Two years ago, I bought a needlepoint tapestry kit, thinking it would be a fun thing to work on in all the spare time I didn’t have.
I picked one from The Lady with the Unicorn (La Dame à la licorne), a famous series of medieval French tapestries.
I imagined my tiny New York apartment turning into something like this:
CC BY 2.5
(but without the French tourists.
Actually they could be fun.)
I think art woven into fabric is so neat - super tactile, like you could imagine it flowing through your fingers instead of just sitting on a wall.
For a year, the tapestry looked like this:
Then came quarantine.
I started working on it in March 2020 during moderately boring video calls.
Picking one color to work on for a while was nice - it’s like a graphic to-do list. My anxious quarantine brain loves those.
Sometimes the lighting was a bit weird –
or I wanted to avoid a shadow of my phone on the tapestry, so I took lots of photos where one side of the tapestry looks bigger than the other.
Starting to fill in that red background was awesome. I knew I wanted to save the whites for last so they didn’t run the risk of getting un-whited by the orange cheddar dust my fingers were inevitably coated in after my 5:30pm (or 3:30pm) quarantine happy hour.
I don’t know what happened between the last image and the next. I must’ve just stared at it really hard and then took another picture. I was probably distracted thinking about whether I should go to law school.
The Age of Red Fill Seeping Inexorably Downward started when I quit my job in September.
Then I started worrying about running out of red. The tapestry came with its own wool, but it assumed purchasers would be competent enough needlepointers to know the difference between a continental stitch and a half cross stitch. Reader, I did not.
Turns out one of them (continental) uses about twice as much wool as the other one does, which is evident if you take a look at the back of the tapestry:
I was also not sure how I was going to do those red and white berries (poisonous apples?) with super tiny dots in the top right. When you have lots of colors next to each other, the knots all pile up in the back and you inevitably end up trying to sew through a sea of tough knots, which is much harder to deal with than a sea of holes.
But I had that sweet, sweet fill down to a T.
By November, I started dreading finishing the tapestry - working on it was often the only thing keeping me sane during quarantine.
But my therapist says overcoming dread is the name of the game in 2020, so I finished it.
And I gave it a nice border. I was going to get it framed, but when I sweetly asked the nice art store people down the block how much it would cost, they said “Oh, between 3 and 5.” That’s between 3 and 5 HUNDRED DOLLARS. I was indignant but then I went down an internet rabbit hole about why framing is so expensive (something about all the shades of white) and got tired. So I’m going to wait until I get a job again before framing this.
And now, the gif you’ve been waiting for.
Updated: I’d been messing around with style transfers and I did one using my tapestry as the style image and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus as the content image.
Closer up:
It’s interesting to compare it to the style transfer I did from the original Lady and the Unicorn tapestry:
Code is here.