Looming Thoughts

OK, bad pun, I know.

Somehow it seemed a bit appropriate for much of today's studio time.  I'd ordered two more harness sets for the six harness Macomber loom I recently bought from Pat Williams.  I placed my order through Sarah Haskell http://macomberloomsandme.blogspot.com/, who's a dealer for Macomber, about ten days ago.  They were sitting in a box by my front door today when I walked home to check the mail.  So even though I knew it would be challenging to install the sets by myself, I decided to give it a try.

Yes, I also know that I got hurt in a MAJOR way last year when working with a floor loom by myself.  One lesson learned with that awful accident was to be more aware of what the equipment was doing as well as what I was doing.  I managed to get the installation done today with only a few scratches and dings on my fingers and hands.  Of course, I'm going to feel the pain later from sitting in yoga-like positions under and around the bottom of the loom for much of the afternoon!

Here's the loom now--with eight harnesses and ready for a warp in the near future!

But... back to the tapestry now.  Here's where I stopped with it earlier this morning:

This tapestry is based on one of the several sketches I did of fiddleheads a couple of springs ago.  I'd worked on them with positive/negative effects, trying to make a balance of dark and light that was interesting in the composition.

I'd stuck them in a portfolio and pretty much forgotten about them after completing the tapestry based on one version, the one called Spring Profusion.  I had the sketches with me at the Tallahassee workshop recently and when I looked at them again, I found that a couple of them were pretty interesting.  I picked one that would adapt to the 24" wide warp that was waiting for something.  And now I'm happy to see it pretty well underway.  

If you're wondering about the red orange half-passes that run through it... those are indicating where I've stopped weaving at the end of each session.  I've thought about doing that before but never have... showing the progress of a tapestry in some way.  Just one more indication of my obsession with time passing, I guess.

Since I work on tapestry by building shapes, the line of red orange meanders rather than traveling straight across.  As a half pass, the line is a dotted line.  There is a border of color at the bottom of the piece so I thought the red-orange lines would be fine throughout the monochrome of the main body of the tapestry.