This past May I traveled to Westray, Orkney Islands, Scotland for a class with tapestry artist Louise Martin. The class was fun and Louise is a fantastic teacher. She helped me add texture to my tapestries but she taught me something much more important. She showed us her island in all its natural beauty and asked us to express what we saw and felt through a series of small or sample tapestries. Louise brought a library of yarns in every color and texture you could ever want to recreate her surroundings. I make four mini tapestries and made a plan to turn them into larger pieces when I returned home.
I plan to take trips in the future and use this technique again. However, I don’t think I’ll be able to bring along the yarns the way that Louise did. I’ll have to rely on my photos and my memory to create the minis.
I find fascinating this concept of capturing a new environment through rough sketches and photographs, followed by yarns that mirror the colors of the landscape. I decided to start the process with a photo that I took and then wove a sample of sand patterns on stone. The finished tapestry will be 32” x 24” and it is about 1/3 complete.
The second image and mini tapestry that I did was of the rushing water around the Bay of Cubbigeo. My mini tapestry captured the colors and textures of the location but I thought about all the angles of the rocks in the photo and decided to try creating an abstract version using wedge weave. I like the scalloped edges that occur with wedge weave. I finished this smaller tapestry, 13” x 10” and sold it immediately.
