Tapestry Time

The Mighty Wolf continues to sit empty. On a day like today, all I want to do is sit down and weave away with that beautiful pink tree in view. But my yarn has still not arrived. I am losing my patience with this company.
So instead I spent my morning back on the tapestry loom. This exploratory project was unfairly abandoned last quarter due to school work.

It has been frustrating trying to create the shapes that I want to create. I was aiming for a much more circular shape here, and as you can see the first attempt looks like a diamond. My second attempt is closer, but the edges are squared off, which makes it look like a bulgy rectangle.
This tapestry won't be very pretty, but it is a good exercise in creating a variety of shapes. The design process feels a lot like trying to draw a circle using very large pixels on a computer screen.
This is a view from the back taken from between the warp. This side will be the front of the finished project. It is perfectly smooth, hiding all the work that went into making it.

In the future I think I'll work with a more complicated design that I first draw out by hand and pin behind the warp so that I can "trace" it. That combined with a warp of more ends per inch should make the process feel "crisper."
This crane is the only other attempt at tapestry I've ever made. It was a final project for my weaving class in college, which was four years ago. I'm actually pretty proud of it. This is a variation on "kesi" or "slit" style weaving, which was the ancient Chinese way to weave tapestry.

In Kesi, the weaver leaves slits between color blocks, which makes clean breaks between colors. It also means that the final tapestry is essentially full of holes. I took this idea and created a tapestry in just one color and emphasized the slits to create a design.