You KNOW you want it….  so let me just give you a little tease that will have you putting this set at the top of your wish list!

16 hours of brilliant instruction by Archie Brennan and Susan Martin Maffei, filmed by Garry Benson of Dragon Design in South Australia.  This set took years to produce….and you’ll see why when you get it!

DVD 1:  Looms, Warping, Basic skills, Leashes

DVD 2: Weaving adjoining shapes, weaving higher angles, weaving triangles, weaving small adjacent shapes, weaving lower angles

DVD 3: Lower angles, sampler summary, endless loop warp, basic curve

DVD 4: Slides 1980s — 2000s

DVD 5:  Eccentric weaving, test woven circle, inking on refined circle, weaving refined circle

DVD 6:  Hatching and half-pass, etc.

DVD 7: Hatching and half-pass cont’d, taking a line for a walk, weaver’s mark, framing small tapestries

DVD 8: 4-selvedge weaving, Dersu Ursala, Susan on half-pass and hatching, minimizing steps by pulling, half-passes and hatching cont’d,
Archie and Susan farewell.

HOW TO ORDER:

Cost $249
Shipping:  $6.95 for US, 21.55 for Canada, $25.75 for all other countries
Mail check to:  Brennan Maffei Tapestry
P.O. Box 312
New Baltimore, NY 12124
Please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery after check arrives

During my post-graduate year studies in 1961 and ’62, I had tried a variety of solutions to develop a more efficient way to deal with locking off and removing the warp ends, when cut, at the two non-selvedge edges of a completed tapestry.  I was then the only technically sklled tapestry maker at Edinburgh’s College of Art.  In fact, I was certain that I was the only art student or lecturer around Britain with my depth of technical experience in tapestry.  There was also little known research anywhere at that time in Coptic or pre-Columbian tapestry techniques.  The many mural size tapestries of European origin had simply been cut from the loom and hemmed at these edges.

But small tapestries were of increasing interest to me and those edges were clumsy and visually intrusive on small works, so I worked out a new method for at first a 3-selvedge solution, and then later a 4-selvedge solution.  No cut warps!  I had ‘invented’ an important and unique technique….well, not quite!  In fact, three decades later I saw that my ‘invention’– with many variations!–had been commonplace in regions of what is now Peru, woven some three or four centuries earlier!

In time I realized that the re-invention of many things, not just in textiles, was no rare occurrence.  The real value of my experience was to apply such an approach to the teaching of any skills.  To sneakily ‘set up’ students along a journey toward a ‘discovery’ of their own that, as such, was indeed new and unique for them.  This certainly encouraged and developed an open and creative thinking process, both in techniques and design development.  That was the real gain for me in the 60s!

Archie Brennan
12 June 2009

Check here for instructions on making your own 4-selvedge tapestry

The Fuller Craft Museum is currently holding an exhibition of fiber arts that include some very well known artists.   Archie Brennan, Susan Martin Maffei,  Maximo Laura, Lia Cook, Dianne Itter, Michael Rohde are just a few of a long list of names we all recognize.

The opening was August 3, and will continue until November 23, so there is still plenty of time to get there.