A small hand woven tapestry on a lap loom purchased from Hawthorn Handmade. They're great and only £15 pop up loom. After my house partially bod up in June, with no access to nearly all of our things, we were starting to go a little bonkers being stuck in a very empty temporary house far away from anyone we knew. I'm also disabled, in a lot of pain and unable to work, which I miss, being at home all day looses it's charm fast!
I saw this and decided to pull a little money from my savings, bought this along with a pack of cheapy 50g balls of wool. Wool goes a long way when making little tapestries!
When I started this piece, which is my second woven tapestry, I hadn't decided on much other than that I wanted to learn Soumak and I was going to entirely use glittery wool. The original name was "Soumak Madness" or "Totally Braided". As you can see, I suck at coming up with names.
*I tried not to write too much for each section whilst also trying to explain each picture, very awkward balancing act! Feel free to ignore the words and just look at the pictures though :)
1- My first ever attempt at Soumak. I watched a video on YouTube 8 times to get this down and I was still stumbling on it! As we are in temporary housing, with no WiFi, every watch of the video was watching my precious data spiral the drain as I've recently discovered, YouTube eats data!
2- Creation of Underhill which lead to the eventual idea of Stonehenge (I was reading Mark Chadbourn, Age of Misrule at the time which did influence me) As you can see I've added more Soumak at the top of my hill. First I did an inch of the middle green tabby weave, the I pulled that up at the middle to create a gap and a hill. The pillars I made from a picture I found online(3) whilst searching for Weaving tips. Then I added another few lines of light green tabby weave above and below the light green Soumak.
3- This is the picture I found. No explanation but the picture was pretty obvious and I wanted to give it a try, every new thing I found I wanted to try as I was discovering I really enjoyed weaving. As I was doing Soumak I thought other braids would look nice and did them inside the hill. My Husband was also reading the same books with me and it was his comment of 'Underhill' that sparked the idea.
4- I decided I wanted the sky going from dark to light, I had not decided to do stonehenge yet, at this point I was considering a tree on the hill! Because I was unsure and because I wanted the sky to me divided properly I did the night at the top first. The moon I cartooned (to do the design alone without weaves around it and add them later) using.... Soumak! The moon looks pudgy, but that gets fixed by the tabby weave next.
5- As you can see, the moon looks WAY better here! The tabby linked behind the back on the moon made it a lot more moon shaped! I also embroidered stars on top using a white glittery wool Ness was using to knit gloves. (All 3 of us became very crafty since the explosion!) Which kept up my pledge to only use glitter wool. There is another line of black soumak at the end of the black wool also.
6- This is where I suddenly changed track. Instead of making a tree... I started doing Stonehenge. Using the same braided pillar technique (it probably has an actual name I don't know but I couldn't find it.) To achieve the texture of the Preseli Bluestone used at Stonehenge u used a mix of light and dark gray. The top of the pillars I did with Soumak, but on 1 warp vs the 2 warps previously used. It's fine that the warps pull together like that, a few lines of tabby weave with straighten that out in no time!
7- The Stones went by quite quickly in 2 sessions, at this point I was only taking a picture at the end of each session, later on I started taking mid points. These are also cartooned.
8- Now, I wanted the sun coming through the middle stone... So I went looking for yellow wool... But there was no yellow glittery wool in the pack! Ness however had received a pack of wool from her mum, which included yellow and I had a small reel of the nylon glittery stuff. So I took 2 yellow, 1 orange, a nylon for each bit, and braided it!
9- Here's the braid, and that is how far I got it wedged into my needle. I was starting to think this was a bad idea.. It was VERY stiff to weave with and anchoring it in the Stones was impossible without destroying my stones. But if it was not anchored at the back, gaps would shop at each side of stone!
10- As hard as it was to weave, very stiff and the anchor was a very tricky. But I love the pattern it created weaving with a braid. A zoomed in sunshot is at (13) Now was the time for the sky. Again to avoid the gaps, I had to anchor. This time I went all the way accrd the the middle, going around the backs of the stone. You'll see this in the back picture (21) and in picture (14) you can see that his has pushed the stones up further making then stand out.
11- having finished the light blue it was on to the dark. This part was particularly nerve reading. Because if I'd done my calculations correctly days and days ago... When the dark blue topped the stone, I could carry on weaving back and forward with no glitches!
12- Now I'd finished the medium blue, it was into the dark. Nearly as dark as the black, on pictures they look almost the same, but they look very different when it is in front of you.
13- Here is the closer up of the sun. I really love the pattern created by the braided wool. You can see a small amount of warp, that is because the braided tool together was larger than Aran, the warp showed through. However I thought having a little white in the sun worked quite well.
14- here you can see how the light blue wool weaved behind the stones, pushed the pillars forward ever so slightly and created a raised texture like the raised effect of the soumak.
15- Just finishing the dark blue here every time I. Thought I was done, I'd pack it down and book, another centimetre appeared! This happened several times, also in such a small section with tabby both above and below... The warp threads were tight and creaked in protest everytime I passed through. But I was determined to fill it in as much as I possibly could.
16- With the dark blue fly filled in to the black you can see the difference to the black above. Because I packed it in as much as possible, it was also slightly more glittery that the lighter blues which I think helped give it a look of blending into the night sky.
17- Here is my little 'helper', Loki. Sometimes he steals my wool because he's part cat. Sometimes he shuffles into my lap whilst I'm awkwardly weaving around it.
18- I wanted to put some actual Preseli Bluestone beads to work into it. Not taken from Stonehenge obviously, but the original site of the stones in Wales has natural run off of the stones, where people turn them into beads and things. The only ones I could find were already jewelry. I felt awful chopping open the bracelet and decided when I'm doing better, I'll sort out a couple of quid to buy myself a bracelet for my arm rather than my tapestry.
19- After finding the sky I decided to add to the dark green, filling in some of the large gap I'd left at the bottom. I did a few types of soumak, using 2 warp threads, on the top and bottom line, on the second and fourth line I did a fishtail soumak. The middle line of soumak is using 1 warp instead of 2.
20- After the Soumak was done, I decided to add tassels using the dark and middle green I made rya knots on 2 warp threads. The middle knot is on 4 warp threads, is longer and has more strands, including some of the brightest green. This was my first time using tassels/rya knots, and I liked how them came out. Gave them a hair trim after to to ensure their length was similar (bar the middle one) at the end.
21- Here is what the back looks like. You can see blue shapes of the stones where they wrapped over them. The sun looks very messy at the back where I had to anchor it with each pass. As you can see the stars look less organised from here, I actually went around the back strut once and had to undo some stars. This picture was taken after so the ends have been tidied up into the back of the weave. Also beneath the rya knots, it has been hem stitched to keep then in place. First time again for something and the hem stitch made Soumak seem like a breeze.
22- This is where I added the beads. I originally had thought to put a bead on each knot for the tassles... But by that point I discovered I really likely the look of them and I didn't want to cover them up. So I played around with the beads until I found a spot I liked, then I started adhering them using a thin green warp thread, using a fancy beading needle a friend lent. (Very odd things.)
23- Here it is. Stonehenge Sunrise. Started September 1st, Finished 21st September. Not bad for my second ever mini tapestry!
