Weaving in the time of COVID

 What’s on my loom?

Being a bit distractable it often happens that I end up working on more than one thing at the time, never mind the knitting project that waits for bouts of TV watching. I have just finished a largish black piece using leather (40x60 cm). It was very enjoyable weaving that, I loved the way the rug yarn worked with boucle mohair and lurex weaving yarns. Now to work out how to hang it…..

At the moment I am working on a small white tapestry that is at a sett much finer than I usually use and it is slowly, very slowly, progressing. I am not the most patient person in the world, and as I work as well I like to feel I am achieving something in my spare time, which is why I usually work on something a bit more chunky that builds up more quickly (‘quick’ is a relative term in tapestry weaving to say the least!). Although the fineness of the white tapestry is interesting, it is quite flawed - I have been using homespun yarn mainly, all manner of fibres in the weft, but mainly wool and silk. Homespun can at times be uneven and so it splays out the warp and has surprisingly made the piece wider as the weaving progresses, rather than narrowing which is the most common problem in tapestry weaving).  And if I think about the weaving speed, or lack thereof, this piece is quite testing: weaving for say, 3-4 hours in the afternoon on this piece which is about 21 cm wide I manage just about 3-4 cm across its width – so either I am a slow weaver or the thing just demands a different way of thinking about making. The making process itself becomes the thing, I can’t force it or become too impatient for it to be finished.

To move things on a bit I am therefore also weaving a sample in greens with a bit of blue, brown and purple at a more sensible sett. I am quite excited about this, as it is in preparation for something large. 

Paris - Sheila Hicks at the Pompidou Centre

Well, what can one say other that when you hear that a major exhibition of Sheila Hicks' work is on show you have to go! 

I just adore Hicks' work, and as fibre art seems to be having a bit of a revival she and other fibre artists are being shown - with Olga de Almaral being shown in Bruxelles and Annie Albers at the Tate Modern in the Autumn it is a good time to catch up on seeing the actual works that one otherwise just ends up looking at in books or one the web. So off I went to Paris for a night so that there would be one full day for the visit to the Pompidou Centre. I stayed in a small hotel near by, with tiny rooms and even smaller shower cubicles which you had to squeeze into. 

Here's a view from my hotel room to the building opposite:

And as the very first thing to see at the Pompidou Centre was of course the Hicks' exhibition, Lifelines - I took lots of photographs but do not want to infringe copyright so will not include any here. But I can tell you that it was quite a spectacular show, with many large scale works and a lot of her minimes, the small weavings she weaves on a small mobile loom - these spanned her whole life of making, so there were weaving from 1958 or so and onwards.

There was a lot of colour in this work - and it was quite a controlled use of colour, palettes led by main colour keys and lovely textures of woven, wrapped and untangled rope-like materials. There were a long series of films covering her more recent her career from the 1980s onwards. I spent a couple of hours in the gallery, watching all the films, studying the smaller works and wondering at the larger wrapped works.

I could spend a lot of time describing my exaltation at being at this exhibition. How wonderful to have been around at a time when the fibre arts movement was at its early beginnings as Hicks was, to be given the opportunities to travel, meet fascinating textile cultures in the South and Middle Americas, to experience encounters with architecture and sculpture, photography and yarn and synthesise all these impressions. Hicks' work was really ground breaking sitting alongside the other textile Modernists of the 1960s and -70s as the early voices of monumentally scaled work that related to space in particular ways. 

In one film she discusses discovering the use of the repeatable textile module and using this in many different permutations. Various works were described in the films and impressions of her work methods. The exhibition was really a gift and something I will try to remember for a long time - and it gets even better: she was sitting nearby my table in the museum cafe, and I summoned up the courage to go and ask for her signature in the catalogue I had bought, and she kindly wrote a dedication in it! I am so thrilled that she was so generous and didn't seem to be bothered that someone quite excited came up to her like that.

The rest of the photos will show a few impressions from the Pompidou, starting with the grafitti in the women's loo, where people had written into the grouting between the times, which showed a but of inventiveness:

On the 5th floor there was a very nice outdoor gallery of sculpture or sculpture garden. The day was very hot so the water that was the reflective base for the sculpture was a cooling relief.

And a pigeon also found the water useful, he landed just in front on me and drank plenty, creating his own small figure in the water.

The building reflected in the water 

A tapestry workshop in April

This post will be brief - just enough to say that I went on a tapestry weaving workshop recently which was absolutely great, mainly on colour and thinking about simplification in design. It was taught by Fiona Rutherford and the conceptual premise of the workshop was to think about colour in the context of the Bauhaus weavers - how colour is used in a disciplined way. My natural inclination is the opposite - no simplification, more complexity, so this was a lesson in pulling back and away from intuitive impulses and reflecting on working in a more controlled fashion. 

I made two pieces, one is almost finished and one is still in progress.

This piece is photographed still on the loom. I have concentrated on greens and a browny orange using a singles mohair yarn blended with wools and linen to make is slightly less hairy in the weave.

The piece in progress was intended as a continuation of the controlled colour, but letting texture take over. I used a fairly lengthy length of yarn for the rya tufts. They are to contrast with the woven squares on the right, but I think the rya is a bit dominant at the moment so I may need to trim the tufts.

Spinning and dyeing

Throughout the autumn I have been spinning. My working life is very busy at the moment so when the evenings and weekends come I have been trying to do stuff that will be relaxing. And Spinning is always relaxing, soothing and still productive. I was given around 3 kgs of carded Jacobs sheep wool by someone. It was very old but still good, although the carding was pretty ropey and there were lots of lumps in it. I decided to dye it and had a great dyeing day doing mostly greens and blues, but also some rosy reads. This has provided the bulk of my spinning resource from October to now, and I also spun some staples in a variegated colour scheme (blue-green and yellow-red) which I have spun as novelty yarns, either plying it with a handspun or a commercial single wool.

Here are some of the examples of what I dyed and spun:

 

The top skein is the novelty yarn, a thin version using some left-over staples, I also made a different yarn that had much thicker staples in it. The skein below is the spun yarn from the slightly lumpy Jacobs wool. It too the dye very well and as most of it was quite course and I am not that good at spinning knitting yarn I decided that I would just spin lumps and all and then use it in tapestry weavings.

 

 

Here's a detail of the novelty yarn. I have this thin commercial single wool yarn in blue (not sure it is indigo, but it is that sort of colour) and used it to ply with the staples of the blue-green. This was a very satisfying process and the  result looks and feels great, now I need to see what it is like in a weaving.

 

The colours in this picture do not reflect the livelier green of the actual yarn, however you can see how coarse the Jacobs is and you will see that I spun it very hard and so it is not a perfectly balanced yarn - my plying technique could be improved a bit.

 

I also have a fair bit of very dark alpaca. In tidying up some of my stash I unearthed even more of it, and this needs to be spun. At my Guild of weavers, spinners and dyers we had a bit of a stash-share and I got some dark brown silk noil which complements the alpaca very well.

 

So I plied these fibres in different permutations - pure alpaca and alpaca silk plied, which has created some smooth yarns with a bit of sheen. I also had some dyed silk which I spun into some of it to create interesting textures.

 

 

The alpaca-silk yarns.

 

The silk-alpaca yarn is to the right here, and the other green yarns are spun from left-overs, merino, more silk, something I don't remember.

 

 

This is a close-up to show the textures of the different mixes, you might be able to see that the merino yarn on the left is Navajo plied so it is a bit thicker.

 

 

The silk-alpaca in detail to show the different thicknesses, this was also Navajo plied which was not easy as I was spinning in the silk as I went along which turned into a knotted mess at times along the way.

 

 

Completed tapestry woven works: Crapapple in white and green and a white textured piece

Crab apple

Throughout December until now my work has mainly been on tapestry weaving. In a previous post I showed a work in progress where I wove on a wooden block and it has turned out to be a fairly respectable piece in two parts.

I should say that these blocks were quite hard to weave; I used a kebab stick as a shed tick and had to needle weave to complete the surface. When the work got to the top and the last rows had to the be woven I had to sometimes/often lift individual warps with a pointed implement to get the needle underneath - a very slow and laborious process.

The warp was linen and the weft was a varying mixture and blend of all manner of handspun and commercial yarn: wool, silk, paper, linen, angora, viscose, latex covered yarn and more. I used only natural and white for one block and white-greens for the other. The greens were mainly dyed using Dylon cold water dyes.

They were photographed in more of a studio setting and so the colours seem a bit more enhanced, but they work together and suggest plant shapes as I had planned:

 

Here are some details of the different sides of it:

 

Basically I have wanted to work with interlaced wrapped elements for a while so this was opportunity to try this out, and as you can see the top of the white block was a mass of interwoven twisting elements.

 

Trying to work out how to finish off the linen warps around the nails, I platted the threads around the nails and tucked them under which in the end was the tidiest and allowed the threads to be cut and they now lie flat against the wood. 

 

 

Another couple of detail images showing each side of the green-white block: Here I used some twisted wrapped elements but used more as features on the surface rather than as a mass, and on the other side I woven in a more graphic pattern partly inspired by Bauhaus type compositions, weaving it flat without any surface additions.

 

 

White texture

 

Over Christmas and into January I was working up a largish sample (26x54cm) in white tones using a mixture of handspun yarns, commercial natural and synthetic fibres. I had bought this raw silk which had a very interesting texture, quite stiff to the touch (although it went soft in handling during the weave) and I had wanted to wrap a number of warps to enable the yarn to be shown off properly.

 

I set out to create a sample that would be big enough to be a wall hung piece and would show off the different textures of mohair, paper yarn, rayon, wool, cotton and linen, and which would provide a neutral background to the raw silk.

Here's the final tapestry, off the loom but quite finally mounted:

 

You can see that I built in some areas using small squares woven in paper yarn to make the background area a bit more interesting than eccentric weft only - the squares were pretty randomly placed and spanned either 3 or 4 warps.

 

Close up you can see how the texture on the right works - the raw silk lies in bunches over 3-5 warps:

 

Looped mohair was also used and I think this needs to be used sparingly if used in this sort of work, or as features in large tapestries as it projects out from the surface and can be a bit too much of a contrast if the surface needs to be flat. In general I should mention that with so many different thicknesses and qualities of yarn I needed to keep an eye on how thick the weft became. Sometimes it probably got a bit too thick or thin, although overall the final piece feels fairly even. I think that you can use the density of weft to good effect in a textured tapestry and I want to explore this some more once I get onto my new loom (an old Dryad rug loom - more to follow soon).

 

I am quite satisfied that the bunches of yarn around the warps worked as I had planned. I wonder whether you could wrap around even more warps and then use that effect in particular ways, but this would probably need a larger piece. As it is a couple of people have said that the  final effect feels like fungus on trees or perhaps more like the texture of birch bark, so I am happy that the organic feel of trees has been captured in this way.

I like the use of paper as a design detail in the squares, but see that I probably need to continue learning to control my edges as they tend to move in and out a bit depending on the thickness of the weft.

West Dean 6th course - Knotted tapestry

First I will add in a few pictures of plants that I took during my afternoon wanderings around the garden waiting to check in - a bit gratuitous, but I hope pleasing in their way:

 
This is now the half way point of my FDAD course - the 6th course is the first step into the last half of the programme and I am now thinking about what the whole feels like.

For the 6th course I chose to do a knotted tapestry course with Anne Jackson. Anne is a  tapestry maker who uses a knotting technique rather than weaving, which allows her to create uneven outlines as she does not use a loom, but confines her grid to a series of warp threads onto which the knots sit. This creates a flexible way to build up the work and even allows for 3D shaping, which I had a go at towards the end of the course.

A knotted tapestry technique sits well with the experimental textiles that I use at the core of all my work, and as I am hoping that one day there will possibilities to work at a large scale, this is a way to think about scale and volume; even worked small this knotted technique is useful, as it can suggest shapes that are expandable and it could be useful in creating maquettes, I think.

So, the course really was a way to learn and practice the technique and we created some samples practicing starting by setting up the warp, knotting and knotting shapes, vertical lines and working with the warp in various ways.

 

I had brought some drawings to work from and interestingly there were different schools of thought on how to use the original drawing as a guide for the work: someone suggested using the traditional way of developing a cartoon from the drawing using tracing paper and focussing on the key elements, having the drawing as a colour guide on the side; others favoured using the drawing directly under the work as guide for design as well as for colour choice. 

I tried both: first using the drawing under the work, then later swapping the drawing for a tracing. As my drawing is quite complex I think in this particular case the tracing was probably the best way to work through the design, as I could examine the colour study more closely separately. It may be that when drawings are simpler and if colours were studied in more depth over longer time between the drawign and the yarns, then using the drawing directly in the knotting process could be a real option.

So, here is the very start of the 'weaving' when I was using the drawing as the guide under the work:

As you can see the technique requires you to use robust pins to hold the warp and certain knots in place, and the other thing that separates this technique from tapestry in the gobelin/Aubusson sense is the way the knots work - you have to simplify the design quite a lot, lines become quite chunky, and would probably work better in large scale works. Also, the work builds up from the top down, rather than being built up from the bottom up as in weaving.

I also worked on a small sample to develop a 3D piece to see who you can develop a more sculptural shape:

 

You can see here that I am working on the side that is reducing the need for warps. This requires you to tie off the warps as the knotting proceeds - I found this a bit tricky to judge when to take them in and you need more knots to fill the area out than you expect.

This work is now in progress and once it is finished I will show it in a later post. In the meantime I have been called onto a different project that I have been pondering about for a while and just wanted to try out, so the two pieces will need to run in parallel. Whatch this space for more updates.

Here's a taster - Nails hammered into a block of wood before warping up: 

 

A bit wobbly, but will be OK once the warp is tied on

 

Third course at West Dean College - Experimental textiles

West Dean College offers a great range of course from calligraphy to drawing, to stone carving to textile courses. I am working towards their Foundation Diploma and as part of that I choose drawing and textiles courses.

Recently I attended an Experimental Textiles course with the tapestry weaver Philip Sanderson and the embroiderer-mixed media artist Michael Brennand-Wood. They have worked on a project together, a tapestry which they showed us, having asked each of the attendees to go through what we had done and what we might want to do during the weekend.

The course was set up to be pretty free. There were wooden frames in different sizes, rectangular or square, warp yarns, drills, nails, fabrics, ropes and other things that might inspire. I had not had time to think about designs, and am happy that I didn’t as it might have been inhibiting on the development of the work over the weekend. Instead I had brought a couple of Japanese obi, with tsuzure flowers and mushrooms. This was just meant to be the trigger ideas and my work that weekend went off at a tangent at one point.

It was a very busy weekend, and I didn’t finish the samples I started. I began by painting a large frame with India ink and attaching this large black grid created by a net. Within this grid I then tied a warp of thin linen in different colours, pinks and purples, but instead of just making a vertical warp I wove into it as well. This was to continue the idea of the grid from the black webbing, but it caused a fair bit of trouble when I came to weave, as I could only cover one or two warps at a time when I started weaving in the weft. It did mean that I could weave from all four angles, which was interesting and opened up a different way of thinking about the design. I could turn the frame and weave from any side, which is very different from weaving from bottom to top.
 

 I had brought a bunch of wools, cottons and novelty yarns, commercial and hand-spun. I tore some fabric to create some fabric 'yarns'.

 

 

Here's the frame mounted in the workshop ready for weaving with the warps added, below is a close-up of the warps woven over the black net. Michael showed me how to do a type of chain stitch that I could tie across the black netting, that is the thicker blended yarn you see toward the lower half of the image.

I started with weaving-in the flower inspired by the obi. The weft was made of blends of pink, with silvery colouring in the spaces between the petals. Hence I now have a section of woven flower and a larger section of loosely woven warps which I need to integrate in some way. Philip had suggested I look at developing some baroque or rococo style swirly sections that would evoke some swirls on the obi. And so to try out some of the techniques Michael showed us I had a go at wrapping aluminium rods with other blends which I bent to shape.

The woven flower in progress. It was looking good in a chunky experimental sort of way, it is clear how the wefts have been woven from all four sides.

The sample in progress, I had loosely woven yarn on the left to prepare to add other elements. I also started to wrap strips which I will continue to make to make a denser area to the lower half of the piece. The 'S' shapes are the wrapped aluminium elements.

Half way through the course this sample I decided to make another sample made of bits being taught on the course, so I would have something to refer to. So, I started wrapping the frame, dyeing the warp with ink, weaving rolled newspaper, thick velvet ribbon on a small frame. Then I was going to place it somehow within a big frame, but I borrowed a book from the college library and got diverted by a fantastic technique I wanted to try out, so ended up warping up the large frame with two thicknesses of warp and started weaving textured structures and stayed within the grid of the weave.

 

Small square frame with fabric wrapped around it, I tried out rolling newspaper and wove in paper sticks and broad velvet ribbon.

Trying out a chunky weft and pulling out the weft to make a loose wavy surface. I added a wrapped element to create a bit of interest in the blue and wove in a strip of felt, rolled newspaper, fabric yarn and more conventional wool weft. I tried out winding wire with fabric and winding aluminium rod, which became a quite organic shape I liked, I will use this again at some point in the future.


The main theme for me of the course was the experimental nature of the techniques, materials and tools. There was no real design approach being espoused, but a permissive environment of ‘try it and see’ which was valuable in allowing all manner of ideas and testing to be done by everyone, and the resultant works were therefore very different. I think mine looked a bit rough, but I think this is due to the nature of the materials and testing of techniques – and both samples are still unfinished. The work was process driven and it enabled a variety of responses and will be a useful point to work out next steps. Right now I am thinking about how I now will integrate the two sides of the large sample and have got some coloured wefts to finish the other sample. In the long run I think there will be space in this approach to permit myself to try out new things and not be too worried about getting a perfect think out of it from the start.