make art from what you see

On the street where I live, the houses are very close together, like shoeboxes, with stoops in front and long skinny yards in back. Many of the houses touch or nearly touch, or have an alley just wide enough for a small person to fit in between them. It’s not always clear where one property ends and another begins.

Some people care about their property lines more than others, and mark them with tall white plastic fences or rows of brick. Others care less and their borders are more of a suggestion: a collapsed wire fence, an unruly hedge. At the backs of properties there are often several generations of fences that have been put up over the years, one in front of another, and sometimes people discover, when pulling out old ones, that they own a little more land than they thought they did. In the unreachable areas that no one claims or wants to maintain, weed trees grow and wild cats have their litters. 

A while ago, two men across the street from me began arguing about the place where their properties touched. They argued about it loudly for several days, standing on the sidewalk in front of their houses, while the rest of us kept an eye on them from our front rooms. When it rained, one man’s runoff was flowing onto the other man’s stoop. Inside our houses, we picked sides. The man with the runoff was older and friendlier, but was he negligent? The other man was angrier and shouted more. Within a couple weeks, a contractor van had appeared and a narrow concrete wall was built to divide the stoop from the alleyway, with a chain link fence on top. The men stopped fighting. 

Later, I noticed that the new border had been modified: the man with the gutter problem had painted his side of the wall dark red and pink. From our side of the street, it was the stoop that looked decorated, but if the owner of the stoop objected, he kept it to himself. I liked that spot because, in addition to breaking up a stretch of mostly beige concrete and brick, it seemed like a satisfactory solution to one of the central challenges of a dense neighborhood, respecting each other while being ourselves. 

I added their spot to a running archive of photos I had taken in my neighborhood, which seemed like they would be good problems to work out in a weaving. I like processes such as clay, metalwork, and glass that add materiality to images or other source forms. Weaving is also a nice variation on painting because it kind of serves as canvas and paint at the same time, so it is an interesting translation, especially when texture or tension varies within the weaving. 

A small loom is a great way to think through compositions and to experiment with colors, shapes and lines. In my neighborhood, where the streets are lined with the flat fronts of houses, this works out well, but it also applies to close-ups of other subjects, like the nasturtiums I photographed at the end of the season. Weaving on a small scale with subjects like that is like painting with broad strokes–you’re translating a composition into fat chunks of color.

One tip I learned in a painting class: Make a simple viewfinder from a piece of cardstock, with a cut-out rectangle in the proportions of your canvas (in this case, your weaving area), say, 4x5. When you are looking at a scene, it helps to frame different parts in your viewfinder, to find the best composition. What part looks the most interesting or feels the most balanced?

Smart phones are also great tools for composition. Take a picture and then crop it, zoom in, change the angle until the composition feels right. You can pick the ratio of the image; it can change the whole feeling of the composition to make it long and skinny or a square.

Sometimes, I sketch out the composition once I’ve identified it. This extra processing of the image really seems to help clarify the shapes, so I recommend it if you are having trouble with the composition. You could also fill in the blocks of color with markers or colored pencils.

In the examples shown here, the yarn I’ve used is basically all the same weight, which means the focus is mostly on the color. I use a wool rug yarn in a worsted weight from an online shop called Tufting Nation; they have a beautiful range of colors.

The other yarns I’ve used in these weavings are from an old stash of incredible handspun wool and mohair Diné yarn bought from a shop in Chaco Canyon in the 80s, and several vintage acrylic knitting yarns that I get in thrift stores and on ebay. I love the old acrylic colors so much, like that turquoise and red. 

I’ve warped the loom with a poly-cotton blend in 8/4 weight from a store on Amazon called Paper Farm. The basic requirement as I understand it for warp thread is that it doesn’t break when you pull hard on it, and this fits the bill. 

The two other variables you could introduce are yarn thickness and warp thickness. This is an easy way to start playing with the feeling of the composition, the materiality of the shapes. You can try the same composition and change up those variables to experiment. Big yarn pops out more, and you see the lines of the warp across it.

Or warp your loom with yarn, not thread, and try different warp colors. Make some shapes in thick yarn and some in thin. Weave some shapes or colors more tightly, so they draw in the weaving in those spots. Do multiple versions of the same image, reducing the number of colors each time.

The little loom is a way to experiment with color, texture, and shape. I don’t worry too much about loose ends, skipped warp threads, or staying in the grid. I usually build shapes from the bottom up, a rule of thumb for tapestry that is very helpful, and the heddle bar in the boomloom helps me keep track of which shed I’m in. If I’m working on two shapes at once, and I need to weave a new row all the way across, sometimes one shape will be in one shed and one will be in another. When that happens, I usually just take out the top row of one of the shapes so that the sheds match. 

For two shapes that share a vertical side, I usually use the method of joining them in which they share a warp thread. I like the way this looks and it makes the weaving sturdy and all of a piece, without holes. 

It also feels like a useful life hack – a friendly way, like my neighbor’s stoop, to share a border.

Thanks to Little Looms magazine for including me in their Winter 2024 issue! This is a really neat publication with a lot of terrific info about small loom weaving. You can find more info on their website.