Straight lines and geometrics always seem to entice me when it comes to my initial plans for the creation of a tapestry.
And often I need very little in the way of directions on a cartoon, as I draw it up with a pencil or marker, colours and textures start to dance and wave inside my head. However, it needs to be said (should I say admitted) that the final woven results rarely resemble the first 'firm' plans for the idea being worked on.
But the textures are always there, no matter what, and so I proceed and I relish the firm base which needs to hold up the rest of the piece, keeping it fairly calm but still (I hope) interesting.
I had taken a five day tapestry course in Denmark in 2010 with a german tapestry weaver living on a tiny island in the 'south sea' of Denmark, Ærø.
One of the things which the teacher Franziska Kurth talked about was how to get depth into a piece, finding three dimensionality. Light and shadow, where is the light source and as I made the paper cartoon for this tapestry I thought hard about this. Where is the light source, and if it is coming from the left side of the space, which are then the darker sides of the structures.
So I picked my yarns, not very many using the KISS method - keep it simple sweetie - and started weaving. I had one idea in the cartoon as you can see and then...... things took a turn. My 'pyramids' did not want to be tall and skinny, and the sky did not want to be portrayed in layers and thus, when I got to the sky part I had a bit of a moment of panic - for I could not see what to do with the sky - my thoughts went to the stash of immense proportions upstairs and ..... suddenly my searching inner eye knew just what to go dig for - a hand dyed linen/wool mix purchased several years ago at a local yarn store.
The other yarns were left overs from the big red wall project which I did in 2010 and I think, yes, I really do think that possibly there will be enough yarn to do another few or five projects out of that box - my motto when dying and designing yarns - Always make sure there is enough - and so thankfully, until now anyways, there always has been.