Tarndie tapestry weekend

As I mentioned earlier, I was at a tapestry workshop last weekend.
Part of the weekend was about designing. Cresside showed us some of her works and the original design she used as well as a current design in progress. She used collage, something that I have not done much of, except when we were required to as part of the Textiles and Design course and that was very little.
So I found some old magazines, not that easy as we don't buy many, especially not the ones you throw away or rip up.

After our discussion of collage and how it can be developed to produce an image, and after our walk around the property, we then had a look at some images we had brought along as inspiration.
The focus was on landscape.

I ended up using an image I had brought along rather than the immediate landscape.

Salt lake in Central Australia, from my trip to Uluru last year.

I tore up pieces of paper that I thought roughly matched the colours of the image - and added some colours from other images of the same site.

As you can see, aspects of both images crept in. 

It was impossible to find exactly the colours of the original image in the magazines, so the work immediately became based on the image, not a replica.  Just what I need to learn.

Cresside provided all the weaving supplies and she had anticipated us using the local landscape (in retrospect, I don't know why I didn't!). This meant that she didn't have the colours I needed, which has very little green. Fortunately, I had brought along some of my thrums from previous works.  Of course, this meant that I could only use the colours that I had.  Some of the thrums were very small and so repeating the colour selection became impossible.  Not to worry, I was trying to learn to produce an abstract design. It doesn't matter that there will be very little similarity between my original image and the final outcome - I hope.

The thrums were a big mess, it took ages to select the colours I wanted and then pull them out.

Of course we didn't get the weaving finished so now I have to decide whether to use my yarns and try to get a more accurate colour match or to stay with the thrums and make do. I think I will try to use only the thrums, making it impossible to try to replicate the image or the collage.  This might give me some discipline in the design.

Using the thrums, which were short, meant that I didn't need to use a bobbin, except for the beating down, not a bad thing as this design would have had quite a lot of bobbins in use if I had had longer yarns.

My thrums were much darker than the collage, another change from the original.

I haven't done any more weaving this week but hope to get some done this week.  It won't be a big piece, and I am changing the proportions as I go too (yet another abstraction), so it shouldn't take too long to do - when I get around to starting.

If  you are interested in some more images and info about the weekend, here are a some links.


Elwyn's Facebook page.

Pat Scholz' blog.

Instagram image where you can see that this person actually used the local landscape.