Tapestry Weaving Techniques for Beginners

Real tapestry needs a floor loom, the thinking goes, and a frame small enough to balance on your knees can manage little more than stripes and the occasional lopsided rectangle, while curves and soft color shifts belong to weavers with bigger equipment.

Nothing in this book asks for a floor loom. Only the weft ever shows in a tapestry, so a soft color shift or a curve is decided by how the weft is laid, not by how big the loom is.

What holds a first panel back is usually one missing move, such as blending two colors without a seam, wrapping a line above the surface, or bending a row into an arc, and each of those moves is a skill with steps you can count, drilled in a technique chapter before a project ever asks for it.

Gradients, Curves and Raised Lines

• Color blending by hatching: two wefts trade places pass by pass until the eye reads a third color that is not anywhere in your yarn basket.
• Soumak wraps the weft over two warp threads and back under one; the result is a raised, corded line that plain weave alone cannot make.
• Curved wefts stack graduated passes inside a bounded zone, which is how a wave crest or a hill gets its shape on a warp that runs dead straight.
• Slits can stay open as a design choice, or close with a single interlock or a dovetail when the edge runs long or borders a soft transition.
• How does a photograph become a weaving? A full-size cartoon behind the warp reduces it to clean color shapes a loom can actually hold.
• Cotton warp twine and worsted wool at 8 ends per inch, plus a wraps-per-inch test for any yarn whose label does not describe its true thickness.

• Five original patterns, from the First Colour-Block Sampler to the Combined-Technique Landscape Panel, each at 8 ends per inch.
• Beat with a tapestry fork, a comb beater, or a sturdy dinner fork; the shed stick stays optional at this foundational level.
• Controlling selvedges: bubbling the weft keeps the edges parallel, and fixing errors early costs a few rows, not a full reweave.
• Finishing runs from knotted fringe and a damascus edge to a stitched hem, then mounting methods from sleeve and dowel to padded board.
• Dressing frame looms notch by notch with one continuous warp thread, plus tension checks that catch a slack end before weaving starts.