Woven Water Lilies

I recently finished a transparent tapestry, Minnesota Water Lilies. They came to woven life fairly serendipitously.

I walk early around Lake of the Isles and Cedar Lake in Minneapolis; both have expanses of lilies. So I had lilies on my mind when I ran across an entire box of indigo-dyed yarn from 2017. After a completely inspiring workshop with Mary Zicafoose, I prepared all the yarn to weave a large rya with a weft-ikat checkerboard border. I tied off portions of a perfectly-measured skein to create even squares. (More on that workshop here and here and here.)

I decided that I will never get my planned indigo rya woven, but thought my intended ikat-dyed weft might work as the warp for a transparency. I cut one end, and then draped each thread over a stick with a larks-head and tied it to the bottom beam. It worked fine on an upright copper pipe loom that a friend gave to me.

Then came the “What should I weave?” question, and lilies came to mind, flowers I have loved since childhood. There were certainly no water lilies near the farm I grew up on in the Red River Valley. But there were lilies in a cove near our neighbor’s lake cabin on Lake Movil in northern Minnesota. As a teenager I found those flowers as exotic as a Monet painting. My Giverny was a northern Minnesota lake.

The warp could be a watery background. I sketched out some lilies loosely adapted from the real ones from my walks, began to play with their sizes, and added some leaves. I made some blossoms bigger and others smaller with Photoshop, and played around with their placement.

Then I made the full cartoon to be placed behind the warp. I took a photo of the front, made the outlines much stronger (so it is easier to see through the warp), printed it out on two sheets of paper, and taped them together for the final cartoon.

I had an idea I thought might be clever, to weave the spiky yellow stamens in the flowers with short pile. That didn’t look good. Instead, I love the small yellow squares.

Once I finished I carefully removed the stick at the top and replaced it with a clear yellow acrylic rod.

I’ll definitely pursue more experiments with ikat-dyed and painted warps as interesting backgrounds. And I don’t think I am done with lilies.