Weaving Progress

Through the summer and fall little weaving progress occurred.  Between my back saga, the holidays, and other unrelated family happenings I just didn't get any weaving done.  I am finally trying to get back to my looms.  Last spring I visited Susan Iverson in her studio and mentioned some problems I was having with my sand pail tapestry, the sides were really pulling in.  She encouraged me to unweave it, and reweave the problem areas.  I did that, and I lost about 3 inches of weaving.  I am so glad that I did unweave it even if it was painful to see my progress disappear.  Now the tapestry looks much better and I am finally more than halfway done.   I have six more inches to weave and will try to stay focused on weaving just a little each day.  Here is my progress thus far....

The other weaving that I started was something unexpected.  I first started weaving some linen to try and make a shaped tapestry.  I was having a really difficult time with the linen and it kept pulling in the warp no matter how hard I tried.  I eventually gave up.  In the meantime, my Sylvia Heyden book arrived.  It is a beautiful book showing the tapestries she has made throughout her life and some of her approaches to tapestry weaving.  As you can see above, the sand pail tapestry is a painterly effect with the sand and bucket.  I wanted to try and expand my horizons and I enjoyed reading Ms. Heyden's approach to tapestry that indicates that the weaver should weave tapestries that are unique to the medium and not just be copies of paintings or drawings.  I decided to try this approach.  My fiber arts group has several photos that are to be inspirations for us to develop works that can be part of a show called "Wish You Were Here."  One of the photos is of a beautiful rowboat in the waters off the Swedish coast.  I used this photo as a jumping off point to start weaving an improvised water tapestry.  The green at the bottom will be part of the selvedge.  The blue yarn is much brighter in person and shows up dull in this photo despite my best efforts to brighten it a bit. 

This is a small tapestry and will be one of a series of small water-like pieces.  Now I have to figure out how to mount them.