In Autumn 2009 the Urban Craft Club delved into the world of wool and pulled out a magic carpet of textures, patterns and colours.  Once freed from the inhibitions of 'doing it right', woven tapestry is a wonderful way to play with wool as it's easy to learn, and the number of rules to be broken is limitless.

Watch us while you weave!

We now have a YouTube channel! You can watch, and watch again, footage of our tapestry sessions with step-by-step instructions to weaving on a frame by simply clicking on this link: Weaving on a Frame

Winter Tapestry

To create the 'Winter Tapestry', which was displayed at the Archway Winter Craft Fair in December 2009, we first spent a session painting winter scenes, inspired by photographs, other artists and our own imaginations.  Enlarging these on the photocopier and then cutting them up, we created a large bank of abstract winter designs, which we used as the basis of our tapestry panels.

Each member of the Urban Craft Club chose a design and created a woven panel inspired by its colours and lines.  Some people adhered carefully to the original designs, while others used the design as a starting point and then followed their intuition and arrived somewhere completely different.

Outreach

As well as our regular craft sessions, we took the joys of weaving to a couple of other groups, inviting people who might never think of joining a Craft Club, to experience a taste of weaving.  It proved a really interesting experience, as weaving techniques are used all over the world for different purposes and most people have tried it at some point in their lives.