Many = One (weft color, that is)

I'm approaching the top of a tapestry that's 19" wide x 14" high, sett at 8 epi with 12/12 cotton seine twine.  As you see, it's a landscape and it's based on a drawing I made a couple of summers ago.  The area of land includes foreground with shallow field and a couple of trees that cast a deep shadow across the ground, a deeper middle ground that has a mass of foliage across the width as well as a small hill in a bit of distance, and then background with mountain ridge in more distance.  Cumulus clouds are building up above the mountains.   Blue sky is all across the top for about 1" above the top of the highest cloud.

You'll notice that the foreground and middle ground areas had many wefts making up the shapes.  Fewer shapes were used to create the mountains and the clouds.  However, I tried to break up wefts throughout the tapestry so that selvedges wouldn't begin to pull in once there were less wefts in play in any of the areas.

That's the reason the blue sky is being woven with so many separate wefts (twenty of them, in fact) -- even thought the entire sky is of the same color.  I wanted to keep the weft from beginning to draw the warps together and creating width problems at the top.  Seeing the top of a tapestry narrow as the end is approaching is a common problem (nightmare? headache?) faced by many tapestry weavers.  And it's usually caused by having fewer wefts at work across the width.  And/or by speeding up the weaving because the end is in sight!

Simple weft-faced plain weave--always a challenge!