Disruption and Interruption

What a wonderful time I am having at Arrowmont this weekend.  It is SEFFA 2019 and I came to Gatlinburg Thursday evening.  Jennifer Sargeant is the instructor for "Woven Tapestry and the Language of Color."  I would normally not do a post about a class until it ends.  However, I need to get some lessons learned down before I lose them.

Yarns I dyed for Arrowmont class

For the record, I love color.  I just find color theory incomprehensible and choosing colors for tapestry daunting.  I have a handle on value but that is the extent of my knowledge.

Hand dyed golds

Cell phone edit to black and white to check value.

We started class with a little bit of color theory.  Jennifer kept it short and simple and we looked at Jennifer's samples.

The yarn packs Jennifer made for us of Vevgarn are on
 the table in front of us.

 We were able to start weaving right away and of course my mission

was to play with color techniques in wedge weave.  

Predictable wedge weave start.

At first I was taken aback by Jennifer's advice to break up the predictability of my wedges by distorting and interrupting the color or structure.  There is purple in there for goodness sake,  how more wild could this be?

End of day one, see  that disruptive little purple box?

Evening of day two

Jennifer encouraged me to use some traditional tapestry techniques to manipulate the color and see what would happen.  I was surprised by the results.  Warning, some wedge weave/tapestry geekiness is ahead. Lot's of details of the good, the bad and the ugly for future reference. 

First the bad, I was rocking and rolling with my giant purple wedge when Jennifer cautioned that is was dark and overwhelming.  She suggested breaking up that large block of color.  I did some unweaving to avoid a giant purple triangle (what I had planned).

I did some dashes by doing a full pass of purple and a half pass of gold.  

The effect was nice but here comes the ugly.. alternating the purple and gold creates a messy spot unless done properly at the beginning or ending of the weaving pass.

I did some alternating stripes by doing a full pass of dark gold and a full pass of light.  The colors are so similar the stripes are fairly indistinct and it looks like subtle shading. 

Notice the disruptive quality of those little purple boxes and how that is lost with the yellow on dark gold box.  The wedge weave is interrupted but there is virtually no impact on the visual interest of the tapestry.

Shy little yellow box 

I have enjoyed getting to know my classmates and will post tomorrow with examples of the work and more pictures.

Hard working and happy tapestry weavers.