CONVERGENCE 2012

I have been thinking about 'Longitude' which is the yardage exhibition for Convergence 2012. One possibility is to use the fan reed on the Kombo. I would definitely do this in as thick a cotton as I could get away with because weaving with a fan reed is SOOOO  SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW.  I am currently thinking over how I could replicate my ideas before setting out to weave. I might take a photo of a fan-reed fabric and use Photoshop.  Otherwise it will have to be a large sheet of paper and acrylic paints. And there is a long warp of double weave 30/2 Tencel on the Kombo so that will have to be  finished soon.

I was musing to my sister, Dorothy, last week about Small Expressions which is also a Convergence exhibition. I have always wanted to enter for that and indeed two years ago designed and wove several versions of an item intended for entry but I decided the quality was not good enough - mainly because it relied on hand stitching up one edge. You can see one here.  It was very difficult to get the faces to exactly the right dimen-sions. I made 5 or 6 of these and, although I could have done one after that, I was very bored. I still have the damned things lying around the house. Well some of them. I managed to give 2 or 3 away. 

Dorothy suggested the existing multiple weave with Michael's enamels.You can see that here.    I wouldn't want to use that but I do have a few more enamel samples - the three shown on the left. These are bigger than the previous lot. The last one was three layers of, cloth one grey silk to hold the enamels in and show them off, one black cotton to back each enamel and striped cotton which comes to the front elsewhere. It occurs to me that the black cotton and the grey silk only occupy  4 of the Megado 32 shafts - so suppose I made two additional layers each of diversified plain weave and wove motifs to echo those on the enamels? Or could I get away with one tabby and one DPW? Interesting. The last time I got Michael to produce a watercolour painting on very heavy (300gsm) watercolour paper and did a practise run. I only had to weave two versions, the paper one and the real one.  It will probably take longer to warp up than weave. And there is a queue for the Megado. However the Megado has to be used because it has the most space  between reed and breast beam. This project does not roll up on a cloth beam!!!!

Last night I joined a chatty group at Moulsford and enjoyed it enormously while managing to wind two warps. I must go and tie on the dark blue indigo warp.

Vale Of Evesham V

I have tidied up the individual elements of the latest Vale of Evesham. This means ironing everything which had a painted warp to set the paint, tucking in any odd ends, embroidering stamens on the flowers. I visited a good Art shop in Studley today and came away with some black mount board to back everything with.

Winter Orchard - white warp, dark brown weft.

Spring Orchard - white warp, orange and pink weft. It all looked rather samey so I embroidered stamens in gold thread and half way through decided that was a bit samey too. So the gold ones are dotted about and I found some Oliver Twist space dyed silk thread to do the rest with.

Summer Orchard - white warp, dark brown tree trunks, two shades of green in the weft for the leaves. Pale green only for the grass between the trees. Possibly the most successful of the lot.

Autumn Orchard. Plums on a white warp with two shades of purple. One thread was solid dark purple, the other space dyed light purple and white

Instead of plums you could have apples. The pale brown ones in the middle are my favourite Egremont Russets. The warp has been painted in swirls of dark green and red. Not sure I like this one.

Or pears. This warp was also painted in swirls of green and two different colours have been used in the weft for each row of pears. These have worked better than the apples.

So I think the Pears and the Summer Orchard have worked best. Tomorrow I will mount everything up.

Vale of Evesham IV

This is Vale of Evesham IV with various improvements. Although it cannot be seen in this photo, I have got the transitions between sides better. Mostly by running the same colour over the join.

Winter and Spring
This is much as before but the edge is better. I have dyed another lot of flowers so I have three shades of pink and the original off-white. The cordons and their branches are woven in several shades of brown and green now.

Spring and Summer
In this, I continued with the pale green weft round the corner and up to the trunk of the first cordon.

Summer and Autumn
You can see the pale green weft from Spring on the extreme left. On the right of Summer (leaves), there are small paler purple plums (the unripe plums suggested by Linda Scurr- thank you, Linda) which have been embroidered on. Autumn with plums all over is not changed.

I feel I have exhausted this vein. No doubt, I could do another one and it might be better executed and maybe I will have an inspiration for improvement. So I will wait and see.

But I had a very good thought for improving the Annuals. I have woven a single side to try it out and it was satisfactory as Nero Wolfe would say. I have also dyed more material for flowers. So I must awa' to the Megado to do a wee bit o' weaving.

Which reminds me of when I worked at Aberdeen University Physics Dept. A typical remark at coffee would be 'Well, I must awa' and do a few wee summies'.  Said wee summies would usually take a week or two and fill a lot of paper. I could never quite get used to that.

A New Project

Last week was taken up with three lengthy visits to Worcester Royal Infirmary and two to our local GP. Lots of waiting time which can be used to think. I had an idea!! My husband has done some classes in enamelling and we have a number of his samples on square copper plates about 10 cm square.  I have been thinking about these for two years. Must be something I can do with them. My idea was triggered by a picture in Val Holmes' book on Machine Embroidery which I borrowed from my sister though I see it has my niece's name, Cally Booker, written on the flyleaf. I wonder if she knows I have it. I was reading this book while husband was having an MRI scan. Val Holmes showed some embroidery which was attached to squares of raku-fired tiles  with holes in them to which the cloth could be sewn.  Val Holmes attached her tiles together using metal wire. They were probably quite heavy. The enamelled tiles are also quite heavy. My thought was some form of double or multiple weave.
 

 
Some years ago, three of us did an entry for the Association of WSD's birthday, the Gold Challenge. It is about A4 size and is double cloth with 12 pockets, each pocket holding an example of textile treatment. There are knitting needles and a ball of wool, some tapestry, dyed fibre , a weaving, all in dolls house proportion. Chris Fletcher and Linda Scurr did all of these. All I did was the double cloth and tucking the miniatures in each pocket. Fine silk (60/2 NM) was used for the front cloth and 2/6 cotton for the back.














If I did a similar straight double cloth and put a tile in each pocket, I don't believe the weaving would stand the weight. So suppose I make it a chequerboard with a tile in every alternate pocket and use (say) a 30/2 silk as the front cloth over the tiles but have three cloths and bring one to the front in the non-tile squares. If I used warp and weft interchange, the cloth would be really strong. So I would have

Cloth A 30/2 silk set at about 20 to the inch - this will need experiment.
Cloth B 2/10 cotton
Cloth C 2/10 cotton.

The cloths go, in order from the front, Cloth A, Cloth B and Cloth C  under a tile
In the other squares, they go Cloth C, Cloth A and B

That should make it a stout cloth and secure the silk threads.

In addition, I could warp up in stripes of colour in Cloth C and have something like a colour gamp in the non-tile squares.  Or how about painting that warp on the loom? I don't know if cotton will take my SEKA silk paints. Cloth B would be white to show off the tiles - or black?
Experimentation is called. I only have a limited number of tiles so the first experiment will have to use squares of card. And can I get away with doing this on the 8-shaft Louet Kombo or do I need more shafts? I can't see why I need more than 6 shafts if each cloth is tabby.

I am still weaving the Vale of Evesham (up to number 4) on the Megado. Linda Scurr has suggested that I need some unripe plums among the leaves on Side 3, Summer. Thank you Linda. I will implement that idea. It has to be done this week.

I had thought I could not develop the Annuals any further but two versions have been staring at me in the sitting room. I do not like the Autumn side with falling petals so am going to replace it with a design of seedheads. To which end I went to the Autumn Quilt Show to get some more colours of machine embroidery thread. Pretty much a washout. The Spring one is twice as big and has people like ArtVanGo and Ario not to mention a fantastic stall selling Japanese fabrics. Nothing like that last week, and no nice glossy thread. Quilters apparently use only cotton. Bah!

Artistic Decision Time (3)

Progress is being made. Every time I sit down at the Megado, I think 'This is it - the final version'. But it is not. Here is Vale3, as off the loom with Winter at the left and  Autumn at the right. There are faults in Autumn which are due to the shuttle I happen to be using for purple. The said shuttle has rollers and a low nose and, as my beloved Bluster Bay shuttles do not give this problem (they never give any problem except that other weavers keep wanting to borrow them 'Just to try out, you understand'), the roller shuttle has been abandoned. Also there are a few errors in the draft in Autumn too and Winter is too long.

The machine embroidery of leaves for Summer has worked

and the flowers for Spring look sufficiently Spring-like.

Here are Summer and Autumn.

So I am off to correct the draft of Autumn and then start on Vale4.

Artistic Decision Time (2)

I have corrected/shortened all the drafts carrying out all the decisions  for the four sides of the Vale of Evesham. But I thought Side 3 Summer could do with improvement and fattened up all the leaves. 

It is still a bit lacking so I machine embroidered a few leaves on it. If you look carefully, you will see two leaves embroidered in the same green as the background leaves. These were done first  and the thread selected as a good match for the silk weft. Instead of toning nicely, they are invisible. So I used a different green. Still not enough extra leaves.

The number of leaves embroidered on is up from six to twelve. Better but not good enough.

Now the number of extra leaves is eighteen. And I think this is acceptable. So off to weave another four sides.

Artistic Decision Time

In addition to my attempts at Annuals with double stitched cloth, I have been working on a similar theme but devoted to the Vale of Evesham. We live on the edge of the Vale which is a famous fruit growing district, particularly for plums. This is because the River Severn has been bringing down silt for millenia and dumping it in the Vale, so the soil is very rich.

What I have done is to imagine fruit trees throughout the year.

Side 1 Winter - three cordon fruit trees in the snow. Well, the snow is very grubby round here.

This is acceptable. I'll stick with this.

Side 2. Spring. The cordons are in flower but only the cordon framework is being woven. There are two versions shown here. The upper one has  a black weft on a warp painted green and brown, all a bit dark and not spring like. The lower one is on a white warp. The trunks are in mid-brown now and the branches are various colours of brown/green. The variation of colour was done to see which colour would be best but I like the effect of the variation so I will stick with this.

And this is with the flowers laid out on top. I still think the flowers are too big. They have a diameter of an inch and the width of the cloth is only 5.25 inches. I will wait until after my lesson next week to decide on this. But it does not stop me weaving the next version since, whatever happens, the flowers are being applied after weaving. The flowers shown were cut from a ribbon which I dyed various shades of pink. I was a bit surprised that the ribbon dyed so well with acid dyes. I have no idea what the material of the ribbon is and thought it would be viscose so was expecting the colour take-up to be poor. As I wanted a pale pink, I didn't mind. Instead the first batch gave me a good bright red! And the lace ribbon, used in Annuals, has never turned out remotely pink but is dark red. No use for plum blossom. And yes I do know that plum blossom has five petals not six

Side 3 Summer with leaves everywhere. This shows two versions, both with brown trunks. One has three cordons and one was only one cordon which is a mistake. To me, it looks like nothing at all. So three cordons it is.

Side 4 Autumn. Three cordons carrying lots of plums - Early Orleans by the colour. You do not ask for plums in the green grocers around here, you ask for 'Pershore Eggs', or 'Marjorie Seedlings' or 'Early Orleans' or  - - -. What you do not ask for is Victorias as they are considered an inferior variety suited only for export to the rest of the world. Or possibly fed to the pigs.


Well, that is a few artistic decisions taken. Now I have to get the dimensions right. The Annuals series  had a 'frame' of brown broken twill which was lined up with the edges of the box. Here I do not mind if branches break through from one side to the next. But currently the length is 22 inches and it needs to  be 20 inches plus 3/8th of an inch. So the drafts need adjusting.

For the record, it takes me 2.5 hours total weaving time  to weave a complete set of four sides plus the run-in for the seam.