weave4fun

i got bored when i was in the country. this is what i did for the 3D sculpture part of visual studies the front piece is a warp of plastic fishing line, which is tough enough to handle a weft of bramble and gorse stalks. for those not familiar with gorse, it's prickly as hell and almost impossible to weave with. you really need a shed about 20 cm deep to expect to not be snagging warp threads while using it. the warp was a chaotic mess by the time i'd finished using the gorse, the brambles were very little trouble on the other hand and this is a flower, think i had a picture up of this in unpainted state a while back. as you can see it's made out of gardening wire and masking tape the tutors thought the straw hanging all over it was intentional, something to do with the interface between nature and artifice. the truth is i ripped the wire out of a tangle of weeds. the suit is sort of an idea i had for aggressive textiles. textiles that harm rather than heal, y'know. the...

cos i'll be out of computer range and besides, my camera's broken first year's finished anyhow. don't know if i've passed CAD or Art History yet, but have everything else. away out west tomorrow to help build up a ruined house over the summer. took my copy of collingwood's tablet-weaving book to see if i can't get into some more complicated pattern. doubleface i could do with getting the knack of. i wish i hadn't misplaced that linen, i guess it's around in gala somewhere, but that's no use. need to buy a shitload more acrylic as well. always easy to get hold of. tablet weaving with wool pisses me off, it's too damn hairy, felts up awful as well. linen is lovely to TW with, i imagine silk is too, but i've never been able to afford any. anyone got any more suggestions for fibre for tablet weaving?

That's my favourite one (above), it's a plain satin. I like the one below as well, which is sateen stripe That's a double faced interchanging plain weave I went somewhat overboard on the fancy yarns there. slub, gimp, and hairy. don't like it that much That's a honeycomb. you probably can't see there, but the texture changes as it goes up cos i gradually changed it to a plain weave on the way up. the lecturers idea. That's weft figuring. not a big fan of weft figuring, it is kinda pretty, but i reckon the floats would catch on things. don't think it's too practical the pictures aren't too great. i don't have access to a scanner. i tried taking pictures of the draft sheets but they came out pretty incomprehensible, so i'll leave them for now. i'm wanting to make an interchanging double weave tartan next year, and am going to try getting the draft sorted out in scotweave (that's the weave drafting program we use, it's kinda cool...

almost just finished my last final woven bit on the looms at college. that's 8 technical samples and 5 final samples (usin colours from pictures i pulled off the web, cos i use the web to do pretty much all my research and imagery scavenging) all the samples are based on natural stuff that happens in nature. in order - 1 dying star, 1 lake with hills in front, 1 bunch of trees in summer, 1 largest/coldest large-sun-sized-but-really-cold object as seen through hubble telescope (discovered the other month), 1 rocky/heathery hillside somewhere up north presumably with the purple heather and all that jazz and 1 big green nebula thing with all bits of orange and some pale blue in it i particularly like the hubble stuff. gas nebulas rock the fabrics should be getting cut off the looms tomorrow evening, and i'll have to do yarn wraps and weft plans. of course, not having written the weft plans down while i was weaving, i now have to painstakingly look at the fabrics to figure out exac...

i love it when a plan comes together

hey! guess what! pretty much everything i've been doing so far as weaving goes is grossly inefficient! hooray! i kinda figured that would be the case so far i've learned better ways of making the warp, better ways of putting lease rods into the warp while it's on the board, better ways of stretching the warp, better ways of packaging the warp for transport, better ways of winding the warp, better ways of threading the heddles, better ways of sleying the reed at some point in the future i'll probably attempt to illustrate these methods in a comprehensible manner, though i find it difficult to imagine i could reasonably expect to show anyone how to use a warping rack consisting of two levels of yarn alternating 1,2 in an up, down manner in order to make a cross between thumb and forefinger for ease of quickly putting onto a warping frame. not without standing there and making sure. it looks like magic when an experienced weaver does it, until you figure out how it's d...

this from Imogen Heaps Twitter Dress Tweets From The Grammys "Around Heap's neck: a kind of sculptural cuff with blinking light. And her purse was a small television. The necklace had a live Twitter feed with a wireless router. And a television with videos her fans were sending to her account. She brought her followers down the red carpet." Wow, that's kinda cool and was actually something i was thinking about recently, about incorporating IM, facebook, twitter and other such info-feeds into clothing via a visual display or an earpiece (with text-to-voice software necessary of course to translate all that "omigod! c wot wez doon 2moz d00dz!" txt/hack speak stuff which is so unnecessary these days when everyone under the age of 25 types at the speed of light anyway It's maybe not a viable application the now, but surely will be an inevitable and highly desirable one in the coming age of Ubiquitous Computing and Full Connectivity. It might not be feasible ...