The sixth Tapestry Discovery Box opens April 15, 2024 and it is all about wedge weave. I’ve admired contemporary wedge weavers for a long time. It has become a popular technique and I often see wedge weaves in art shows. The technique is an eccentric tapestry weaving technique and in that sense it has been used all over the world for as long as weaving has existed. The use of wedge weave where the technique patterns a whole textile, however, is most often seen in Diné (Navajo) weaving. It was a popular style from 1870-1900 when it disappeared from use for a century or more. It is said that tou ..read more

I started putting together a list of resources from my past blog posts and newsletters of the things that I see give tapestry weavers the most trouble. I wrote the first blog post about this February 22, 2024 and realized there was at least one more blog post worth of things high on the list of most-frustrating. In the February 22 post I covered these things: weft tension choosing yarn getting the last warp tight on a continuous warp design and getting the effects you want Let’s add a few more to the list. sett Sett is what we call the measure of how many warp ends is in a particular ..read more

Tapestry weaving by Rebecca Mezoff woven during Change the Shed I've always felt fairly private about my tapestry designs as I'm working on them. Since my apprenticeship ended 14 years ago, I rarely ask anyone for feedback on my designs unless it is a commission. Designs are fragile little beings that can be crushed by other people so easily and they need time for me to be sure enough about them to let others see them.* It is both a protective instinct that makes me guard my ideas to give them space to grow and also a fear of being criticized. No one wants their beautiful butterfly of an idea ..read more

How many times as a newer tapestry weaver have you felt frustrated because you’re weaving along and suddenly your wefts are in the wrong shed?* Wait, what is a shed anyway? How many of us who have been weaving tapestry a long time remember those days when every time we added or subtracted a weft in our design our sheds were wrong? Or we are trying to fill in a dip between two forms or add a new color into a pattern and there were either lice or the wefts just wouldn’t go where we wanted them to go? We have ALL been there. When things like this happen and we find ourselves with two wefts in th ..read more

Way back when my book was brand new, so sometime in early 2021 most likely, Longthread media recorded a podcast interview with me. They re-released it this week and I had a listen in the car a few days ago. It is always reassuring to find that you sound reasonably intelligent and like you know something about your subject. While I do know a lot about tapestry weaving and my own history and I suppose I am of at least average intelligence, giving interviews does often lead me to wish I’d had a little more sparkly brilliance somehow or at least remembered to say something I forgot to mention. Th ..read more

I had the great joy of seeing Bhakti Ziek’s show at Form & Concept Gallery in Santa Fe this week. The show is a retrospective of over 50 years of her weaving life. Bhakti Ziek’s show, A Tenuous Thread is open in March and April of 2024 at Form & Concept in Santa Fe, NM. It is hard to believe when you meet Bhakti that she could possibly be old enough to have been weaving for half a century, but she did start young. She has been an incredible mentor to me and for those of you in the Design Solutions for the Artist/Weaver, Season 1 class, I recommend watching her interview there. It is i ..read more

Ten years ago I left my job as an occupational therapist to be a full time artist and fiber art teacher. In that moment I didn’t know I wouldn’t return to healthcare. All I knew was that the job I thought was my perfect forever-job (pediatric outpatient OT), was ruled by a boss and a system I couldn’t stomach any more. I had only been at that job a year though it was my 17th year working as an OT. Me in my Santa Fe studio working on a new course, 2014 When I moved to Santa Fe the year before to start that job, I also shelled out the money to share a studio with my colleague and friend Corneli ..read more

Whether you’re just beginning or have been weaving tapestry awhile, there are some things that trip most weavers up at some point. Over all the years I’ve been teaching, these are the things I’ve seen the most often that give people working in tapestry difficulties. Weft tension Weft tension is what controls warp spacing. This is probably the biggest problem I see new weavers have. Weft tension problems can lead to lice, your fell line bunching up because the weft can’t pack in, or most commonly, the edges of your tapestry either draw in or push out. In the photo, lice are showing (red arrow ..read more

I like learning new fiber skills. Sure, I made granny square afghans like all geeky kids in the 1980s, but I hadn’t crocheted much of anything since. Then Gist Yarn’s amazing team started a sister brand Zollie and I wanted to try one of their kits. Marty the duck was the one for me! I knit a lot and I’m used to following patterns and of course searching YouTube for whatever weird abbreviation or odd stitch someone is asking for. Since my crocheting was rusty, I was off to a questionable start when one of the first skills was to make a magic ring. But then I realized I was not alone. This kit i ..read more

Moreno and Mezoff. I think we might be a force to be reckoned with! Jillian Moreno is so many things, but one of her outstanding skills is her teaching ability. She is an author, editor, creative, and someone who makes things happen. She wrote Yarnitecture but did you know she also wrote two books about knitting before that? She has so many tricks up her sleeve for helping newer spinners make the yarns they want to make. This week we experienced that magic at a retreat she and I taught together in Taos, NM which we called Spinning for Tapestry. We played with different breeds, ways of spinning ..read more