Drawing A Weaving

When I don't have time to weave, I draw instead

For as long as I’ve been weaving, I’ve been drawing weavings too. As I noted in the margins of my first year art school sketchbook it is “easier to explore a concept in drawing than to actually make it”. Further down the page, in brackets, I wrote “it’s cheaper too”. 

Weaving was an expensive pursuit for me back then, scraping by on my meagre student budget. I scrounged for yarn in charity shops and pound stores, struggling to amass enough raw material for the large scale woven sculptures I wanted to make. Magdalena Abakanowicz used to forage for discarded rope on the banks of the Vistula river to make her famous Abakans, but the waterways of Oxford had no such bounty. Instead I wove with torn strips of canvas, muslin and cheap Primark bedsheets. 

In, Through, Over (2010) wire, woven bedsheets & muslin strips

From the beginning, when I couldn't afford to weave, I drew instead. The pages of my sketchbooks were covered with delicately interlocking strands. On paper, I taught myself the difference between plain and twill weave, twining and soumak, and laboriously copied out the diagrams I found on Wikipedia. 

Later on, this obsession with drawing weaving would actually come in use. In 2017 I wrote and published a booklet called Tapestry Weaving: An Illustrated Guide. Each illustration was painstakingly rendered in pen and ink. Looking through them now, I’m astonished by the level of detail, right down to the careful pen strokes showing the twist and ply of each strand of weft yarn. Which did I love more, weaving or drawing? Looking at these illustrations, it's hard to tell.

Original pen & ink drawings for Tapestry Weaving : An Illustrated Guide

Drawing, for me, is a way of articulating something to yourself, and a way of exploring the invisible infrastructure within what you are making.In tapestry weaving, the weft is packed down over the warp, hiding it from view. In my drawings, I can pull the weft apart, and show how each strand passes over, and then under and around, and then over, and under once again. You can see, rather than feel, how this binary sequence of plain weave must work, and the challenge of continuing that same sequence consistently over many, many separate sections of weft. 

These days, weaving is still expensive for me, but it’s less a shortage of money that I struggle with, and more a shortage of time. Most of my day-to-day is taken up with the demands of Balfour & Co, even though, as I’ve frequently discussed here on Substack, I’m trying to cut this down. Nevertheless, in the past seven days, I’ve set up, taught, and packed down a workshop, wound yarn, packed orders, emailed students, made content for social media and written this post. 

With time so tight, I’ve found myself returning to drawing again. It helps me to think through what I’m weaving and designing, and what new possibilities I might explore on the loom. I’m still hoping that this year I’ll begin work on a new collection of tapestries, but I’m trying to hold this process gently. There’s no sense stressing myself out and rushing things. Sometimes the most interesting ideas are the simplest. And even when I don’t have time to sit down at the loom, I still have time to pick up my pen, and draw.