Weaverly

Looking Back, Looking Forward

I don't make New Year's resolutions any more, because my history of keeping them is abysmal. But I do like to pause & look around.

Looking back, on the wrong side of the cloth as it travels to the cloth storage beam, I see the point at which the cable failed. The long floats were not visible on the right side, but if I had peered underneath the web I would have seen this mayhem (green arrow):

 

The inch of plain weave marks the pause for repairs and the restart. All is going well now on this sample warp. It's a group of structure samples for an upcoming workshop. That's the looking forward part.

 

 And now my wish for everyone for the New Year: build bridges.

Your interpretation may vary.
 
 

The Export Business

The black warp is sleyed and the weaving is begun—sort of. 

 

What you see here is the initial few inches, wherein I weave plain weave until all the loose ends are identified and corrected, any threading errors (none this time!) corrected, and then a wooden stick inserted in the shed with some ties looped around the stick with lark's head knots. Then a few inches woven to lock everything in place. 

What happens next is that the first few inches of warp will be trimmed, just up to where the plain weave begins, and the wooden stick will be tied to the cloth apron rod. This little routine keeps unnecessary rags and tags of warp hanging down and tangling in the loom works on the cloth's way to the cloth storage beam.

For this warp I've designed 18 design samples in Photoshop for some of the classes I'll be teaching this year. I copied and pasted the designs from Photoshop into WeaveMaker on my Mac, then exported them as wifs. At the loom, I opened WeavePoint on the Windows-running laptop connected to my dobby loom, opened the wifs, and started weaving the samples. The reed marks will disappear after the cloth is washed. 

 

What would we do without wifs?
 

Being Pretzeled

Did you know that pretzel is a verb? It means to twist, bend, or contort. This morning I was pretzeled after threading three more inches of the black warp. Two thirds done. 

To straighten out, I'm going to the Y to swim laps earlier than usual (they close at 1 pm today). 

Season's Greetings to all!

 

A Collaboration

I've engaged in a dozen or so collaborations in the past, and I'm in the midst of several right now, so I'm always interested in reading about how other artists approach the subject. For the past few months I've been following Terry Jarrard-Dimond's online documentation of Compositional Conversation; in this project 15 artists joined together in creating a single work of art. Today's post is the wrap-up of the project, in which the artists reflect on their experience. Pictures of the stages along the way are included. It makes fascinating reading. Check it out!

Yesterday Sandra pointed out that Flossie's left eye opens at a different rate than her right. Fascinating—I hadn't noticed that. So I spent more time looking at her picture. Yes, there is an asymmetry to her face. And considering that the picture was taken on a cel phone, it contains a lot of information. I worked on it a bit, cropping, eliminating the stripe on the left, enlarging, indexing to 6 colors, and reducing it to black and white.

Converting to black and white forced Photoshop to organize the color table from light to dark when indexing. Then it was easy to choose new colors in the table. Here is one possibility. Maybe for weaving in double twill? 

 

I've just received a Google Alert that there is a Picasa web album of the recent Fiber Artistry exhibition in Duluth, Georgia. One of my pieces, Hyacinth, is in the show. The exhibition was held in September-October of this year. There are lots of good pictures of many of the fiber entries (including weaving!) here. Enjoy.

 

Happy Birthday, Erik

My family isn't very large, but when we get together for a birthday we make enough noise to compensate. 

 

Pillows Finished

Pillows is finished.

I know it sounds funny.  Remember the Hitchcock movie The Birds? The ads said, "The Birds is Coming!."

 

 

What interests me here is just how little information is necessary to define a personality. In the original file, there are only a few pixels for the facial features, and yet this is unmistakably Catalina. The mouth is perhaps less successful, but the mischievous eyes are spot-on. 
 

Pillows Halfway

Pillows at halfway point. The little hands have emerged from the land of weavings-to-be.

 

Meanwhile, this is going on just outside:

The shovel on the lower left will give you some idea of the scale. The stone bank is to control erosion into the creek. The rest of the yard looks pretty much like this, now that the irrigation pipes are buried:

Soon it will all be covered in vegetation (at least that's the plan). Meanwhile, pattern, pattern, pattern!  
 

Brooklyn Bridge

A picture I took on the one sunny day we had in New York works particularly well when reduced to three colors:

I don't know what I'll do with this yet. I think it would be a good starting point for a project with lots of text, or layered with an alternative image. Tree branches? Large birds? A pirate ship? A stack of hot pretzels?

A Few Surprises

I found this surprise in my camera as I was downloading pictures from last week in New York: the moon as seen from W. 51st St.

 

And I found this surprise in my driveway today, after weeks of weather-related delays:

 

 

This bodes well, as does the return of this fellow:

 

I've started weaving Pillows, which you first saw here:

Pillows will have a patterned border, a device I've used a few times in other work. The patterning acts as a frame, but uses the same weave structures included in the body of the piece. The weaving is going well. All heddles behaving nicely.

And what a wondrous and splendiferous item arrived in today's mail! A box of handcrafted chocolates from a weaver/chocolatier. I just noticed that the text on the tablecloth reads "It's an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers." 

  

And, to cap things off, The Book has arrived back from its copyreader extraordinaire (all will be revealed).

 

 

 
 
 

The Secret Life of Double Twill

This morning I cut off the most recent pieces of double twill, and took a good look at them. Canal, which you saw on the loom here, can be seen in more detail in this scan:

  

What is really amazing is the accidental coloration of the reverse side, always a surprise:

Also seen here in its entirety is the sampler of double twill dobby simulations. Reading from left to right, top to bottom, the swatches are for 40, 24, 16, 16, 24, and 40 shafts:

 

…and on the "secret" reverse side: 

 

For any of these pictures, click to enlarge.

And finally, I thought you'd enjoy seeing an approximately 12x enlargement of the 40-shaft sample. Click.