I took an online tapestry class this past week with Molly Elkind.

It was superb!

I think I love taking classes as much as teaching classes. This course was one of many Molly teaches offered by the Weavers Guild of Minnesota. The course was called Using Photographs to Design for Tapestry.

I use photographs to design for tapestry quite often. Mostly as a jumping off point that leads to a final tapestry quite different from the original photo.

The format of the class was Zoom. I’d taken another Zoom class that was structured much like this one - 3 segments with homework in between - and was sorely disappointed. This was different.

Something you many not know about me is that I’m extremely introverted. I can rise above it when I teach or am in small groups, but throw me in a room full of strangers and I am the classic wall flower. So I was hesitant to put myself in that situation. But I’m so glad I did.

I don’t usually go “all in” with online courses, either. I tend to think of them as a resource for future use and usually can’t justify the time put in to homework when I have so many other things on my to do list.

The first segment of the course was an immediate ice-breaker for me. I can only attribute it to Molly’s teaching method. We were to come to the course with one or more images to work from and she gave us time to do some sketches during the course (I think it was 5 minutes or so). Of course, I didn’t have anything printed out but I knew I had a ream of images on my phone. So I doodled away on a couple I’d been thinking of doing something with some day… and came up with this:

This is from the image below of a close-up of the dried flower head of an Illinois Bundle Flower, a native plant that continues to pique my interest.

Illinois Bundle Flower (dried flower head)

I didn’t think much about it until she gave us our homework assignment - which I actually did!

I was getting excited at that point. For one thing, the course had reminded me of pieces rolling around in my head that might not otherwise have transformed. It didn’t feel like busy work. It felt like a step toward a new tapestry.

The course just got better. Seeing what everyone else was working on and the directions they were all going was so much fun. I guess I kind of geek out on that kind of thing - critiques and brain-storming together. It was a wonderful group of talented and imaginative tapestry weavers.

And the best was yet to come. For the last class session, we were to continue working on our cartoons, plans, maybe even sampling. All that comes with those beginning stages of design development in a tapestry. Seeing what others had come up with and how their pieces had evolved was such a joy to me.

I’ll share my steps here with you. From my little quickly made sketch, I started working on a cartoon.

First consideration: Size

I’ve had a warp on my Zeus loom for longer than I care to confess. It’s warped at 16 EPI - 32” wide. Never mind what my intention had been; I think it just might work for this one. And I’ve been dreaming lately of going bigger…

There were several ways I could have gone about making it larger. I could have simply redrawn it onto a larger piece of paper. But I haven’t had much success doing that in the past. Somehow the gestures and initial expression always gets lost in translation.

Another way would have been to draw out a grid and enlarge each section of the grid x amount of times, re-drawing each one to size. I couldn’t see myself doing that, either.

My chosen method was to take it to Photoshop.

My steps

Take a photo of the sketch
Open it in Photoshop.
Make a grid of 9 sections.

One by one, crop and save each section.

Print out each section to fit on an 8.5 x 11 inch paper.
Tape together.

It’s crude, but so was my sketch.

It’s a start.

Next steps…

I need to decide on colors and if you read much in my blog, you’ll know this is what always takes me the longest to decide. I envy those that are attracted to one hue and stick with it. The color blue and Marie Thumette Brichard comes to mind!

Foreground and Background

I plan to implement a couple of techniques and imagery that I use consistently in my work, incorporating both Prairie Songs technique of color blending for the background and representing mycelium networks with Vertical Soumak in the foreground. The trick will be to keep the focus on the bundle flower - landscape - and subdue the tones in the other sections.

I’ll keep you posted on the progress!

Taking this course not only gave me tremendous pleasure and inspiration, but it also made me re-think the Zoom platform in terms of my own courses. It’s convinced me to add that live component to my student slide shows in the future.

Thank you, Molly Elkind, fellow students in the course, and the Minnesota Weaving Guild for the inspiration!