Tapestry Weaving Adventure!

Hi everyone! This is Emily with The Woolery, I write this blog and our email newsletter so you hear from me a bit. I'm working on a personal project I want to detail on our blog.

This past winter break I went up to the Chicago suburbs to visit my family, including my grandma who just moved into a Memory Care Center. She has Alzheimer's and my grandpa was no longer able to care for her on his own in their home. He lives in an independent living apartment in the same facility so he is still able to visit her everyday without even having to go outside. Her new home is very nice and welcoming but I felt like her bedroom doesn't have enough personalized decoration. My mom said they aren't allowed to have items that are hard like picture frames or paintings hanging over her bed because of the concern that they could get knocked off the wall onto the bed. I got the idea to weave up a wall hanging that would go with the colors of her room and be soft and okay to hang over the bed! I'm hoping to get this done in time for it to be her Mother's Day present.

These pictures are my inspiration for my palette for this project. I want this wall hanging to fit in with my grandma's existing decor so I'm using colors from her bedspread and a painting (that hangs on a different wall) to pull colors from. My first step was to go through my existing stash and see what I had.

All of this is yarn that I already owned and came from stash! A lot of it is my own handspun, the cream skeins to the left are actually my very first yarn spun on my Lendrum Original wheel. They are lumpy and not even, but that is going to be perfect texture for this tapestry! The two grey in the middle are also handspun from Romney that bought from The Woolery before I worked here. The grey/green skein to the left of those is also handspun, my first handspun skein spun on a cross-arm (Turkish spindle). The turquoise puffy balls at the top are new balls of Knit Picks Tuff Puff but everything else is scraps/leftovers from other projects. There are even some handspun leftovers. I like the palette this created but I wanted to add more crunchy texture, and felt like I needed a bit more green to match the palette I was going for so I did pick up some more new things from our shop.

I had so much fun running around the shop and putting yarn/fiber next to my existing pile of yarn to see how it added to my palette. The roving is Hand-dyed Blue Faced Leicester from Frabjous Fibers in Fiddleheads. Directly above that moving there are 2 skeins of Rug Yarn from Halcyon in 1480 and 1540. The other two skeins are Cestari Mt. Vernon Collection in Babies Breath and Willow. The cone is Harrisville Shetland Wool Yarn in Jade. I think these were the perfect additions to my stash pile to make the colors exactly what I want them to be.

I think this is a much more balanced palette. It's also a LOT of yarn/fiber so I'm considering making it a tryptic piece, three thinner wall hangings instead of just one wide one. My next steps are to swatch to determine my ends per inch, sketching to see how I want to lay out the colors, and then warping my loom. I'll be keeping you updated along the way so be sure to follow this blog or subscribe to our Woolery Newsletter if you want to keep up with my progress.