Thursday, January 12, 2012

One Week Down only 51 to Go!

2012Week1Here’s the first week of my 2012 tapestry diary. For the first month I plan to keep it simple, play around with colors, yarns, patterns etc.

2012Week1detailI’ve been thinking about making bluish halos around the black and white images in my tapestries, so I’ll explore how that might work.

2012Week1Detail2 

4 comments:

K Spoering said...

I like the blue. It gives a kind of seasonal atmospheric effect. It might be interesting to change that color just a bit as the seasons change.

Jan said...

Oh, I definitely plan to change the colors every month. I might even add a tiny bit of another color this month. It's fun to have all these balls of color in my basket, but then only use a tiny bit.

jennyheard said...

I an totally inspired by the diaries. I am very new to tapetry but use other looms. Do you have size or other recommendations for a newbie? What size is the tapestry and loom. I feel like I've already missed part of the year and need to get going.

Jenny

Jan said...

Hi Jenny
My diary is about 14 inches wide, which allows for 2 inches per day, assuming each row is a week. I am weaving mine as parallelograms, or wedges, to avoid slits. Some people weave different shapes every day. You could weave something really narrow and just weave all the way across, every day. It's up to you.

And don't think you have to take on a whole year, you could just start with a month, or 3 months or whatever works for you.

Personally, I think it's very important, once it's all set up, not to agonize every day, just do something. Today I was really busy and suddenly realized I had to leave for work in like 15 minutes, so I just grabbed some yarns, mixed up 3 colors and wove a plain colored wedge, really fast, although the 3 color blend was interesting. Sometimes it turns out boring or ugly, but it doesn't matter, because it's only a little piece of the whole, and the important thing is just to be doing it. It gets my creative juices flowing.

I hope you'll give it a try! Let me know if you do. If you have any more questions email me at janetaustintapestry@gmail.com