Tuesday, May 1, 2012

My First Sprang


Several years back we visited the Southwest Museum (this was before it was closed to the public due to it not meeting modern earthquake code).  We were looking for inspiration to create pieces for an exhibit.  This skirt-like thing really caught my eye, maybe because some of the decorations on it are actually sewing thimbles!  The photo is really bad; it was through glass so there is reflection, and we couldn't use flash so it is blurry because I was holding the camera and couldn't hold it steady enough.  But you can see the general idea.  It had a bunch of fringes that were curly looked stiff, like they had been made of sinew.  So much texture.


For some other now-forgotten reason, this piece seemed to say to me that it should be done in the sprang technique to capture the feeling of the original skirt.  So I chose some rough-spun cotton yarn and put it on my floor loom, and learned how to sprang from Peter Collingwood's definitive work on the subject, The Techniques of Sprang: Plaiting on Stretched Threads.

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