A Tapestry in Alpine Blue Silk

Here is my second tapestry on a common theme...palms in the moonlight of Santa Monica Bay. Completed in one hue, alpine blue, along with its values and shades along with a bit of metallic. This piece was done without touching my beater...I needed to lose that beating habit before I start working again on my Circus piece.

This too was an experimental piece. I wanted to play around with sett. This piece has a sett of 6 epi except in four places where I used 12 epi. It was fun to slip in several squares of 12 epi to see how it would work.

The first square I wove did not stand out. It simply blended into the 6 epi on each side. The second square I tried to incorporate a bit of a sandy beach into the piece. The third square was a square of my selected hue - alpine blue. Since I dyed silk...the alpine blue is probably not the blue you would expect. It does remind me of the water in Anegada. The darker alpine blues mixed with silver metallic look more like the water in Santa Monica Bay in the evening.

This was a pleasant piece to weave. Nice colors. Nice feeling yarn. Silk beats cassette tape any day. And the beating habit melted away...

Cassette Tape Tapestry

Here is a tapestry I recently finished, Santa Monica Bay at Civil Twilight. I like how the moonlight simmers in the sky and reflects in the ocean.

This was an experimental piece. The tapestry was woven with cassette tape. The palette is somewhat subdued due to the inherent nature of the 'yarn'. I used about three cassette tapes to weave the piece using singles. The stuff goes a long way. I also pounded the cassette tape flat. To acheive the shimmering sky, I lightly spray painted the cassette tape brown with a chrome white paint.

The sett was about 12 epi and the final piece is about 7.5 inch square.

This is one of those pieces which grabs you from afar and draws you in. The metallic moon is stunning. It is done with some metallic thread. When you get close you start to notice the details; the twisting of the trunk, the painted cassette tape in the sky and the undulating warps.

It was quite difficult to weave...I have never pounded a piece as strongly as this with my beater. To break the habit of excessive beating I wove a second piece in which I never picked up the beater. Check out my next entry.