My “Summer Spree”: Teaching Kids Tapestry

By Laura Lawrence

I’ve tried my hand at teaching kids various things, with various degrees of success. This summer I think I found the subject that suits me best: TAPESTRY! This is the story of what we did and what I learned in order to make next summer's experience even better.

I offered classes to three age groups: Second/Third Grade; Fourth/Fifth Grade; Sixth - Eighth Grade. Fortunately, no one signed up for the youngest class. The schedules of the four sixth graders meant that they were with the fourth and fifth graders, making eight in that class. There was only one seventh grader, so she got a private lesson. Eight was a lot to handle, but we managed. Next year, I'll offer more times to fourth through eighth graders, since the age spread didn't seem to present any problems, and fewer would be better. Though I didn't make any gender restriction, they were all girls.

I made canvas stretcher-bar looms for all nine girls. I didn't know if the younger ones could handle the fixed one-way shed which results from a figure eight warp, so I just wrapped the warp around the loom in a circle at 4 epi. This way, they could lay the cartoon between the two layers of strings and let it rest there. I'm presently looking for a small loom with a simple shedding device like the one Yuiko, the seventh grader, brought from her native Japan. It was German-made and worked very well for her. I think it would eliminate a lot of the mistakes some of the other girls often made in not alternating warps.

I wanted to give the girls the fun of creating their own choice of colors when it was time to begin their individual cartoons, so I bought lots of Kool-Aid® and various textures of white wool and mohair yarns. Then I had one of those serendipitous experiences. The woman I bought the yarns from pulled out a bag of "tapestry" yarns (what Americans would call needlepoint yarns) in close to a hundred colors and sold it to me for $15. We still did our Kool-Aid® dying, but not in the quantity I originally anticipated. Whew!