WOVEN TEXTILES PROJECT_01
WORKSHOP / PENLAND SCHOOL OF CRAFT / 2025
Image Weaving — Penland
FLOOR LOOM / PLAIN WEAVE / TAPESTRY / COLOR REDUCTION
A photograph reduced to a limited yarn palette and woven in plain weave on a floor loom, in a workshop with tapestry artist Erin M. Riley.
THE WORKSHOP
Woven during a workshop with tapestry artist Erin M. Riley at Penland School of Craft, exploring imagery weaving on a floor loom in plain weave.
The photograph was reduced to a limited palette and translated into a woven image, with discontinuous weft, hatching, and shaped sections used to create depth, highlights, and tonal variation.
01 / SOURCE IMAGE
An existing photograph — an image of a cake on a plate.
02 / COLOR REDUCTION
Nineteen yarn colors.
The image was indexed down to a limited palette — nineteen colors — so every tone in the photograph maps to a yarn.
03 / YARN PALETTE
Yarn colors were selected against the palette and plied together where needed to build shading between neighbouring tones.
04 / SAMPLER
Testing color before committing to the image.
Before weaving the final image, a sampler was developed to test single and blended yarn colors, explore how adjacent hues interacted, and practice the plain-weave techniques needed for the tapestry.
05 / LOOM PROCESS
The warp was threaded and sleyed for plain weave, the image pinned beneath, and the image built from the bottom up in discontinuous weft.
- THREADING HEDDLES
- SLEYING THE REED
- CARTOON UNDER THE WARP
- DISCONTINUOUS WEFT
- HATCHING
- ECCENTRIC WEFT
06 / FINAL TAPESTRY
