I realized I could use my invention to weave large bead pieces as well as smaller items such as jewelry. I wasn’t prepared to like those tiny little glass objects. The loom and I expanded our repertoire to reach out to the world of bead weaving. The looms and my artistic life evolved symbiotically. My studio houses a huge one that once hung in a classroom as well as smaller ones on which I take notes. I LOVE THIS (From Claudia): I have been obsessed with slate blackboards since I was five. The two parts of my personality have merged into one. The line between manufacturing business owner and artist is now blurred in my life. Suddenly my inner engineer emerged and I designed the Mirrix loom with the help of a friend. While learning how to weave tapestry, I also learned what I desired in a tapestry loom. If I am spending the night at a friend’s, my biggest bag is the one filled with yarn and looms and knitting and embroidery materials. I even have an “emergency art project” stashed in my car’s glove box just in case. I have art projects stashed in every corner of my life. It calms me, it focuses my thoughts, it allows me to escape into a world of color and texture and form. My love of this medium merged with the practical need to make money. My work found its way into galleries and I was hired to create commission work. Everything I saw had potential as a tapestry. I remember going on hikes and memorizing the landscape, going out West and taking photos of the beautiful desert colors and looking for the shapes in objects I loved. I prepared my colors during the day when the light was good and wove at night when my kids were asleep. I had found my new medium and I was not to be stopped.Īfter learning tapestry on my own for several years I decided I was ready to sell my work. Even though I created a lot of failures I was forced to rip off the loom, I was mesmerized. No books, no internet at the time, I made every possible mistake trying to solve the various issues involved with weaving yarn onto a vertical warp and making it pictorial. I then set out to invent tapestry on my own. It seemed more like a club for women who liked to gather and weave and there was more talking than actual instruction. I just never imagined it could make art, big art, art that took up entire walls.Ī decade later, while pregnant with Elena and too distracted to practice what was meant to be my “art”-poetry–I found myself in a beginning tapestry class. How could yarn be woven to create shapes and animals and people? It was like painting but for me so much more interesting because I had already developed a love of fiber and weaving. I could not believe that such a thing was possible. I first discovered tapestry in my early 20s when I visited the Cloisters in New York where the Unicorn Tapestries hang. Weaving beads can be simple or complex, but the process is always a refrain of memorized hand movements. Typically, it is done by stringing up beads, placing them behind the warp threads and then sewing back through them on top of the warp threads, essentially stitching the beads to the warp. The weaving of beads is slow and methodical. Once you’ve learned the skills to weave beads, the challenge lies mostly in design. For example, a technique called Pick and Pick produces what looks like a repeating pattern of vertical columns and one called Wavy Lines creates just that.īead weaving is a very different art form. Different techniques produce different effects on the weaving. Tapestry is woven on a loom with high-tension and is a very slow, meditative art. Typically tapestries are hung on walls as fine art but can be functional, too, and used in pillows or purses or even jewelry. Tapestry is a type of fiber weaving that is weft-faced (that means you can see the threads going horizontally across the piece, but not the warp threads that go vertically up and down), not woven edge to edge and usually pictorial in nature.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |