I am delighted to announce that I now have photographic prints of my latest tapestry "Eynhallow, disappearing island."
Small and medium sized prints are available to purchase online through the gallery website. They can be found in "jo art prints" in the "shop" drop down menu on the homepage, here's a direct link.
Small, medium and large prints are available, framed and unframed, at the gallery.
Just a quick note to say that I've updated the "follow by e-mail" button in the right hand sidebar of my site this week. The e-mail subscription service I previously used through Google was scrapped in July which meant those who previously followed by e-mail stopped getting updates on new blog posts.
Before the service closed I managed to download my list of followers and I have now (hopefully) transferred them to a new mailing list service. Those who previously subscribed by e-mail shouldn't need to do anything to receive future blog posts, you should get notified by e-mail as normal with a link to my latest post (best check your spam filter in case it heads there though.) If you no longer want to receive my blog updates you can opt to unsubscribe from the mailing list at the bottom of the e-mail.
Fingers crossed this has all worked. I am a not a techy person!
In other news I have been working on making photographic prints of my latest tapestry, "Eynhallow, disappearing island". They will be available for sale through the gallery and gallery website within the next week. I'll be back with an update when that's live.
"Eynhallow, disappearing island"
Size: 170 x 76cm (67" x 30")
Materials: cotton, linen, rayon and wool. Woven at 8 warps per inch on cotton warp.
Handwoven tapestry based on an acrylic painting in my sketchbook (size 20.5 x 9.5cm) of the view looking across to the uninhabited island of Eynhallow from Aikerness beach in Evie, Orkney.
Eynhallow, also known as Holy Island, is known within local folklore as a disappearing island due to the surrounding turbulent tides. It was also the summer home of the mythical "Finfolk": fearsome, amphibious, human-formed creatures with webbed fingers and toes and scaley skin. They were known to be great swimmers and equally at home on land or under the sea.
A selection of detail photographs below:
I finished my tapestry and cut it off the loom last week. It was an exciting day.
I don't think I was prepared for just how tired I'd feel after finishing, I felt like I'd completed a marathon! Granted it is my biggest piece to date and I put in a huge effort over the last month as I was determined to be finished by the end of July. Post-completion mental and physical fatigue was therefore inevitable. I'll be back with "finished" photos and more coherent sentences soon.
Trimming all the long end on the back. There were a lot of colour blends, therefore a lot of ends!
I'm on the home straight, just lots of subtle colour blending until I reach the top.
I say "just", but obviously creating a seamless, subtle blend has its own difficulties, but at least I'm not weaving lots of interconnecting shapes whilst blending, like the lower half of the tapestry.
This tapestry is proving to be a classic example of why it's difficult to answer the often asked question, "how long does it take to weave a tapestry?" I managed to weave 1ft last week (1ft x 30" wide) whereas a similar sized area in the lower half of this tapestry took around a month to complete. It really does depend on the complexity of the composition/drawing and how you're choosing to weave it.
I'll be finished next week. Watch this space!
Wayhey, I'm finally in the sky section of my tapestry! After reaching the half way point last month, the horizon, I had a big tidy up in my studio and put away colours and bobbins that were no longer needed. I think I felt smug for half a day before remembering that the second half is almost like starting a new tapestry as it requires a completely new set of colours. I also made things more difficult for myself as I no longer wanted to weave the sky section the way I had drawn it on my big sketch/cartoon (which is tied behind the loom) as it would look too different and disconnected from the sea section, so I'm now working between the original painting, reference photographs and the cartoon.
I had a couple of days of head scratching and finding new colour blends but now that I've got the new section established I'm fully on the move again. It has grown a fair bit in the last couple of weeks. It won't be long before I need to stand on a scaffolding platform!
"It'll get easier when I reach the bright turquoise-blue near the horizon" she told herself, naively.
Ha ha ha.
