Krokbragd Tapestry

“Playa: Impossible Sky,” 2016

By Judy Ness
August 2018

Editor’s note: This year’s Best of Show weaving in the 2018 National Norwegian-American Folk Art Exhibition was Judy Ann Ness’s “Playa: Impossible Sky,” an intriguing combination of krokbragd and tapestry techniques. She won Best of Show for “Playa: Summer Lake, 2014” in 2015. (Read more here.) Now seemed a good time to ask her more about she combines techniques in her signature style.

Why, oh why, would one want to do this technique? I do not know. It began to develop in 1996 during graduate school in textile arts/weaving at the University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. The interest in Norwegian textiles began much earlier, probably 1968 or so, when I saw a pair of a Norske immigrant’s giant white mittens knitted and felted displayed at Vesterheim during Nordic Fest. I was a local kid from Lake Mills, Iowa, just northwest of Decorah. You never know when something will spark, take hold and stay, lurking for years until it surfaces with meaning and intent.

Let’s look at the details using krokbragd and tapestry techniques.

KROKBRAGD

Krokbragd lozenges

Traditional krokbragd is mostly woven as small interlocking patterns of almost infinite possibility. It has some constraints being a bound rosepath: 3 lifts repeated over and over again: 1-2, 2-3, 1-3. Using the same color on the same lift repeatedly produces a pattern of three vertical, solid color bars. The magic comes when the colors are changed. The treadling goes forth without variation, and the pattern is varied simply by the choice of color change. I’m particularly fond of making lozenges with a lacey black outline. Be assured, at some point in exploring the basic krokbragd, a weaver will start to see and understand what color changes will create a specific pattern.

TAPESTRY

Tapestry is two-shed plain weave warp: 1 and 2 on a vertical loom. If using a horizontal loom in a straight draft, the lift would be as for tabby: 1-3, 2-4. It’s plain weave with two lifts. The business of how the weft is woven is the substance of the tapestry technique. We won’t go into this here except to say the weft weaving controls the imagery.

A COMPARISION & A SOLUTION

Krokbragd pattern is loom controlled and tapestry is outrageously free of control. To combine them is interesting and time consuming. After years of trying to find an elegant solution to the interlock portion of tapestry on two lifts marrying with the loom controlled three-lift action of krokbragd, I failed. Absolutely. The more complex method was replaced by reverting to a simple clasped weft technique. (Reference: Peter Collingwood’s excellent The Techniques of Rug Weaving.) The solution was to use the krokbragd treadling with the clasped weft technique. It offered a choice of tapestry or allowing the krokbragd patterning to emerge.

Melding these techniques created a chimera, a beast of two different parentages that combine making something new. As you will see, the early work expressed krokbragd more distinctly with later efforts merging both the krokbragd and tapestry personalities. Curves, depth, and imagery become more possible to achieve.