Stumbling blocks to stepping stones

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit. - Conrad Hilton

Another idea I got from one of the students' projects in my class was to use both interlinking and interlacing in the same piece.  In addition, I want to also use both of these with loom-weaving.  I warped up a narrow width on my loom to test my idea.  The two samples in the photo below have a woven length made with the loom, then interlaced sprang, then interlinked sprang (and of course then the mirror image of the sprang - interlinked then interlaced), and finally another length of regular weaving.

The top sample has some of the warps omitted from the sprang section (and later cut off), so the sprang section is narrower.  I had omitted the green warps because my brain took a vacation and I was thinking that all the warps from my weaving would turn 45 degrees so they would be too close together.  What actually happens, though, is that yes, half the warps make a turn, but the other half turns the other way and acts like weft to the first half (and vice versa).  I must admit this is one of my many V-8 moments.

So for the sample in the bottom of the photo, I didn't omit those warps.  That of course messed up my carefully-planned color sequence but the size is more what I wanted.  There are some interesting accidental patterns happening, too; the red and gold area has sort of a houndstooth going on.

So then I thought, what if I use a loom weave denser than the plain weave in the above samples, like a twill.  I could make the sett even closer, and my interlaced portion won't be so open.  I want it closer to a piece of plain weave fabric set on the bias.  So I put a 3/1 twill on the loom, and...

...well, that was certainly not what I was after.  The interlaced sprang is now all lumpy and "gathered".  It wants to be much wider than the woven portion, even in a relaxed state.  What I learned is that spacing the woven portion closer does not encourage the interlaced area to have a spacing anything like a loom-woven weave.  But it does have some potential dimensional appeal:

Fodder for a future project, perhaps.  For the project at hand, it's back to the plain weave.  And for my experimentation, rather than a failure, I now have a new bit of knowledge and another aspect to explore.

Sprang and other fabric structures

 By learning you will teach; by teaching you will learn.

         -Latin Proverb

This old adage is brought home to me again and again.  In preparation for teaching a class on sprang, I made some samples of different fabric structures, to help put sprang in context and get our focus on what we were about to make. Some samples were sprang, and some were not. I tried to think of as many different ways of forming fabric as I could: knitting, weaving, looping etc. Making these samples was an enlightening experience for me.

Above is basic 1/1 interlinked sprang, and below is interlaced sprang,  See the difference in the way a warp element (illustrated by the one black yarn) traverses the fabric in these two samples.

Here are a couple aha! moments I had.

A late addition to my little collection of samples was gauze weave. I got the idea to add it from a chapter in Chieko Aihara's beautiful book Sprang, in which she compares sprang with gauze weaves, particularly in the context of the techniques indigenous to South America. Sadly I don't read Japanese, but the connection is apparent from her illustrations.  I have never done allover gauze, just a few pickup leno borders on table linens and the like.  While making the shed for the gauze weave I chose (this time with a needle as a pickup stick), I noticed that the warps I was picking up were going under two adjacent warps, in the same manner we look for when forming 1/1 interlinked sprang.

Another of these structures which was completely new to me was "fingerweaving" which is actually a form of braiding. Working from the book The Basic Book of Fingerweaving by Esther Warner Dendel, I chose the basic Peruvian flat braid, and as I set out to create the first shed, I almost got a shiver up the back of my neck as I found my fingers making the exact same motions they make when working interlinked sprang. The finished product doesn't bear much resemblance to sprang; rather it's the process that is is related.

Texture in sprang

One of the students' projects in my class used thick and thin warps alternating, two thin loops and one thick loop repeatedly. It was coming out so nicely that when I got home I wanted to try it myself.  I used the warp I had on my frame already, and added some thin cotton seine cord between the thick cotton twine/cord I'd been demosntrating with in class.  Here's how the structure looks when stretched.  You can see clearly what the thick pair of warps does in the fabric.  I love the cabled look between the lacy bits:

But look at all the folds that happened when I took it off tension and sewed it up into a little bag!  I think this is so cool, all the movement that it has.  It's doing this on its own.  I have not tried to block it out.  This seems kind of like the "tracking" patterning that sometimes happens spontaneously in plain weave fabric.

Firestorm and Regeneration

One of my "tree" pieces, Regeneration, has been accepted into the Woven Together: Firestorm exhibit sponsored by Pike's Peak Weavers Guild and the Business of Art Center in southern Colorado.

Regeneration, 22" x 34", wool, in twill weaves & sprang, painted warp.

The exhibit commemorates the many fires that occurred last year in Colorado.  My piece is depicting a sunrise signifying hope, and the resilience of the forests and the people as they recover from the devastation that occurred.  This is particularly poignant to me today as I have the TV news on as I type, with the coverage of several fires right here in Southern California, threatening people's homes.

The exhibit will be from June 21 through August 3, 2013, in the Hagnauer Gallery, Business of Art Center, 513 Manitou Avenue, Manitou Springs, Colorado.

Now the challenge will be to figure out how to box it up for shipping.

Another Return Home

My two pieces got home last week from Colorado, where they had been hanging in the Loveland Museum Gallery for the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild's Fiber Celebration 2013.  The hanging rod for the panel got bent and the mailing tube looks like it opened like a can of Pillsbury biscuits, but the fabric panel itself seems to have survived OK.

Involution won the Jeanne Richards Memorial Award, and His Hands are Mutes got honorable mention in its category.  I wonder if the rod got bent on the way to the museum, and they hung it that way, and that's how it got into the "Non-Functional Three Dimensional" category?  Hmmm, I was sure I entered it in the two-dimensional one...

And look, someone must have liked His Hands are Mutes so much, they used it as the background on the postcard and the exhibit catalog!

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.

Regeneration: New Life Sprang Forth

The scale was just too small on the woven experiment #2.  I wanted the colors in my background to have more life.  So for the big piece(s), I went to 20/2 wool, and painted it with acid dyes.  I did two images to get two paintings with the same wastage as one, plus I thought I might need some practice and hopefully one of the finished pieces would come out as I hoped.  Here is warp #1:

Then it bled a bit.  Well, OK, a lot.  One of the paintings less so than the other.  Here is the same warp a little while later:

And here are warps #2 and #3:

And the first piece, after weaving in twill weave, with sprang "tree" forms in the foreground silhouetted against the painted-warp sky.  In this one, you can see clearly the warp I used for the sprang coming out of and reentering the fabric above the branches and below the roots:

It felt really good to weave on this painted warp.  I just had all this color in front of me.  It's funny but it seems like whenever I try do do something in color, it always turns out purple-and-green-and-orange (is it that I don't like the primaries, or that I just like mixing things?).  These warps had just about all the colors in the rainbow, but when I raised each shed to weave, I called them in my head the purple warp, the green warp and the orange warp.

Here's the second image.  I think I got the hang of the "tree" forms better on this one.  The sky is also more vibrant (it's the one that bled less):