FINALLY finished: Mayday Mayday Mayday!

I am pleased that I can finally share with you photos of a piece that feels like it took forever to do! 

Mayday Mayday Mayday, (c) Molly Elkind 2024.  27" x 16.6" x .5".  Cotton, wool, silk, paper, synthetic, plastic 

Mayday Mayday Mayday, details.  (c) Molly Elkind 2024.  27" x 16.6" x .5".  Cotton, wool, silk, paper, synthetic, plastic

This piece has a long and winding origin story.  In hopes that you, like me, enjoying hearing about other artists' process stories for their work, I'm going to share with you how this one evolved.

In 2016 (8 years ago!) I made this collage:  

"The Wreck," paper collage by Molly Elkind, 12" x 9"

The background is a page from a news magazine.  The image with the green sun in the upper right was a linoprint I made years ago in a workshop.  I added a couple other bits of paper and stamped black spirals over the entire collage.  This collage was my response to a prompt in Randel Plowman's book, The Collage Workbook*, to make a monochromatic piece about every color on the color wheel.  While I liked it, and I experimented for awhile with tracing, cropping and enlarging it to make a tapestry cartoon, I decided it was way too difficult for me to weave at the time.  I called it "Blue" and filed it away.

Last year I came across the collage again while teaching Collage to Cartoon, and thought, hmm, I'd like to try weaving this.  I saw it now through the lens of climate change and it seemed to fit with the current direction of my work.   I was hopeful that my skills had improved.   I was excited about playing with transparency for the spirals and wanted to try weaving the printed sun section with plastic bag strips.  The idea of weaving it as a tapestry collage, in separately woven pieces and layers, also intrigued me.   I enlarged the collage greatly, from 12" x 9" to 23.25" x 16.75", to make the spirals and other details weave-able at a sett of 10 epi.   I wove three samples, trying out those spirals and various yarns.  I even wove a grayscale sample to make sure I liked the value contrast.  

Sample #1

Sample #2--would it work to stamp the spirals rather than weave them?  I decided No. 

The paper collage, the grayscale photocopy, the woven grayscale sample, and the enlarged cartoon for the printed sun section.  

 

 

 

 

 

Weaving underway but cartoon was heavily revised at one point. 

Bottom layer complete.  Upper right corner is woven in random diagonals as a base to be covered by second woven layer based on the linocut print.  The partial headline from the original magazine article is stenciled, clumsily, across the top.

The clumsy printing of the headline posed a couple of serious problems.  I had cut a stencil and sampled the printing--but I had one chance to get it right on the tapestry and I flubbed it.  I thought it fatally detracted from the piece.  I also noticed that people who viewed the piece in progress immediately thought of "the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald"--not what I was going for.  So I began to think of turning to the back, as a hem, that entire white strip at the top.  This would necessitate changing the title of the piece as well, from The Wreck to something else.

As I pondered these changes, I wove the third layer in navy wool, the wedge shape that would go at the bottom if I followed the original collage.  I tried out several variations on the layers and the degree to which they would be skewed as in the original collage. As it happened, the navy strip at the bottom was about 1.5" too wide.  I figured out a way to  remove the warps from one selvedge edge and tuck under and stitch down the wefts. . . but I began to think it was all too fiddly and that the navy wedge didn't really add much to the piece in the end.  I decided to delete the navy piece and add a fringe of plastic strips.

Experimenting with placement of three woven layers.  Once I finalized the placement of the green sun piece, I tacked it to the bottom layer across the top and down the sides. 

Removing warps from weft to narrow the width of this narrow strip of weaving. 

Trying out different plastic strips for an added fringe.

The final hurdle has been to figure out how to mount it.  I referred to Barbara Burns' article here* on mounting tapestries so that, when using Velcro on the tapestry and on a wall-mounted wooden slat, the top edge doesn't fall forward and cast a shadow.  I painted the wood slat white and used small triangular D-rings on the same side as the counterpart (rough) strip of Velcro.  Putting the D-rings on the side next to the tapestry was the tip that made all difference in keeping the whole tapestry flat against the wall.  Thank you, Barbara!  The two nails through the D-rings protrude from the wall a bit, but they are hidden by a margin at the top of the tapestry.  

 

Painted wood slat with Velcro and D-rings, hanging on nails on wall

 

For the tapestry side, I did something new for me.  I made a backing piece of matboard, cut it to fit within the width of the tapestry, and encased it in a close-fitting cotton muslin sleeve.  Before sewing the sleeve around the matboard I machine stitched a strip of Velcro (soft side) to it.  Then I hand stitched the whole assembly to the top of the tapestry, just catching one weft at a time along the top edge and the two sides.  

 

Matboard in cotton sleeve with Velcro, basted to back of tapestry to check placement vis-a-vis the wood slat.  Note that the top of the matboard piece is 1/2" below the top of the tapestry, to hide the D-rings and nails.

I learned a lot making this piece:

1.  Don't be so literal about translating the collage to tapestry.  I would have saved myself a lot of grief if I'd deleted the white strip with the text "the wreck of the" and the navy bottom wedge earlier in the process.  Of course I probably couldn't know this until I got as far along as I did.

2.  Plastic weft strips behave differently from fiber yarns.  They are very difficult to stitch through (for sewing slits, for finishing steps).  Different weights and types of plastic stretch differently and are stiffer  and harder to weave with.  Sampling is key.  As always.

3.  It's one thing to have an idea you're excited about.  It's another to ponder realistically the time involved in executing it.  Life Intervened more than a couple times since last September, when I started this piece, and really slowed down the weaving and the finishing of it to an incredibly frustrating extent.  Do I really have the time to work like this anymore, I'm wondering? 

On the other hand, I am pleased with how the basic concept of a layered, collaged tapestry worked out.  I'm pretty proud of my transparent woven spirals and of the use of plastic strips.  And I think deleting the words actually opens the piece up more for interpretation by viewers, which is always a good thing. 

 

 

 

* highly recommended!