Not twisted, just warped. And maybe a little eccentric.

So what’s so good about tapestry? Having just completed a three-day introduction to the basics with Maralyn Hepworth in Shropshire (www.maralynhepworth.co.uk), I have a better idea than I did this time last week.

Clearly it’s the wonder of creating fabric, building up a unique weave and playing with the colours and textures of the yarn. I especially enjoyed the soumak and the appropriately named eccentric weave, although here I’ve not managed to keep an even tension, so the fabric bunches up in places.

If I ever get good enough, it will also be about telling stories in the threads of a 3-D picture –like the Bayeux tapestry does, only it turns out that’s embroidery and not a tapestry in any conventional sense at all...

But a huge part of the pleasure for me, after recent years looking at such big-picture issues as international action in a humanitarian crisis, was undoubtedly the simple fact of focusing on an object 15cm x 12cm with zero consequences. Relieved of the obligation to produce and the aspiration to perfection, I’ve spent three wonderful days making shapes, tying knots and learning about colour blends, picks and sheds, vertical butting (nothing lewd!), and the creative uses of chip sticks as bobbins and dinner forks as beaters. The one advance in tapestry technology that really seems to be lacking is the woven equivalent of Ctrl-Z, the key combination on PCs that undoes whatever you just did wrong, which would have saved me hours of unpicking my picks. (But then the same could be said of many activities.)

The result is riddled with holes and mistakes, there’s a shocking quantity of ‘snow’ (where you can see the warp threads through the weft), and the surface is impossibly uneven. But it is My First Tapestry, and I’m unreasonably pleased with it!