by Carol Lerner
On a normal first Thursday of the month, tapestry artists gather at TFAC to practice their “meet and separate,” hatching, hachure, and all sorts of great tapestry techniques. The air crackles with creativity, and members often fall into an intense working silence between discussions, requests for help, and brainstorming. It’s a laid back sort of gathering, with an undercurrent of a creative kick-in-the-butt(can I say that?).This format isn’t really zoom compatible, but the Thursday Morning Tapestry Study Group is alive and well nonetheless.
In one more of those weird silver linings of a pandemic cloud, a few of the members of this study group have been able to use the time to finish some started things, start some other things and, for myself, purpose to up my game and get some more training. Here are some of the results of our efforts:
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Inspired by the ContempT Study Group’s theme challenge of “Sticks, Stones and Stitches,” Dianne Byrne created tapestries incorporating sticks and stones, and even shells. Chris Kesner, also of the ContempT study group, gave Dianne a box filled with pieces of bark from Minnesota red pine trees, and Dianne featured several pieces of the bark in a small tapestry, to show off its texture and character.
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Carolyn Cooke completed a sampler pattern adapted from one of the guild’s library resources, which suggested utilizing light and dark colors to provide contrast in the sampler. Serendipitously, Carolyn found this two-ply yarn in a thrift shop in Rose and Purple, which provided the contrast (and inspiration) needed in a monochromatic color scheme.
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Nancy Frishe produced this piece that measures out to 5 1/4″ x 6 3/4″ . This image is build on cotton warp with a combination of wool, silk and cotton wefts.
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This tapestry by Carol Lerner was also inspired by the Sticks, Stones and Stitches theme, and was woven at 8 epi with linen warp and cotton weft, garden sticks, and one stone. |
I had just signed up for an online tapestry course from Rebecca Mezoff in February. What timing! The course was on color gradations, and it took me almost the whole summer to complete the coursework. This is the resulting sampler, that illustrates regular and irregular hatching, regular and irregular hachure, shaped pick and pick, transparency through bundling, vertical gradations, and using stripes, floating bars, and demi duites for color changes. It is 5′ 2″ long, and doesn’t even encompass all the possibilities of technique practice from the coursework
The warp is 8/2 cotton, and weft is Norskfjord Vevgarn 2 ply wool, doubled for weaving.
Here there are four colors blending into each each other in each band, utilizing a Fibonacci number sequence.
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These sections show several techniques from irregular hachure to pick-and-pick for color gradation. The light section with intersecting blocks illustrates color blending by weft bundling. It was revelatory to find out that the point of intersection could be more effective utilizing different colors than those of the squares that intersect. Who knew?
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