Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Spranging in 3D - Billowing Sails

As I was weaving the "Dead Reckoning" piece I thought it would be cool to have the sprang "hour glass" shapes in alternate squares like a checkerboard, so the curve would continue from one
to the next.

In this piece I used two colors in the one of the warp layers in each stripe, so either color could be brought to the front to be worked in sprang. Because either 1/2 warp can be the sprang layer, this means I need yet one more shaft per block to get the back layer to weave into cloth.

So this piece takes 6 shafts for each of the two blocks that can be worked in sprang, plus 4 shafts for the doubleweave block as a border on the selvedges: 16 total shafts, all I've got.

I got this piece off the loom and wet finished it, hated my selvedges so I did a hemstitched fringe on the selvedge edges, took a photograph of it and - blah!

It's the exact size and shape of a placemat. A very nice place mat, but...can you say BOR-ing?

So I started trying to manipulate it. The sprang bits are almost inviting me to pull them up off the surface. When I do that, the back layer wants
to come up and sort of pleat as well. Now, that's more interesting!

The colors in this piece remind me of the tropics, so continuing with the nautical theme I called this one "Trade Winds" as it also looks kind of like full sails.

1 comment:

  1. This piece won an award at Convergence 2012 - see post http://fiberartisan.blogspot.com/2012/08/award-winners-return.html

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