If you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that I teach a lot of things about tapestry. There are times when I want to weave something insanely complicated. If I actually let this wish get the better of me, I might end up feeling like this.
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| Molly McNeece, Cousin Trapped, watercolor |
When this happens, I go back to some old tried and true tricks. My favorite is regular hatching. If you've had a class from me, you've probably tried this technique. I used it in the spirals in many of my Emergence pieces and sometimes I just weave it on a sampler to calm down a little bit,
dork dedicated practitioner that I am.
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| Rebecca Mezoff, Emergence VII, 45 x 45 inches, hand-dyed wool tapestry. All of the spiral form not in the teal bar is done with regular hatching. |
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There are a couple ways you can do this technique. The simplest is just to overlap two colors in full sequences in a regular manner.
Use two colors and change the points where they relay according to your cartoon or any regular pattern. The example below creates a triangle.
Depending on the two colors used and their values, you may create the illusion of a third color between the two as in this arrow pattern which seems to suggest a green tree.
An excellent example of this technique is in Ulrikka Mokdad's tapestry,
Floating in Blissful Ignorance.
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| Ulrikka Mokdad, Floating in Blissful Ignorance, 50 x 33 inches, wool weft, linen warp, photo: Frantz Henriksen |
This detail shows the regular hatching between the peach and the black in the finger.
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| Ulrikka Mokdad, Floating in Blissful Ignorance, Detail |
This technique can also be done with a separate color used for the striped lines independent of the background color.
Rebecca Mezoff is a tapestry artist and educator who loves to scratch puppies behind their ears, eat pepperoni pizza, hike long trails, and teach people about tapestry weaving. You can find out more about her and her online classes here:
http://www.rebeccamezoff.com/online-learning/
Note: This blog post first appeared on the Mirrix blog as a guest post. If you feel like you've read it before, you're not crazy (well, not that I can tell anyway), you did.
April 18, 2015 8;30AM on the East Coast.......Thanks, Rebecca, for this post which is fun, and also informative.....when I get bogged down in weaving isolation, it really helps to see a new slant and remember to have fun weaving tapestry....a small, mentally fun tapestry on another loom seems like a good idea when weaving gets too pompous or too serious.....from Janet on the Atlantic Coast
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