Sprang lecture and workshop

This month I made presentations to two local guilds, Southern California Handweavers' Guild and South Coast Weavers and Spinners Guild.  In my talks I introduced Sprang (braiding of fixed-end warps), went over a bit of its history, showed examples of four current fiber artists working in sprang (Carol James, Graciela Foradori, Edith Meusnier and Chieko Aihara), and then went through the development of my work incorporating sprang into my harness-loom-weaving (basically covering a lot of what I've been blogging here).

At SCHG, I also led a 1-1/2 day workshop.  What fun that was!  Everyone seemed to (eventually) get the hang of the 1/1 interlinking, and some participants then ventured to try some other "stitches", or other colors, weights and fiber content of warps.

Here's one with thick and thin yarns in an A-A-B repeat, and simultaneously learning how to intentionally create a hole in the work:

This is using double-twist interlinking with a striped warp to form diamonds:

This fiber is linen in 2 slightly different weights, interlinking changing to interlacing.  Look how much energy the interlinking area has!  I couldn't make it lie flat:

A gorgeously-colored striped warp with interlacement:

And some particpants tried out the Torchon Lace stitch:

I'm so proud of each student in the class.  And I hope everyone had as good a time as I did.