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Still playing around with the antlers design. Less antlers now and more vines, but there is a family resemblance. Weave structure is granite based on 20-end satin, and I'm taking it on faith that these recent pieces will wash up with very deep texture.
And underneath:
Despite the continuing and very dismal rain, we drove out to Pickens today to visit friend & fellow artist Ellen Kochansky in her brand new house near The Rensing Center. Her gem of a house is built with great respect for the natural environment, and contains many delightful features. One of these, dear to the heart of any fiber artist who ever used a store-bought pattern, is the guest room walls:
Bruce photographed her house quite extensively today, so I'll leave the serious stuff to him, but here's a snapshot of Ellen and Bruce reviewing some images on the laptop:
Between the raindrops, we took a brief tour of the Rensing Center. Here's the piano, and a most wonderful mirror frame:
And of course Scylla and Charybdis, after Charybdis was coaxed down from the roof:
We spotted a few really nice birches…
Then after a warming lunch of chicken soup, Audrey bade us goodbye (at least I think that's what she was saying):
Now from the Department of Eagle-Eyed Weavers comes this find from Melda: if you look carefullly at pages 39 and 40 of A Crepe is Not Just a Pancake (see Monographs in sidebar), you will see that 12-shaft drafts #1205 and #1206 are exact duplicates of drafts #1203 and #1204. Oops! Good catch, Melda. That will be corrected in the next edition.
This time around, instead of high contrast, I tried a new approach: dark weft on dark warp. The warp is a mixture of black, brown, blues & greens, and this weft is a dark blue marl. The swirling antlers (yes, more antlers) are weft satin against yet another granite weave, and of course the antlers will be warp satin on the reverse side. Now grant you, this one won't exactly hit you in the face, but the more I look at it, the more I am liking it. Very mysterious.
If you absolutely must have bright colors, let me show you the beets & beet greens in the pot before they were cooked for last night's supper. Give some people a camera and they lose all self control.
And if that's not enough brilliance for you, I'll share this photo just in from our roving correspondent in Addis Ababa:
What can I say? It's just the other side of this.
A quick look at Bamboo, which has just been hemmed. The black and pinkish-mauve yarns are cotton, and the off-white is bamboo.
Interestingly, I found this microscopic image of the bamboo stem after I finished the piece. There is a remarkable similarity, not at all intended.
Here's the credit for the above image.
Another two granite weaves. This pair features maximum float lengths of 5, and they are not the reverse of each other on the reverse side, so effectively there are four granites in this sample! Makes me dizzy. The diagonal twill-like lines disappear on the reverse, too. This design practically named itself: Antlers. Click to enlarge.
Here are the two granites:
Good news yesterday from my friend Barbara Walker. We have been collaborating on book projects over the past few years, and for the second time in a row our work has been accepted into the National Fiber Directions show at the Wichita Center for the Arts. I love collaborating with Barb, and having the work recognized in this way is just icing on the cake.
This one's for Margreet: the reverse side of the spotted cloth. Click to enlarge.
What appears to be very long weft floats on the reverse side is just a trick of the lighting.
The granite weave ground has 13 risers out of 20 on the face of the cloth, so with the dark warp and pale weft, this ground looks darker on the face and lighter on the reverse. The satin spots behave as you would expect—weft satin light on the face, warp satin dark on the reverse. Such fun to play with these and swap them around!
Back to the dobby loom. On a granite ground, little spots arranged in satin order (this pattern repeats after 5 spots). The spots are a weft satin, and each spot is surrounded by a 2-pixel ring of plain weave. You can hardly see the plain weave, but it does provide a separation or barrier between the granite and the satin.
The plain weave is a little more obvious in the draft. Here are two total liftplan repeats. Click to enlarge.
The last day, just about ready to cut off. Bamboo. The medium and the message.
It felt very good to get back to the loom this morning, after a severe hangover from too much of a certain British miniseries.
A note that the work pictured above was created largely in Photoshop, both the imagery and the weave structures, which are various granite weaves. This seems like a good time to remind my readers that I'll be teaching a class in Photoshop for Weavers at Penland School August 25-31. Click here and scroll all the way down. This will be total immersion in Photoshop for dobby weavers and jacquard weavers, in the most gorgeous natural setting you could imagine: the North Carolina mountains. Get away for a week of pixels, with like-minded folks, and enjoy the scenery and the good food. Bring a companion—they might enjoy taking a class, too! Many offerings available in all media. More information and registration forms here.