shafts (patterns are made by threading the warp through different shafts), the more shafts a loom has, the more complex the patterns can be.

I have woven several things on this loom, not the least of which is the beautiful overshot pattern to the left. With careful threading of the shafts and repeated sequences of treadling, marvelous designs can appear.

It was the "mathyness" that drew me to quilting originally, taking just simple bits of algebra to cipher out an entire quilt. Weaving is also mathy, and I love it!

But just as, after a time, all those straight lines in quilting designs began to chafe, so it is with weaving. So, I needed a tapestry loom.Tapestry weaving lets me draw with yarn. It's the weaving world's equivalent of applique. I am taking an online class from Rebecca Mezoff, and so far we are only up to geometric forms. The class has been just marvelous, Rebecca is a terrific teacher.










This is my final project for Part One. Curves aren't actually covered until Part Three, which is next month, but I couldn't help myself. They were supposed to be circles, those blobs, but at least the top one ended up a convincing oval. Even the triangle was a bit of stepping out, we're only just now getting the the lessons in triangles, in Part Two.

And now to the OLAD, one more type of loom, this one a for-real floor loom, a heavy duty loom that can handle rug making, and also with more shafts for more intricate patterns. I've been watching for a used loom to come up for sale nearby, and one did, just last week.

Introducing the Norwood. These looms have a delightful Michigan history, built by a furniture maker out of cherry wood.

She has eight shafts, and a weaving width of almost forty inches. She also has a sectional warp beam (it's the spiny looking thing on the left), so I'll need to learn how to work with that.

I wish I could say that I was done buying looms, but I fear I have a couple more in my future. I'm certain that I will eventually want a larger tapestry loom, and I'm also considering a band loom, to weave intricate, skinny bands of color. But that's it, really, who actually needs a loom with more than eight shafts, or hooks up to a computer, or is just bigger? Nah, I'm done with OLAD, really I am.

A Loom Room

 To say that the office was a disaster would be an epic understatement. This picture shows the cleanest part. I am too embarrassed to show you the rest of it. The room was crammed with stuff. Parts of books and patterns, printing stuff, binding stuff, paperwork and general junk was piled higher and deeper and filled every corner. And it was all stuff we thought we needed. The room was so bad that, even though I relish a challenging organization job, I turned a blind eye to this room.

And then there was IKEA. I love IKEA, and luckily the nearest one is about two hours away or I'd be in big trouble. Fine furniture it's not, but its a big cut above chain store stuff and that's good enough for my purposes.

This wall is the office. What used to take up the entire room is now mostly hidden behind doors. The desk that filled a quarter of the room (and harbored stacks of homeless paperwork) is gone.

A center for tapestry weaving is replacing it. Instead of the jumbled mess from the first picture, a Baby Wolf floor loom awaits. I was worried that I'd gone a little bold with with paint color, but now I love it. The room positively glows! I can't tell you how many times I've gone back to the room because I thought I left the light on.

The room is still a work in progress. I'll be sewing up new curtains, there's a new top coming for the tapestry center with room for the bobbin winder. And before much weaving can go on, I'll need a proper bench.

My buddies always said that one day my stash would cause me to expand into another room, but I don't think this is exactly what they had in mind.