On (tapestry) weaving

I can’t really explain how to do it – there are lots of books out there which can help with that.  I was lucky enough to be taught in real life, on an adult education course no less (rare as hen’s teeth) and I think it made a real impact on how I felt.  I was learning the rules (there are a lot in tapestry weaving – but as I have discovered, most of them can be bent or broken.  If you make something and it doesn’t fall apart instantly then you are winning).  But I was also learning stories, ideas, inspirations – and I think that makes the difference between learning a skill with hand and brain and feeling it.  I’m still lucky to be learning through West Dean college – which continues to give me connections, ideas, community (and more rules…)

All weaving mesmerises me.  I think it has something to do with its essential nature.  Once we stopped covering ourselves in whole animal skins and particularly as we moved into colder climates, weaving was something we needed.  Not just weaving of course – sourcing material, cleaning and preparing it, carding it, spinning it, dyeing it…Archaeology was traditionally obsessed with things you could dig up and which hadn’t changed much and were easily identifiable – you knew where you were with a sword or a knife or even a piece of pottery.  The stuff that hasn’t lasted is more easily dismissed from the record.  Spinning and weaving equipment was primarily wood, so has decayed (sometimes the stones used to weigh down the warp are the only thing left to suggest a loom had been in that spot).  Cloth – animal or vegetable also decays (in the days before chemists got involved and invented materials that will never ever decay…).  It’s easy to trivialise the necessity and effort of cloth production (unless its being used as a proxy for virtuousness – see Penelope and her never ending weaving in Homer’s Odyssey).  Writers and forensic archaeologists are gradually challenging these omissions – and finding evidence to support theories and practicalities of cloth production.

I’m very keen on hidden history – the stories we can’t tell, the places where the archives stop, the artifacts

vanish.  And that might be iron age cloth or how my great-great grandmother felt about her life and work as a cotton weaver in Lancashire in the 1840s. 

I wanted to write about tapestry weaving…I’ve drifted away into unknown history.  In my mind everything is woven together (sometimes matted) and it can be hard to pull the threads apart.

I haven’t (yet) learned to weave ‘properly’ with a hefty table loom, or better still, a floor loom.  I couldn’t make you a tea towel or a length of fabric to make a skirt.  I stood this week at Quarry Mill, near Styal, lost in the noise and movement of the Lancashire looms.  They crashed and rattled as the shuttles raced from one side to the other and the drive belts whizzed round.  One person (woman) looking after 4 or 6 of these things – watching out for breakages, empty shuttles…hot, noisy, exhausting.

What I do is much more ‘artistic’ (just typing that word puts me right off the whole idea).  Instead of a shuttle carrying the weft racing between the threads of warp, so many metres an hour, tapestry weaving is slow.  There are tapestry looms linked to computers which speed the whole process up, by why would you (time and money)?

The simplest loom is an empty picture frame, the warp wound round and round.  The most common type of weave is a tabby weave – over, under, over, under.  And the warp disappears between the weft – it is the skeleton not part of the visible design (usually – remember, all rules are designed to be broken).  The final ‘different’ thing about tapestry weaving is that it is usually discontinuous – the weft rarely travels the whole width of the loom.  It stops and starts creating shape and pattern.

And I love it. 

I love learning the rules and breaking them.

I love the slow meditative nature of the actions of weaving.

I love the way you can plan and prepare but you never really know what the final piece will look like until it is done.

I love the thrill of the design slowly emerging beneath my fingers.

I love that it is art and craft – it teeters on the intersection.

It makes my brain and hand have to work together – and something about that is very grounding and very powerful.