So I was inspired by this thread to have a go at making a Mintakan tapestry. I was working on another project involving a lot of jute webbing when I saw the thread and the connection was made.
Anyway, this first picture is after I'd taken two 8 foot lengths of the webbing overlapped them a bit and then just topstitched them together. This stuff is great as far as that goes, you can topstitch in khaki thread and it becomes pretty much invisible. After I joined the two strips I started doing some of the embroidery. Despite my best efforts looking through various trims and such, the only thing I could find that came close to looking like the black and white diagonal striping with the way it seemed to have some depth was yarn embroidered directly on to the jute. This is where the project took a rather laborious turn. I set out embroidering with the black yarn using a counted thread technique and then going back over it and filling in the remaining space with the white yarn.
I chose to do 8 feet of embroidery even though the tapestry is only 4 feet long because the original tapestry appeared to me to have the embroidery on both right and wrong sides and the edge of the actual tapestry indicated that there were two layers of jute fixed together. I probably could have just hemmed up the edges of a 5 foot strip or so, but the wrong side of the yarn embroidery had a lot of messy knots and joins as well as all the work from the beading so I figured I'd embroider the 8 foot strip and do all the beading then join it end to end and sew the edges together to make a nice flat 4 foot strip.
laid out flat
embroidered on both sides
and some obligatory "on the back of a chair" shots
Overall, the embroidery made it more work than I was anticipating, but it produced a really satisfying result. It definitely feels like it could be an artifact from a primitive culture.
-John
Anyway, this first picture is after I'd taken two 8 foot lengths of the webbing overlapped them a bit and then just topstitched them together. This stuff is great as far as that goes, you can topstitch in khaki thread and it becomes pretty much invisible. After I joined the two strips I started doing some of the embroidery. Despite my best efforts looking through various trims and such, the only thing I could find that came close to looking like the black and white diagonal striping with the way it seemed to have some depth was yarn embroidered directly on to the jute. This is where the project took a rather laborious turn. I set out embroidering with the black yarn using a counted thread technique and then going back over it and filling in the remaining space with the white yarn.
I chose to do 8 feet of embroidery even though the tapestry is only 4 feet long because the original tapestry appeared to me to have the embroidery on both right and wrong sides and the edge of the actual tapestry indicated that there were two layers of jute fixed together. I probably could have just hemmed up the edges of a 5 foot strip or so, but the wrong side of the yarn embroidery had a lot of messy knots and joins as well as all the work from the beading so I figured I'd embroider the 8 foot strip and do all the beading then join it end to end and sew the edges together to make a nice flat 4 foot strip.
laid out flat
embroidered on both sides
and some obligatory "on the back of a chair" shots
Overall, the embroidery made it more work than I was anticipating, but it produced a really satisfying result. It definitely feels like it could be an artifact from a primitive culture.
-John
