… I want to acknowledge this issue’s theme editor Pat Williams for delivering a wonderful selection of articles on proportion. The theme editor is an important contributor to each issue of Tapestry Topics. …

Please consider sharing your time and talents… as theme editor for one of these upcoming issues:
Teaching the Next Generation of tapestry artists and professionals
Exploring Color
Weaving with Handspun Yarns

Passage is the act of passing from one place, condition, etc. to another, the route one travels. ATA invites artists to use innovative approaches that push the technical or conceptual meaning of the term in their submissions to the ATA's biennial juried small format exhibition.

For more information about this exhibit and to download the prospectus, please visit the Small Tapestry International 2: Passages link on the American Tapestry Alliance’s website:

… Sarah Swett had spent over 15 years contentedly weaving vivid tapestries that told stories until she felt frustrated by tapestry’s seeming limitations and became fascinated by egg tempera paint … which allowed her to explore an imaginary land, a narrative she had been drawing for several years – “Palouse by the Sea.” The Palouse is a dry region in Northeast Washington and Northwest Idaho characterized by high, rolling silt dunes created by the ice ages. … Sketchbooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of streets, maps, houses, and people with names who had conversations and insisted that Sarah write down their words. … What followed was four years of fiction writing about this watery place. …

Sarah’s return to the loom was sparked by these narratives “and jealousy of a person who didn’t exist – a tapestry weaver in the second novel whose work was nothing like mine, long, narrow, colorful tapestries … limited in palette, simple in structure, and I longed to do work like that.” … Sarah describes, “The initial style shifts were the result of copying the work of my character – or what I saw as her work while I was writing about it … when I began to write less and weave more, I found that, narrative or not, what I wanted from the woven surface was different from what I wanted before. A limited palette, large areas of negative space, the freedom from detailed cartoons were all so pleasurable that I found I had lost interest in packing my work with movement and color as I had before.”

below: Sarah Swett, Hang Up and Draw, 56 x 37”

below: Sarah Swett, Sketchbook - Revised, in progress, 72" x 36"

Index of Content