Landscape Weaving

Profiles a West Bengali caste specializing in producing painted narrative scrolls and performing songs to accompany their unrolling.

Potholder looms can make so much more than potholders! You can weave on these popular looms using the traditional loops or with nearly any yarn to make a variety of patterns, including Plain Weave, Twill, and Checkerboard. You can also weave shapes other than squares, such as rectangles and triangles. Tapestry weaving is also fun on the potholder loom, and Noreen shows you how with detailed instructions for setting up your loom and working tapestry techniques.

Learn to weave the basics in this little portable book. Basic tapestry techniques are introduced for the beginner weaver.

Kathleen Matthews shares her unique method of creating beautiful landscapes using quilting, dyeing and stitching techniques. She shows what materials are needed, and takes us through her design process from taking reference photographs of landscapes through composition, identifiying the light source and choosing fabrics and thread to create the scene. There is an excellent section on using simple dyeing methods to create unique fabrics that are ideal for landscapes. We then learn how to transfer the design on to fabric, create a quilt and then layer fabrics to create the various parts of a picture. Free machine embroidery is then used to create the effect, with hand embroidery sometimes employed for details. There is plenty of information on creating landscape elements such as water, skies, trees, hills and mountains, fields, flowers and buildings and more, and on depicting the four seasons. There are five gorgeous step by step projects showing an Autumn Woodland, Flowers in a Landscape, a Mountain Scene, a Sunset on Water and a Lavender Field. The book is filled with beautiful landscapes to inform and inspire textile artists. This book is part of the new Stitched Textiles series for textile artists (in particular intermediate to experienced embroiderers, quilters, etc.), showing how to embellish and enhance fabric surfaces with paints, dye, appliqué, collaged elements, stitching, beads and more. Themes are forever popular in the textile world, and this book on stitched landscapes will demonstrate how to design, realise and create original work.

Tapestries were among the most prestigious of art forms, created for the mightiest in the land and valued for centuries. Despite its illustrious history, tapestry weaving is actually a simple technique that requires little equipment or expenditure, and can be done anywhere. Written by a prominent tapestry weaver, this lavishly illustrated book gently leads you through the whole process with detailed diagrams and exciting work by contemporary weavers. It will be useful to the absolute beginner, but experienced weavers will also find new ideas and techniques to tempt and inspire them. The book includes a step-by-step guide to setting up a small frame loom and starting to weave; basic and more advanced techniques, and how to create shapes and textures; advice on taking your work into the third dimension, whether bas relief or fully sculptural; information on the qualities of different materials and how they can be used to create the effects you want; and design ideas for tapestry and how to follow supplied designs. This will be an essential source book for experienced and novice weavers, and is beautifully illustrated with 190 colour illustrations and diagrams.

Textile Landscapes demonstrates how to develop your approach to textile art with a focus on using found objects and paint and stitch on cloth and paper. Cas explains how to exploit the contrast between the hands-on textural quality of working with fabrics and threads and the spontaneity and movement of brush marks to lend a painterly quality to your work. She begins with the basics – keeping a sketchbook to generate ideas, painting and stitching on cloth and on paper and working digitally; Inspiring Landscapes looks at natural and urban space, the changing seasons and great landscapes as well as intimate spaces and travel diaries; Painting and Marking with Cloth explains the practical aspects of painting and dyeing cloth and how to make connections between paint, print, dye, stencil and stitch; Stitch-scapes looks at the different forms of landscape, experimenting with photographs and prints and how to translate those images using ink, stitch, abstract and collage techniques and then at how to transform the image using digital techniques; On Closer Inspection covers using elements and details from landscape and the environment as found objects and for research; finally People and Place explores the relationship we have with the outdoors and the built environment, as well as personal interpretations of place. The book includes artworks by the author that explore the UK, USA, Europe and Australia, as well as works by other internationally renowned textile artists. A creative guide ideal for textile artists of all levels – students, teachers and practising artists and makers – to make unique and beautiful work inspired by the world around us.

Projects: Sun sampler -- Peruvian birds -- Cat and fishes -- Simple landscape -- Cover design -- Tulip -- The parrot gets the last word -- Little owl -- Sleeping dog -- Sleeping cat -- Bird.

Sakiori is an approach to rag weaving used by Japanese peasants to cope with the scarcity of new cloth for clothing and household textiles. In modern times, there is instead an overabundance of cloth filling up thrift stores and being discarded. Weavers can use this source of “rags” to make useful and surprising new cloth. Depending on the fabric used, results can be rugged and utilitarian (like cotton rugs) or fashionable and delicate (like silk scarves). The book begins with an overview of the history and context of sakiori in Japan, followed by methods and tips for successful rag weaving with a variety of materials and looms, including rigid heddle looms as well as floor looms. Charts and worksheets make it easy to find the information weavers need to get started, and 21 projects with instructions and drafts provide inspiration and ideas.