Predator is Packing to Take a Trip

This piece entitled "Predator" was juried into the Complex Weavers show Complexity, so it is leaving to go traveling for a few months.  First it's off to Nebraska, at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln for a month-long show.  Then to Washington state for the weekend of the Complex Weavers seminars in June.  Finally it goes to Providence, Rhode Island, coincident with Convergence, the biennial national conference for handweavers, spinners and dyers by the Handweavers Guild of America.  My piece and the other Complex Weavers fiber art will be on exhibit on the following dates:

The Robert Hillestad Textiles Gallery

University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE

April 7 – May 9, 2014

Gallery at the Hotel Murano

Tacoma, WA

June 28 - 30, 2014

The Cohen Gallery, Granoff Center

Brown University, Providence, RI

July 14 – August 1, 2014

The jungle challenge - my answer titled: "Predator"

You are deep in a jungle. You look around and try to absorb this wondrous new world. Many colors, shapes and textures surround you, but you can only choose 3 of those colors to make up 75% of your piece. You must also use a weave structure to represent something you see in your jungle for 50% of the finished piece. The jungle does not care what size or shape you create, but your creation must be woven or knotted/interlaced/spun/felted, but not knitted or you may not make it out alive!

The above was the 2013 Challenge issued to members of the Southern California Handweavers' Guild.  On the right is my answer to the challenge.  I'm not sure I got all those percents right, but I'm sure there's a way to make it fit.

The surrounding fabric is what I showed in earlier posts, a 3/1 twill where the thick wool and thin cotton alternate in the warp.  In the middle section, the wool was left unwoven while the cotton made a plain weave background for the sprang.  The sprang this time is double-layered sprang, with holes or slits left so pieces of the layers could interchange and wrap around one another like vines in a jungle.  The striped vine-like bits represent a tiger prowling around in the foliage.

Last weekend was the big reveal at our guild meeting, and I was all set to show my answer here as well, but my camera and computer decided they weren't on speaking terms.  So I had to wait for a new cable to arrive before I could get the photo uploaded.

As usual it was really fun to see all the different ways that my fellow guild members had come up with to answer this puzzle or challenge, and their beautiful and creative results.  They will all be displayed at our annual Weaving and Fiber Festival, Sunday November 3rd at the Torrance Cultural Arts Center, Torrance, California.

How would you have solved this challenge?

Wrong Way Warp

Got the latest project onto the loom.  I just had to start with a photo of my little helper.  No, he is not helping tension the warp.  He is being naughty and I think he knows it.  But I just had to shoot a picture before shooing him off.  Kitties lo-o-o-ove wool.

It seems that with each warp, there's always something.  With this one, I was so excited to get it onto the loom that I forgot to run the beamed (cotton) portion of the warp through the slot between the two warp beams, so that the weighted (wool) portion wouldn't sit on top of it.  Here I have some stick shuttles sitting between the two layers.  You can see the cotton warp coming up from the warp beam and going outside that additional back beam.  It's supposed to go between the two back beams in that slot, where the handle of the screwdriver is.

I thought I would be clever and just slide that beam out from under the cotton warp, and replace it between the cotton and the wool layers.  Alas, I could only get 3 of the 4 screws to budge.  (The loom is older than me, after all.)

So I ended up constructing an ugly and only partially effective separator from stick shuttles and masking tape.  Yes, masking tape makes many appearances in my weaving path.  Useful stuff.

And it seems to have worked well enough for it to weave, anyway.  Here's the work-in-progress shot.  I have woven a 3/1 twill using both the cotton and wool warp for a few inches, and now I am weaving just the cotton in a back layer of plain weave, leaving the wool warp unwoven to be worked in sprang, or double sprang to be exact.  There is a border of 3/1 twill on each side to frame it as well.

Attempting Double Sprang

All I can say is that this is not for the faint of heart.

This is my first trial at double-layered sprang.  It starts out with the black layer in ftont, and the lighter striped warp forming a layer in back, hidden by the black layer.

Keeping track of two layers was a new experience.  I tried using Peter Collingwood's method, and part of the way through switched to the method he describes as that used by E. Siewertsz van Reesema, which is to flip the work over and work the back row separately from the front.
Normally when working double sprang, you use these two layers, usually in contrasting colors, to form patterns of light vs. dark areas.  But I'm not really interested at this point in time in making patterns in flat fabric.  So I diverted from the normal method, and instead formed a slit in my front layer, and two slits in the back layer, so that I could bring a portion of the back warp through the slit to become part of the front layer.



This is the back side of the sample.  Part of the black front layer comes through the two slits to become part of the back layer.

At the top and bottom of the sample, see how the front and back are completely separate layers. 

They are also separate but different layers in the middle of the sample.  The layer on the left has a striped portion in the center, and the layer on the right has black in the center, where the two layers have changed places.

I'm hoping to use this interchange of layers in a sprang and woven piece, to have the portions of sprang twist around each other.  But I will have to figure out a method of working without flipping the piece over, since there will be a layer of weaving behind the sprang as well.

Thanks for reading!  How about you?  Have you worked in double sprang?  What was your experience?