An earlier version of this article was published in the Tapestry Weavers West newsletter.
Recently, my regional tapestry group, Tapestry Artists of Puget Sound, began a group project in which each of us would weave a tapestry, or maybe more than one tapestry, that was inspired by an existing textile. Beyond that, there were no other stipulations. The chosen textile would serve as a springboard for a design that could evolve in any direction that caught our attention. Because I often use references to historical textiles, or even incorporate details out of historical textiles, into my tapestry designs, I engaged with the project easily.
My first “springboard” textile was an Andean tapestry fragment. There may be a face nestled into this very busy weaving, but much of it shows a variety of stepped, meandering and checkerboard motifs. It appears that the horror vaccui people often use to describe European Medieval millefleur tapestries influenced Andean weavers, as well.
Borrowed Language 1 source textile – Andean
(left) Borrowed Language 1 design. (right) Borrowed Language 1, tapestry, 12”x8,” 2024, cotton warp, wool weft. Photo: Mary Lane
I excerpted motifs from the Andean textile, altered them a bit and arranged them in a variety of patterned compositions until I came up with something that I liked. Because I saw the different motifs and shapes as weaving language, I called the piece Borrowed Language 1.
In this tapestry I reengaged with a feature of weaving patterns that I had explored a few years ago in weavings that I called Woodles – woven doodles – borrowing this term from Kennita Tully. The feature of weaving patterns that I refer to, is the fact that, to weave patterns, the number of warp threads needed for each element must be calculated so that the repeats fit within the width of the tapestry and the number of warp threads contained in that width. Or, conversely, one can let the number of warp threads needed to weave the repeats of the patterns determine the width of the tapestry.
Because I did not want to weave on single warps, I assigned each vertical line two warps. Given the intended size of my tapestry, this meant that I had room for four repeats of the gold motif, instead of the six repeats that are in the Photoshop design. I altered the white motif, as well, so that I could fit entire repeats of the motif within the number of warps I had available. I find that thinking within the constraints of a pattern – calculating the number of warps needed to weave it, or altering a pattern in order to weave it with the number of warps upon which you have already decided, to be a great mental exercise.
My second tapestry in this series, Borrowed Language 2, was also based on an Andean textile. I wanted each piece in this series to be the same size, so that was another “given” that imposed limits as I extracted motifs from the source textile and simplified or altered them for this second tapestry.
(left) Borrowed Language 2, design. (right) Borrowed Language 2, tapestry, 12”x8,” 2024, cotton warp, wool and cotton warp weft. Photo: Mary Lane
In Borrowed Language 2, I wove the red background with boucle yarn and the patterns with cotton embroidery floss so that the material differences in the two yarns became an additional feature of the tapestry.
As I alluded to, this project was interesting to me because I enjoy looking at, thinking about and riffing off historical textiles. I may weave a few more pieces for this project. I worked up some potential designs with the Borrowed Language series in mind, but instead of creating them in Photoshop, I drew them with markers or colored pencils.