Designing a tapestry

I have been working on a cartoon for awhile. I finally had it ready to go to the printer for enlargement today. Since I have moved since the last time I had an enlargement made, I had to find a new print shop. Technigraph in Santa Fe is a great place and I certainly missed them for awhile this morning. I got some quotes, one of which was way over $100 and would have taken the rest of the week. I have a 6 x 18 inch drawing that I need blown up to 24 x 72 inches which is 400%. Technigraph would have done this in 10 minutes for $12.

Turns out FedEx Office will do the job for $8.55 in 5 minutes. Here they are! To be honest, that 72 inches looks fairly daunting.

I design in a lot of different ways. Ideas accumulate over time and eventually some of them come together into some preliminary sketches. I also take a lot of photographs of patterns and colors I see and carry a little sketch book with me to jot down ideas when they hit. I know that I'll never remember them later. My design tools include a camera, tracing paper, pencils, colored pencils, collage, Photoshop Elements, collected images, and time.

Once I have a design I am happy with, I copy the whole thing onto one sheet of paper.

And then you go hunting for someone who has a large format printer.
I am going to weave this piece on my Macomber. I weave all my big pieces on my Harrisville Rug Loom, but for several reasons, this piece gets booted to the Mac. I know she can do it, but I also know I am going to miss that warp extender on the Harrisville.

With yarn still to be dyed and warping to do, it will be awhile before weaving commences.

If you'd like more information, here is an old post with photos of what I do from here. http://rebeccamezoff.blogspot.com/2010/12/tapestry-cartoons.html

And a video I made about attaching a cartoon when weaving on a floor loom: