Tapestry Weaving for Beginners and Beyond

Book excerpt: Learn to weave your own stories and make personalised woven wall art with this guide to tapestry weaving. A collection of wonderful woven hangings for you to build your tapestry weaving skills. Learn all the techniques you'll need to create your own woven tapestries with a unique, personalised element. Author, Kristin Carter, explains all the skills required to make heirloom woven wall art with a very personal theme and how to recreate images of people, pets and places to create your own paintings with thread'. Learn all the basic techniques for tapestry weaving including a quick and easy way to make your own loom using an old photo frame, how to choose the right yarn, working with a template and how to start off a weave. Kristin then explores all the tapestry weaving techniques you will need to make your own stunning wall hangings. All of these techniques are accompanied by step-by-step photography so the instructions are super clear and suitable for absolute beginners. Learn how to do rya loops, weft facing weaving, soumak, pile weaving, diamond twill, overweaving, boubles, and an inverted rya fringe. There are 17 incredible projects for you to experiment and try out your new skills. Each of these can be adapted in order to create your own personalised wall hangings so you can make special heirloom woven art for friends and family. Kristin explains how to set up the loom, gives guidance for yarn amounts and what other tools and equipment are needed for each project. All of the projects are suitable for a an A3 sized loom so you only need one size to try out all of the variations. There are projects for abstract patterns, gradient weaving, blending compatible yarns, pet and people portraits with special techniques for recreating the texture of fur and hair, how to play with transparency in a weaving and creating texture using different yarns. Other techniques covered include cartooning (how to make a cartoon template from photographs); creating templates from your own sketches, how to create a marble effect and advice about colour theory and weaving.