THE FINE ART OF UNPICKING

You may think that I have arranged these photo's in the wrong order but, my mantra is if in doubt pull it out! This tapestry has been a challenge in every stage of creation. Trying to make a good cartoon from an out of focus photo. Dyeing all of the wool has challenged my skills as a dyer. All of the colours have been greyed down with a mixture of red, yellow, blue, and black. I wasted a lot of time that could have been spent at the loom dyeing 5 gram samples. But now I am loving the colours, very different from my normal pallet of bright hues. I even had the loom warp, so it has been taken apart with the warp on it to be fixed! I also decided to celebrate my Irish heritage by adding one stand of linen to my weft bundles. This ended up a disaster as the linen won't unwind off the bobbin the same length as the wool. I ended up un plying the linen by spinning it through my spinning wheel. The first time that I rang Marie I had only woven 15 cm and every single pass of that I had to correct by pulling the linen through separately. So you can just imagine what I was thinking about my Irish heritage at the time? For the last three weeks every Monday morning I have sewn a thread across the tapestry so that I could chart my progress each week. Last Wednesday I decided that I could not live with the jug the way that it was as you could see my turns and I thought that it would look better woven a different way. So I spent hours un pulling it.

This confirmed my opinion that you must be crazy to work in tapestry, if you aren't it helps to be. It took me two days of solid weaving to weave the section back in. I am glad that I made the choice to un pull the equivalent of a small tapestry, 36 X 14 cm. I am happy with it now. It takes courage to unpick your work, but living with what you think is not working is a lot worse.

This is where I am up to today, the beginning of another week. It is difficult to get a good photo of this tapestry as the loom is taller than the ceiling fan so I am not able to push the loom far enough back. Best get on with weaving!