The Deliberate Owl

I've been enjoying tapestry weaving lately.

It's such a slow art form, in some ways. You design the piece, or at least, have some idea of what you're working towards. Then you assemble it from the bottom up, line by line, like a printer. It's very different from painting or drawing, where you have access to the entire page or canvas at the same time.

(Read: Project: Tapestry Weaving on my Lap Loom)

With each project, I'm trying to learn a new technique, either for weaving or finishing. I learned to weave soumak, which was originally a rug-making technique that loops the weft yarn around the warp, and used it to add texture to parts of my tapestry. I learned a way of framing/mounting smaller works using canvas stretcher frames. In my most recent piece, I learned a new way to finish the warp ends by braiding them together.

Another fun thing: whenever I'm at my loom in the afternoon, my kids tend to pick up their projects and join me! My 8 year old, in particular, has enjoyed learning new techniques from watching me; he even made his own peg loom last year!

(Related: How to Consciously Be A Role Model in Creativity, Curiosity, and Crafting for Children)

Here are some of my latest projects.

You Are My Sunshine

22"x29", cotton weft and wool warp, 2025

Some tapestry weavers sketch out everything they plan to weave in great detail ahead of time; others make a vague cartoon then see what happens. With this one, I had a vague cartoon and some general ideas about color and movement. Since I'm still learning techniques and practicing making the colors and shapes do what I want in the weft, my initial mental images differed from the final product, but that's part of what makes it interesting and fun.

I was inspired by a couple things. When I started planning it, I had recently seen a talk by Fen de Villiers about dynamic, vital art. His work features masculine virtues and brings earlier art movements such as Art Deco, Futurism and Vorticism into 3D sculptures.

I had also recently read a couple books on tapestry weaving, including Tommye Scanlin's reflective discussion of her nature-inspired Appalachian works, The Nature of Things. I had read Carrie Gress's book The Anti-Mary and Catherine Pakaluk's book Hannah's Children. I was thinking about feminine virtues and celebrations of feminine culture, and looking at dynamic art from earlier eras. And while I didn't end up with an art deco feel, there was some influence, especially when looking at colors for background versus foreground.

I will probably mount this one on canvas stretcher bars with fabric like the earlier one.

And a few in progress photos…

Ocean #1

9"x13", cotton weft, acrylic and cotton warp, 2024

This one was a study in textures! I went with a general ocean theme. I added fringe to the bottom and hung it from a stick instead of mounting it or braiding the edges.

Red Hills by the Sea

9"x12.5", cotton weft, acrylic and cotton warp, 2025

This is the one where I was first learning soumak, and trying out some of the techniques and ideas that fed into the larger tapestries.

Ocean Twilight

22.5"x31.5", cotton weft, acrylic and cotton warp, 2025

For this one, I wanted to try a larger piece focused on textures and colors more than shapes. I decided to approximately follow the design of the smaller blue ocean tapestry pictured above. Like in that one, I used a mix of cotton and acrylic yarns, which I collected mostly from yarn scrap bags at thrift stores.