I was happy with my recent water lily tapestry on an indigo ikat-dyed warp. Now I am designing a larger piece with water lilies, patterned bands, and fish. I’m working with yarn from a box of indigo-dyed wool in my closet, which I intended to weave into a rug more than a decade ago. The yarn is a three-ply, tightly spun wool, with just enough variation in the shades of the hand-dyed skeins to make an interesting warp for an open weave tapestry. It seems to be just a bit thicker than the ikat-dyed yarn I just used, so I needed to make a sample.
Here is the single water lily, followed by a list of what I was investigating and what I learned by weaving the sample.
My husband and I were on vacation in Maine with family this month — seven adults and seven kids in one house! 12-year-old Maddie is a fabulous drawer. What should I draw, she asked one day as we sat at the kitchen table. “Draw a water lily,” I responded. I was interested to see her interpretation. Maddie’s lily was a bit more geometric than the blossoms on the tapestry I finished recently.
For my new sample, I wove a more angular lily, a la Maddie, but I think I like the more rounded petals better. Comments are welcome. Do you like the more angular, or more rounded petals?
The mystery blue wool yarn is a bit thicker than the Norwegian Rauma aklegarn I usually use for warp, so I warped the small loom at seven ends per inch rather than eight ends per inch. I worried that spacing the warp too closely would not allow the weft yarn to pack down closely enough to cover the dark blue warp. The sett worked well.
I brought fabric markers and pieces of fabric to Maine. This was the first image that Maddie drew. Koi!
I think my new design will include fish in a border!
Frida Hansen’s transparent tapestries had straight woven borders along the bottom, with knotted edges.
On this sample I left off a bottom border. I think the woven parts would have stayed in place, but I used sewing thread to sew up one warp channel and down the next, along the bottom, to be sure the bottom-most woven areas would not sag.
Frida Hansen’s open warp transparencies were woven with wool warp and wool weft. In this piece, in addition to the mostly wool weft, I wove some watery areas with a beautiful cotton yarn, and it worked fine; the stickiness and the grip of the wool warp held the multi-strand cotton well. I don’t know where I obtained this pretty cotton, or I would buy more to weave water areas in my next water lily tapestry. Does anyone recognize this?
I also experimented with leaving a good portion of the piece unwoven above the design.
And now, on to the large lily design…