Finally! The Eye of the Beholder is finished.
Since I may be heading back to the USA next weekend, I stayed up all night getting The Eye done, and did the work on the bottom hem to prevent the weave from unraveling. The top end remains to be done, then the hemming with bias tape, and the mounting.
Right now, The Eye is mounted on the blocking board–more like blocking styrofoam. The tapestry doesn’t look straight, but it actually is, if you look at the top right corner of the blocking board you’ll see the line.
Here are two pictures, one of the blocked tapestry, and another of me cutting the tapestry off of the loom. Hey, it was about 4AM, and I’m not a good photographer anyway!
See the pins stuck in The Eye? Most of them are safety pins. There are two needles in the collection. Why safety pins, you wonder? That’s what I could get. All the straight pins I found, in my hunt for blocking tools, had round plastic tops. Since I’m blocking with a iron, using those plastic heads would’ve been risky. When I’m back home, I block with the Oreck steam cleaner. It does a great job, its water tank doesn’t need refilling, and the steam is far from my hands.
Anyway, I had a choice between lots of needles and plastic headed straight pins, and I chose safety pins. Don’t ask me why it’s difficult to find plain straight pins in China. Perhaps the colorful plastic heads are in vogue because they are not plain. The trend in China is towards color and frills and furbelows that would make clothing not plain. After decades of depressing clothing, the Chinese are splurging on color and adornments. So, I extrapolate from that to the pins and think perhaps, maybe, possibly, that might account for the absence of plain straight pins.
To paint the cartoon on the warps, something I didn’t like before but learned to appreciate when doing Thar Be Monsters Out Thar and The Eye of the Beholder, I used kiddie water color pens. In sprinkling (for the first time ever I used this in blocking) the tapestry preparatory to using the steam iron, I saw some slight coloration from the pens in two areas. So, note to self, limit the use of the pens to design. That means that I will have to purchase extra sets of the water color pens as well as some oil-based paints for the warps. Sounds like a plan.
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