Tapestry Study Group April Minutes

by | Apr 21, 2015

Guest Post by Gerry Woodhouse

Cathy, Celest, Gerry, Paula, and Scharine shared projects, and asked lots of questions.

Celest has knitted slippers which are not yet sewn up. Beautiful, fine yarn with some interesting stripe design in the knitting.

Cathie continues to weave squares and loop them together for cushion covers at a womens’ shelter program.

Paula completed her tapestry from the Mirrix loom, turned the selvage edges to the back and hemmed both sides; then mounted on a rod. She plans to find a more decorative rod. She also wove a sampler of different wool yarns that she will use to compare the look of each one. She wove them in weft stripes, and wrote up a sheet with the descriptions of each yarn. She particularly likes the cleaner vertical slits she gets with the singles yarn. The 2 ply tapestry yarns have a diagonal twist line that doesn’t give the clean horizontal/vertical lines like singles.

Scharine brought her small soumac tapestry on the Hockett loom. We discussed how to “mend” a broken warp at the selvage. Also, once the warp is broken, one loses tension throughout the tapestry on the tiny Hockett loom. She is also using a diagonal wedge weave in the tapestry such as that used by Sylvia Heyden. Scharine also showed us other works she’s completed, including a beautiful dyed scarf which is already sold, a dyed tee shirt with leaf motifs and ornamental stitching, and an Ipad pouch of handwoven fabric embellished with tiny added motifs on one side and a dyed panel on the other side. Gorgeous work. She has some of these in a gallery in Alaska. Opaque

Gerry brought the Opaque projector and wheeled cart to demonstrate enlarging designs for tapestry cartoons. We will have to figure out the best location in the Guild House to use this… as we need to dim the lighting in the space so we can view the projected image from the projector, and we need a clear space on a wall where we can hang our paper up to project images. We also need to acquire a piece of glass to lay over objects we want to project. We’ll work on that, but the projector is cleaned and ready for experimentation.

Gerry