At the loom again, finally!

The studio has been unpacked for awhile, and I have been faithfully weaving my tapestry diary, but until last week I hadn't actually started a new tapestry.  One of the things I love most about our new place is that the windows are open all the time and New Mexico winds blow through . . . all the time.  Since my last studio was in a window-less basement, I am loving the airflow.

That's the working title of this new small piece, Airflow.  It's more of a study than anything, and a sample for the class I'm teaching at Convergence next month about using collage to design for tapestry.

Here is the collage I started with, along with the cartoon, the array of yarns and the yarn wrap, and barely visible at top left, my list of "20 Things I know about this piece" (thank you, Kathe Todd-Hooker), even if I did come up with only 11.  Did I mention it's a small piece (12" x 6")?  For some reason I left the blue yarns out of the photo.  But I am loving the gradations available from Weaver's Bazaar.  

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One fun thing I'm experimenting with this time is using the same yarn for both warp and the background of the image (it's Davidson Corporation's "Navaho warp", a Churro wool available at Earth Guild in Asheville, NC.)  I was inspired by painter David Hockney's early practice of leaving blank canvas visible in his paintings, and I wanted to try to translate this idea into tapestry.

Here are some progress shots.

I'm breaking up the background with slightly curved lines of eccentric weaving that go from selvage to selvage.  Those lines indicate the airflow.  You can't see it in the photos, but for these lines I'm combining two strands of shiny translucent metallic yarn from Giovanna Imports with the Churro warp.

I am so enjoying being back at the loom.  I hope you are finding time to weave--or whatever gets your own creative juices flowing--this June!

A reminder:  there is still some room in my two-day workshop at Convergence called Collage to Tapestry Cartoon.  Find out more and sign up HERE.  The supply list is  minimal since we'll be focusing on design rather than weaving.  I'd love to see you there!

Tapestry Diary 2017 complete! (almost)

It being the end of the year there's been a flurry of interest lately in the tapestry diaries some of us are keeping.  When I posted my completed December weaving online last week a few folks asked for more information about the year's work.

Molly Elkind, December, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

I've also had some queries about how to get started on a diary.  (Shameless self-promotion:  If you want a look at many artists' diaries and a guided tour of how to get started, consider signing up for my class at Convergence in July:  Plan Your Tapestry Diary.  The class is filling up but there are still several spots left.) 

When I started the 2017 diary these were my self-imposed rules or guidelines:

   

• weave each month's piece to finish 5" high x 7" wide; 
• weave an indeterminate amount each day, responding both to the day and to what has been woven before;
• when away from the loom, do not weave; 
• choose a palette of colors for each month but be open to adjusting the palette as necessary. 

In addition, I decided on a sett of 8 epi on a 12/6 gray seine twine warp.  I used my copper pipe loom and had to warp it twice over the course of the year.  You can see that overall these rules are pretty loose; the most specific guideline is the overall size of each month's piece.  My plan was to join each month's panel together to make an accordion book. 

For the first few months, January to April, I did respond to what I saw on my morning walks, the colors of the sky, of blooming plants, the street itself, and so on. 

Molly Elkind, January in progress, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

In February I marked off each day's weaving with a half-pass of red.    

Molly Elkind, February in progress, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

In April I decided to take a big risk and included a found object in the weaving, a red mailbox flag I picked up off the street.  This was a learning experience!  I should have used half-hitches all around the flag to stabilize the warps as they were stretched around the thickness of the object. . .but I didn't.  Live and learn. 

detail, April-May-June, Molly Elkind, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary.

In May, our schedule called for us to be away from home every weekend, so I devised a complicated system of colored squares and slits or interlock joins to indicate sequences of days spent at home or in another place.  I tried to weave each day as a perfect square . . . but (another learning experience) noticed halfway through the month that my third woven week was developing a wavy top edge.  One of my unspoken rules for the diary is not to un-weave if I can help it.  So, I inserted a corrective strip of weaving in gray.  Hey, I'm the artist, I get to make the rules, and re-make them, right?!

At this point it was becoming clear to me that the diary was evolving into a kind of tapestry sketchbook, in which I was trying out new ideas and techniques without much worry about whether they would make a cohesive whole or even always succeed technically.  And that was fine.  For me the important thing was to have a place to play and experiment.  

At the beginning of June I had just returned from a wonderful retreat with Tapestry Weavers South, at which Connie Lippert had generously shared the basics of wedge weave.  I set myself the challenge of weaving wedge weave, and changed the orientation so I'd weave that month from the side.  

Molly Elkind, June in progress,Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

In addition I decided to use only yarns from my scrap bag.  This actually turned out to be one of my most successful months of the whole year, I think.

When I started the July diary the Fourth was looming and our national political situation was on my mind, so I decided to weave a heart composed of hatched lines of red and blue on a gray background.  

Molly Elkind, July, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

In August I returned to the idea of incorporating objects I found in the street on morning walks.  This time I chose thinner objects, and arranged them in a composition of sorts.  The tweedy background was meant to mimic the texture of the street.  I think now I've got found object weaving out of my system!

Molly Elkind, August, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

In September I chose to use only scrap yarns again, and only horizontal lines.  Partway through the month, though, I saw a discarded sunflower in the street on my morning walk and decided to incorporate it too.

Molly Elkind, September, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

In October I adapted an old watercolor sketch, changing up the values and colors and again using scrap yarn.  Only darks were left in the scrap bag, so that's what I used.  I was happy with how this one turned out too.  

Molly Elkind, September, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

In November I decided to do a study of textures, seeing how many different techniques I could use to create texture.  I also limited myself to a light palette this time.  Techniques included twill, twining, double and triple setts, countered soumak, slits, rya knots, eccentric weaving, twining, and plain weave with lazy lines. 

Molly Elkind, November, Book of Half-Hours, 2017 tapestry diary

In December, I happened on a diagram of regular hachure and hatching in Kathe Todd-Hooker's book Line in Tapestry (available here.  While you're there check out Kathe's blog as well).  

(c) Kathe Todd-Hooker, Line in Tapestry, p. 26.  Reproduced with permission.  

Upside down, it looked like a Christmas tree so I decided to practice this technique, using green Churro singles for the tree and fine tapestry wool for the background.  In a nod to my 2016 diary which tracked the colors of the liturgical calendar, the background moved from purple to white over the course of the Advent season.  You can see this image at the top of this post. 

I still have to do the finishing work on these last several months and join them to the January-July segments to make a complete book.  

Meanwhile, I've warped up my Mirrix to be ready to start the 2018 diary in a couple days.  Like the new year, an empty warp is pure potential, don't you think? 

2018 tapestry diary warp:  12/6 seine twine, 10 epi, 5" wide

If you are thinking of starting your own tapestry diary, it's a good idea to give a little thought to your starting guidelines.  To quote a previous post: 

Settling on these initial guidelines is an important and subtle part of the game.  You want to have rules, as it were, to govern the game and to make the artistic choices you face each day limited enough to be manageable.  On the other hand, you want those rules to be spacious and generous enough to allow for spontaneous creative responses to circumstances and inspirations. . . and for those inevitable days when you just can't get to your practice.  You don't want to set such strict rules that you get bored or frustrated. 

For further information about tapestry diary practices, check out these links:

Tommye Scanlin approaching the end of her 2017 diary 

Rebecca Mezoff's recent forays into the tapestry diary

my review of Time Warped . . . and Weft exhibit of tapestry diaries and other time-based weaving.

An expanded version of this review will appear in the next edition of the American Tapestry Alliance's member newsletter, Tapestry Topics.  If you're an ATA member, you'll see it.  If you're not, and you're a tapestry weaver, consider joining ATA!

Let me know if you plan to start a diary (it doesn't have to start on January 1 or even run a whole year!).  And share some pictures, below in the comments or on find me on Facebook or  Instagram.  I'd love to see what folks are doing!

Tapestry Diary: from Lent to Easter

Last week I shared with you my excitement about my daily practice of collage and where it might be leading my work.  Today I want to update you on my tapestry diary, which I began late in November 2015 at the beginning of Advent, which is also the start of the church year.  In my diary I am following the seasons and colors of the church's liturgical calendar.  I intended for this to be a spiritual practice of sorts, in which for at least a few minutes a day I would focus on the meaning of the spiritual season and the sanctity of time generally.  I confess that many days my focus has been on the practice of tapestry technique as much as anything transcendent.  

The color for the period of Lent, like Advent, is purple.  During Lent I continued to practice various tapestry techniques, mostly hatching (horizontal lines) and pick-and-pick (vertical stripes).  I did an exercise that Kathe Todd-Hooker calls "spider" by combining the two techniques to make a large cross shape in the center.  I acknowledged my birthday by using purple ribbon and silver thread for that day (above the cross and under the A).  As I have been doing, on days I was away from my loom I inserted a white strip of matboard to fill the empty warps temporarily. 

For Holy Week, the week before Easter, I decided that I would weave the word Hosanna (conveniently, it has seven letters), the word that the adoring crowds shouted as Jesus entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.  I challenged myself to weave the letters without a cartoon, and I did so, though the letters are rather crude block capitals until the last two days, when they became crude lower-case letters.  At the start of the week the letters were the green of the palms the crowd waved in the air; by the end of the week the letters are barely distinguishable from the gray-purple background.  It seemed appropriate in light of the story of Holy Week for the Hosanna to die out at the end. 

This past Sunday we celebrated Easter and the start of a six-week white season in the calendar known as Eastertide.  All through Lent I wondered how to weave this section.  How could I use tapestry to indicate the significance of the holiest day in the Christian calendar?  How to show the radically new beginning and disruption of old rules and assumptions that the Resurrection represents?  And not least, how to make a large white section interesting visually?

I decided to weave a half-pass of dark gray between Holy Week and Easter week, indicating with a sort of dotted line the permeable membrane that separates life before Easter from life after Easter.   For Easter and the few days since, I've used white linen thread and silver metallic threads.  On the first day, the far left, I used too thick a weft bundle and the yarn didn't completely cover the gray warp.  Since then I'm using only one strand of white linen at a time and that is working better, but in keeping with my original rule about not ripping out, I left the first day as is.  I'm inserting small shapes and diagonal lines in silver that I intend to carry throughout the season.  (Sorry they're not more visible in the photos.) I have some other ideas for how to disrupt the old diary grid and conventional techniques as well.  Stay tuned! Soon I will have to advance the warp and what I've done up to now will be rolled to the back of the loom.  

P.S.  For another look at a truly spectacular and inspiring daily practice, check out Penny Berens' yearlong adventure in embroidery.