I wrote about the Weavers’ Mark project with the British Tapestry Group and weaversbazaar in a previous post. It’s been on my mind - and on my list - to follow through and come up with my own mark. Practice what you Preach…

My daughter was here in the studio with me (weaving baskets) while I was writing that post. She’s an artist, too, and we naturally share our creative brainstorming.  I looked up at her and said “I need to leave my mark!” and told her what I was thinking. I explained to her that I was thinking Soumak would be a good way for me to implement my mark; especially since I use that technique in various forms in nearly every weaving I do these days.

She asked to see my weaving journal (I think she actually said “Where’s your sketchbook!”) with an outstretched hand and quickly made this page of possible marks for me.

I had not at this point sat down to actually draw anything out, but her sketches couldn’t have been more spot on the images I’d been envisioning.

What I especially like with using this technique is that I could still go back into my previous weavings and add the mark with surface embellishment. One more wonderful quality of this type of Soumak.

I noted a few I liked best and never got back to it. I thought I would add it with embellishing the surface later on one small piece to test it out, but then never quite got around to that, either. Until this week.

I was finishing up a warp with samples for my Soumak course, and had a wee bit warp left. I’m one of those weavers that doesn’t like to waste warp - and I remembered  the Mark I was going to start using. So I did a sample to see how it would work.

Here it is:

I like it!

This is pretty high contrast; I wondered what it would be like to use the same weft color. I found a piece I could try that out on and this is what I came up with. Not ideal. A little rough… but it’s a start.

So, I’ve made the first step in creating my Mark. I’m still amazed that I never thought to do this before. Since writing the blog post on the Weavers’ Mark projects, I’ve been consciously looking for them in other artists’ work. Not to name names, but I’m seeing a lot of marks that still haven’t made it to that database. 

If you’re reading this now and you have a Weavers’ Mark, please submit it to their database. I just sent mine in before hitting the publish button on this post. Practicing “Practice what you Preach!”

Hope to see many more next time I look!