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i did something i liked

i made a pile fabric out of ripped up strips of an old t-shirt

and guess what, it's part of visual studies. not that sam said "make a pile fabric out of pieces of an old t-shirt"

but she did say "take last weeks 3D sculpture stuff and express it in cloth in a 2D format with 3D elements coming off the surface"

and i had this old t-shirt sitting there. so i cut it up into strips and made warp, weft and pile out of strips of warp-knitted fabric. i tied the warp around my A2 sketchbook

it's all 1 colour and kinda ugly, and i couldn't keep the selvedges from pulling in progressively as it went on and i'm sure you can understand how crap that feels, cos once the selvedge is pulled in on there's no way of pushing it out if you're not using a reed which i obviously wasn't. it's a common problem i've found with tapestry and knotted pile on square-frame looms. not easily avoided unless you're going to go to the trouble of building little bows in the weft line before you bat it down with a fork, which i didn't have the time to do

if you want to know what i mean by that i can photocopy pages from Peter Collingwood's "Techniques of Rug Weavng" in which he describes how to lay the weft so as to give it space to go up and over the warp ends to avoid draw in when the batten is pulled back. i also find keeping an open shed and holding the weft lightly (so as to allow it to run through your hand freely) with one hand and beating it down from entry point towards exit point also works, but is necessarily more time consuming

i apologise for the lack of pictures, this was the one day in the last two weeks i'd emptied my bag and only taken in what i actually felt i actually need. which didn't include my camera, unfortunately. it is unfortunate, cos i paid a lot of money for that camera, and i really should use it more often

Comments

Dorothy said…
I know about that camera problem - I got a digital slr because the compact cameras don't do all the things I want cameras to do, but this of course means it isn't easy to carry so sometimes it isn't with me when I want it. I'm doing better at taking it out since I got one of those handbags like a small rucksack, but this is a bit of a girlie solution.

Did you the spinnerweaver's recent post, t-shirt transformed into guitar strap? There's lots of potential in old t-shirts. I like the idea of a pile weave.

Re. draw in, can't you fix this by putting in a tension arrangement to compensate for warp take-up?

I went to the British Tapestry Group's exhibition in 2008 and was surprised that lots of the tapestries had been allowed to draw in. I don't think I'd exhibit a tapestry like that unless it was allowed to draw in for effect.

ttfn
Anonymous said…
Hey! I'm glad you did something you liked!
Meg said…
Cheers to doing something you like! The assignment sounds interesting. I might have a more serious think about it sometime.

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