Innholdsfortegnelse for May - June 2018 i Handwoven

A FEW YEARS AGO, I attended the exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica mural at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. Picasso started the mural upon hearing about the bombing of the Basque city in April 1937, and by June 1937 he had finished what has become one of his most famous paintings. Besides the power of the piece, what struck me about the exhibition was the large room full of drawings that Picasso created prior to putting paint on canvas. The sheer volume of sketches was overwhelming. Some of those images made it into the final piece, others did not. Picasso had the knowledge and experience from a lifetime of painting and studying art to enable him to go from inspiration to idea to implementation in only three months. That…

FOR ANY ARTIST, inspiration arrives as a welcome gift. Some find their muse in nature or perhaps hanging on the wall of an art museum. My inspiration came from something sitting on my kitchen counter: a ceramic Noah’s Ark cookie jar. I’ve had this cookie jar for a long time, but it has never faded into the clutter of my kitchen counter. The brown clay ark is unadorned except for a few glazed accent colors. Noah, staring out at me from a cabin window with his white hair, has always caught my eye whenever I glance in his direction. The anonymous designer used minimal color and simple incised lines to create texture. The curving parallel lines on the ark suggest the planks of an old wooden ship hull, and a…

INSPIRATION SOMETIMES COMES ALL AT ONCE in an exhilarating rush, but for me, it happens most often in increments, with one idea building on a previous one. Many times, the inspiration for my fabric is another fabric. A sample will suggest a further development, sparking an idea for a finished product. This blouse was the result of several ideas coming together. A small study group I participate in was working on projects combining thick and thin yarns. One study took me through a series of alternating stripes of fine and heavy yarns, keeping the sett the same for the fine yarn as for the heavy, resulting in lacy “windows” in the cloth. I had several pretty colors of Brown Sheep Company Cotton Fine left over from Yarn Lab for the…

I LOVE OVERSHOT, especially the innovative ways Bertha Gray Hayes designed and wove it. It’s a shame we don’t know more about her. In fact, if it weren’t for the fantastic work of the Weaver’s Guild of Rhode Island, I wouldn’t know about Bertha Gray Hayes at all. I decided to weave one of her patterns, Unnamed 4, but in doubleweave, and chose a Venne Nm 50/2 cotton yarn, otherwise known as sewing thread. Let’s call it a challenge! (The directions for the foulard substitute 30/2 cotton, which has a similar weight.) For beginning weavers and those not interested in this sort of weaving challenge, the pattern also looks good in 22/2 cottolin sett at 40 epi. In the end, I didn’t like the result of “tromp as writ” and…

AS A BIRD-WATCHER, I’ve often admired the plumage of birds and considered using their colors as the basis for a weaving project. But it wasn’t until I discovered the scientific name of the California quail—Callipepla californica—that I found my inspiration. The genus name Callipepla is composed of two Greek root words: calli, which means beautiful, and pepla, which is translated as woven robe or gown. Beautiful woven robe! I decided to weave a scarf in homage to the California quail. I drew a schematic of the quail’s colors and patterns on graph paper and determined that the design should alternate between solid and patterned areas. I remembered a project in a back issue of Handwoven (see Resources) that alternated plain weave with shadow weave, and though I hadn’t woven shadow…

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2018 The Great Group Weaving Challenge Study groups, start your engines! For this issue, we challenge weaving guilds and study groups to choose a theme that takes members in interesting new directions and expands their skills. We will present a set of projects from each winning group. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 Lace and Friends In this issue, we explore the marriage of cloth and air. Handwoven lace can be subtle or striking, and it can be paired with other weave structures for interesting effects. We will also look at some of lace’s cousins, such as spot weaves. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019 The Best of Both Worlds: Yarn Blends Combining fibers in one yarn often brings out their best qualities, and lately it seems there are many blends to choose from. Yarn blends behave…

ONCE EVERY TWO YEARS, weavers from around the world make the pilgrimage to the Handweavers Guild of America (HGA) Convergence conference for a week of fiber-related workshops, field trips, shopping, and speakers. Most importantly, though, it’s an opportunity for weavers to meet, network, and simply spend time with others who speak the same language and understand the “weaver’s handshake.” If this sounds like heaven to you, you’re in luck—there’s still time to make plans to attend the 2018 HGA Convergence. This year, the conference will take place in Reno, Nevada, at the Peppermill Resort. HGA has put together a diverse schedule filled with workshops and classes led by heavyweights of the weaving world including Rosalie Neilson, John Mullarkey, Daryl Lancaster, and Robyn Spady. Classes cover a wide range of subjects,…

ON WEAVING: NEW EXPANDED EDITION Anni Albers Anni Albers and her book On Weaving have inspired weavers for the past 50-odd years. This new and expanded full-color edition of On Weaving includes 105 color illustrations and new color photographs replacing the black-and-white versions of the first edition without changing the book’s design and structure. In addition, the new edition includes an afterward by Nicholas Fox Weber, director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and personal friend of Albers and her husband, and two essays about Albers and her achievements by scholars T’ai Smith and Manuel Cirauqui. These additions provide context for the book and the framework of Albers’s personal philosophy. Albers had an important influence on design and contemporary art, and she used weaving as her medium. Her work…

THE WORLD IS FULL OF COLORFUL INSPIRATION—but how do you turn what you see into a piece of fabric? I work best from images, which give me something to refer to as I plan my fabric. I match the colors in the image to Color-Aid paper, a set of 314 colors often used for teaching color theory and design. I pull out every color I see and then cull the deck of colors to a workable number for my project. From there I choose my yarn, or in this case, dyes. I’m a member of a study group that is weaving swatches inspired by the book Colors of the World: A Geography of Color. I picked images of a cemetery in Guatemala. The colors are vibrant with an overall ethereal…

I LOVE WEAVING WITH BRIGHT COLORS, and I often draw ideas from nature. When a friend returned from his Hawaiian vacation and showed me a photo of tropical flowers, I knew I wanted to capture the colors in a handwoven scarf. Using colors from a photo to design handwoven cloth can be complicated because the warp and weft colors mix where they interlace. With four vastly different hues in the photo—fuchsia, green, yellow, and purple—I knew that weaving them together would create a chaotic mess that would look nothing like the clear colors I loved in the photo. To avoid that, I separated the colors into stripes in the warp and chose a black weft to keep the hues as “true” as possible. To evoke the look and feel of…

THE INSPIRATION FOR THESE TOWELS grew out of a color workshop I teach. I encourage students to translate their explorations of color from the workshop into their own designs, and that leads to using profile drafts as a design tool. To illustrate the concept, I substituted a two-tied structure into a two-block profile draft originally designed for the traditional Swedish structure of halvdräll. Using a “block substitution” tool in weaving software, I plugged in the structure and a variety of color combinations to get an idea of how it might work. The graphic quality of the profile draft appealed to me and seemed to be a good fit for placing the design emphasis on color. The first sample I wove using this draft was a major disappointment. Using soft colors,…

EVEN THOUGH I AM HAPPY being a landlocked Midwestern girl, I love visiting my mother in south Florida. No visit is complete without a trip to the ocean, where the colors and textures of the landscape, sky, and plants are so different from those in Missouri. I always return home with the Florida beach palette shimmering in my memory. This pair of kitchen towels is inspired by those “beachy” colors: the sand, sky, waves, jellyfish, seashells, and seaweed that I relish on my beach walks all spring to mind when I look at these towels. For warp, I used Halcyon Yarn’s lovely Block Island Blend Fine yarn. Its luster, crisp hand, and subdued heathery colors make it the ideal yarn for my beach-inspired towels. I used double strands of the…

THE YARNS Superfine Merino: 18/2 laceweight, 5,040 yd/lb, 100% superfine-grade Australian merino. The Green Line: 8/3 sportweight, 1,490 yd/lb, 100% organic merino wool. Mousam Falls Sock Yarn: 14/4 fingering weight, 848 yd/lb, 100% superwash wool. Kokadjo: 14/4 fingering weight, 1,960 yd/lb, 90% superwash wool, 10% silk. (Note: The name “Kokadjo” caught my eye and the story behind the name clinched the deal. This yarn is named after a small trading post in northern Maine where the sign reads, “Population: not many” and the saying goes, “Where the pavement ends and the moose outnumber people.”) Sample 1: Differential Shrinkage Sample yarns: Kokadjo (Riverwalk) and Superfine Merino (Williamsburg Blue). Sett: 10 ends per inch (epi). Shrinkage in length: 27%. Shrinkage in width: 33%. The key to differential shrinkage is that one yarn…

ON LIFE AND WEAVING Here’s my current project on the loom. The picture is just eye candy. I wanted to share with you how much I’ve learned about life from weaving. It started when I realized that there’s always a reason for what’s happening on the loom, even when I can’t understand it right away. With patience, grace to myself, and practicing curiosity rather than frustration, I can figure it out. Why is my floating selvedge not as high in the reed on the left as on the right? I look and see the hanging selvedge is resting on the top of the back beam! Time to lengthen it. Why does the weaving look too open there? Oops, I missed a dent in the threading. Unweave those first 2 inches.…

IN WEAVING, we have a lot of phrases with the word “tie” in them: tie-up, tie in, tie down, and tie on. They all mean something different, but when you are a beginner, they all sound the same. The tie-up is probably the most important of our “tie” phrases and the one that can lead to the most confusion. WHAT IS A TIE-UP? A complete weaving draft shows four different elements: the threading (the order in which warp threads are threaded through the heddles on the shafts), the tie-up (the shafts that must be raised/lowered to make the required sheds), the treadling (the order in which the treadles are used for inserting the weft), and the drawdown (the interlacement produced by the other three). We have developed a standard format…

MY INSPIRATIONS usually come from beautiful colors. I often have an idea about a particular project but don’t get too excited about it until I envision the palette that will bring it to life. Fortunately, my studio is filled with an abundance of yarn, and as I weave, it’s easy to gaze at my yarns and dream about my next project before I’m finished with my current one! I’m also sometimes inspired by need. As a frequent traveler, I find that airport lounges and airplanes are often too cold for my comfort. I challenged myself to design a durable and lightweight shawl small enough that I could easily slip it into my carry-on bag, yet still big and toasty enough to keep me warm. I chose a lightweight cotton/acrylic blend…

I DON’T REMEMBER HAVING an “aha” moment of inspiration—a moment where I knew precisely what color or structure to use for this specific project. This project began as I was weaving a color-study sample for the Complex Weavers Double Weave Study Group. I warped with rayon chenille, with the goal of seeing how colors would interact in four-color two-block doubleweave. I wove the first sample exactly as printed in an article by Paul O’Connor (see Resources), and I enjoyed playing with the many color combinations. The sample was nice and the colors blended well, but along the way, I started thinking about other possibilities. I thought about adding lines of colors, changing the warp or weft colors, adding supplementary warp, or using different warp and weft threads to add contours…

MY INTEREST IN WEAVING typically leans toward weaving rugs of all sorts—in other words, not lace. When it comes to huck lace, however, my experience was similar to being adopted by a stray cat: I didn’t think I needed a cat, and I didn’t go out searching for a cat, but a cat adopted me. Let me explain how I came to weave huck lace with color-and-weave effects. My exploration began when I came across a piece of fabric woven with the smallest example of log cabin that I had ever seen. The pattern blocks contained only five ends, and each block began and ended with a dark end. It was different from the way I had learned to thread plain-weave log cabin. Thinking about it, I realized that the…