From Spikeworld. | Spikeworld - The blog of Spike Dennis | Artist, Maker, Curator and Colloaborator
My First Tapestry
I attended a tapestry weaving workshop at the Fleming Collection in London earlier this month. It was a one day introductory workshop led by Master Weaver Caron Penney of Weftfaced.
The workshop coincided with the Fleming Collection’s exhibition, “From Fleece to Fibre“, which includes the Large Tree Group Tapestry created at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. It made for the perfect setting for the workshop; wondrous and inspiring.
Having exhibited alongside artists such as Erin Riley on a number of occasions of the last year or two, and having been looking to the unicorn tapestries as a part of my research, I’ve been keen to try tapestry for myself.
This was only a taster workshop so the warp was already created for us. This gave us an opportunity to get stuck straight in with the yarns to create our weft. Though technical it’s a ‘relatively’ straight forward process although perfecting it will clearly take time; you can see from the image above that my tapestry gets a little narrower towards the top due to the pressure I was exerting when pulling the yarn through the warp. There are also a number of considerations to bear in mind when building up different colours to ensure that the stitches support one another.
Images can be created by counting the numbers of stitches used in a similar way to the way in which cross stitched images can be constructed. This makes me think that there could be a genuine use for tapestry within my practice, particularly with regard to the internet inspired body of work I have been working on for the last twelve months or so.
If you’re interested in tapestry then the Weavers’ Bazaar website is a great source of both materials, tools and tutorials. There is also another introductory workshop at the Fleming Collection at the end of January 2015; check out their website for more information.
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