Somewhere Over the Rainbow 2015: Controlling Colour Placement in Tapestry Using Hand Spun Singles

Yesterday, I discussed how I use my multi-coloured singles weft yarns to build a tapestry design. This style of free form weaving is relaxing and fun - I begin to weave and see where the yarn takes me. Weaving this way is truly "playing with string." Most of the time, though, I have specific designs in mind and I weave with a cartoon behind my warp. This watercolour was the starting point for a piece I wll discuss here, "Study for 'The Garden':"

I've lost the cartoon for this weaving, but my practice is to translate such paintings into line drawing cartoons, like this one:

How do I use my hand spun yarns to build a controlled design? A weaver can work mathematically, planning the colour changes in her spinning based on some calculations in a woven sample. Let's say that she knows that a 10 inch (25 cm) wide x 1 inch (2.5 cm) high block of colour contains 36 picks per inch (PPI) and that she has approximately 10% take up in her weft yarn with each pass. Each weft pass then requires 11 inches (27.5 cm) of yarn. She would multiply 11 x 36 for a total of 396 inches, or approximately 11 yards (10 metres) of yarn per block woven. Working from this, she would then spin 11 yards or 10 metres of each colour she wanted per colour block (or she could be wild and spin 11 inches of a variety of colours 36 times to mix her colours in that same block). There will, of course, still be some variation in colour placement, due to differences in take up, yarn grist, techniques used and the touch of the human hand, but overall, a spinner could make weaving weft this way and be fairly confident as to how the colours would weave in a given section.

Apart from the challenge presented, I have no interest in working this way. Spinning precise colours into my yarns doesn't strike me as an effective use of my time, given that I can use traditional weaving techniques to place my colours where I please. Instead, I use my experience as a dyer and spinner to blend colours in my yarns; my experience with tapestry weaving allows me to decide how best to place the colours. The short version of this is that I work intuitively, but I also pay attention to the shapes in my cartoons and how to build those shapes with my yarns.

In "'The Garden' Study," shown here as woven and turned to show how the final weaving is presented, I built shapes using both discontinuous weft tapestry techniques and the colours in the yarns:

You can see the traditional way that shapes are formed in the small flower at the lower left. The stem and leaves are woven with green yarns in eccentric weft technique and the bud is a separate shape from a different yarn placed between the leaves. The Snake's body and the right side of the large flower are woven with continuous yarns (each from separate balls). The natural striping of the yarn forms the stripes on the Snake. (For some reason, I always think of this image as a "he" and always in capital letters.) That colour way begins with the pink at his underbelly and continues to the tongue, orange stripe and eye, which are woven in separately, then the main yarn continues into his head to the top of his body. The large flower is woven the same way, beginning with light pink for the stem (right side, lower photo), into the purples and fuchsias of the bud. The left side of the stem is woven in the same fashion with a different multi-coloured yarn.

You can see the same effect in this detail of a leaf from "Chakra Roots." This shape was woven from a continuous strand of yarn, the leaf from one end of the ball and the soumak from the other:

Working this way is not an all-or-nothing process. Whether I use a fairly solid colour or a multi-coloured yarn depends on what I believe best suits my design. For example, in "The Garden," the rounded shapes are woven with solid singles, while the background combines various gradient singles combined with slits and eccentric wefts.

Weaving with multi-coloured singles reduces my weaving time by allowing my yarns to mimic some classic tapestry techniques. It can also enhance those same traditional ways of weaving. Working with such yarns extends my design possibilities - I can allow the yarn itself to determine my design, as I did in "Badlands" or I can use that yarn to highlight shapes in my cartoons. Best of all, weaving with my hand spun yarns combines my love of dyeing, spinning and weaving into a single fabric. There is a meditation in this practice as All becomes One.

Namaste.