Binding Books

I have been to my bookbinding class today and am a happy bunny. In the past years, I have been to several 5 day courses at West Dean College to do bookbinding and have mended books and made books. I did make some books which were bound with my own weaving. But it was always double cloth and I quite fancied trying with a thinner/finer cloth.

Being a retired lady now (as of October 2009), I decided I could go to the local Technical College in Malvern to do book binding so I go every Wednesday afternoon. It is wonderful. We have a wonderful tutor, one Angela Sutton, (do look at her web site), a lively class and all the tools, clamps, presses that you need to do bookbinding.
In September I went to West Dean to do a three day course on Block Printing Fabric and produced five pieces of cloth which were suitable for book binding.

This is one, printed and over printed and with copper foil rectangles which are also  overprinted with the same pattern.

And here are two more.  The top one is big enough for an A4 book and I have spent all afternoon, tearing and cutting handmade paper to make a sketch book for that fabric to cover.  I have an A5 book all sewn and ready for the second piece of fabric. I doubt if I will get more than these two finished this year and I want to do a leather book next term.

I did bring home today two completed books which are below.

I do love marbled paper. In fact I love paper. As I was tearing up the handmade paper today, I was saying to myself. "I remember that shop - Philadelphia. The only bright spot in our trip to an Exhibition there. Oh and this sheet came from a lovely shop in the Hague. I bought two glorious notebooks there and a sheet of paper with cocktails in rows all over it"   There is not enough of it to act as end papers. I did use up some with flowers on it and also cats, making two notebooks for my grand children and using the paper on the outside

The other cheering news is that I did a tiny piece of weaving with 16/2s cotton on a handheld loom. It was then painted with SEKA Paint. Ironed at the hottest setting and washed. Colour Fast!! So my plans for a weaving with Michael's enamels have not run into trouble - yet. I have ordered up the 12/2s unmercerised cotton in the colours I need from William Hall and a friend is going to pick them up this weekend.

Annuals VI

The top picture shows Annuals VI off the loom. It is 21 inches long as shown.  The picture below shows the woven fabric after the machine embroidery of grasses and seed heads has been added to Autumn and the flowers have been sewn on to Summer with metallic gold thread.

This shows the whole thing assembled on its five inch perspex cube. The viewpoint is looking at Summer and Autumn.

This one shows Spring and Summer.  And that is the end of the Annuals series.I have started on the Fruit and, after some trials, have finished a square of apples. I have painted the warp for pears and will complete that tonight.

I have also worked out what to do about the triple cloth for the enamels. I have decided to do it in 12/2s cotton and have ordered some from Halls.

This last weekend we had Priscilla Lowry  at the Kennet Valley Guild to give a talk (The WoW Factor) and two courses (One on Knitting Silk and one on Spinning Silk. The talk was very interesting - what does a juror look for at a juried exhibition. Something different, something that stands out. Something that has been designed. Definitely food for thought there. She is a first rate teacher and one very knowledgeable lady .

Last Thursday Michael and I squeezed in a visit to an Exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham dealing with Art Materials. We had booked for a half day course on pastels with Tim Fisher and that was very informative. I learnt such a lot. We were used a paper new to me - basically high class sandpaper!!! Not something where you blend with your fingers.

Using Enamelled Tiles

I have been exercised about colours and how to deal with the new project of a weaving which includes Michael's enamels. I have carried a trial on Photoshop which has been helpful.
First of all I drew a grid on white foam board and laid out the enamels as I wanted them. Each enamel is 70 mm square and I an going to make the pockets at least 75 mm square. Maybe 80 mm would be better.

I had quite a job with Photoshop because the 'white' of the board is not white but patchy due to undulations and lighting.  A first trial only put black round each enamel and that is much better than a white surround. Then I filled in the other squares with bright colours and did not like it at all.

So I used the eye dropper in Photoshop to pick up colours from the enamels and filled the squares artistically with those colours. This is a great improvement. Now all I have to do is decide how to get those colours. I don't know if SEKA silk paints will work on cotton and I will have to try that out. It will still be a case of trials and samples if the paint does take.

The colours above are much darker than they really are.

I can see a way of painting the warp if I go to four cloths not three. It is definitely a job for the Megado and this is going to eat shafts. If it is tabby and three cloths, I need 12 shafts. If it is tabby and four cloths, I need 16. I was thinking that a complete goose eye twill in each coloured box would be nice but that will take 24 shafts.

I will need to do experiments but I only have enough tiles for the final version.  There are three slightly longer tiles which I can use and Michael has agreed to paint a set of 'tiles' on thick paper.

I have finished the Vale of Evesham series. Number IV has gone to the Midlands Textile Forum (MTF) Annual Exhibition in Birmingham. Annuals VI is finished and off the Megado - no more of that either. I have painted the next bit of warp in green and red and it is drying at this moment. We are going to have apples and pears next. But everything has to be off that loom by Sunday 15th November as I have a major project which is late in starting!!

I got the train to Birmingham to deliver  Vale IV to the MTF and had plenty of time to read John Becker's Pattern and Loom. This is available from

http://staff.hum.ku.dk/dbwagner/Pattern-and-Loom.html





Just download it. The author has examined many early Chinese weavings and replicated them. The book is a very scholarly work - full of drafts and photos of early weavings and his versions of them. Very good indeed, even if not for the average weaver to try out!
 

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.

Plasticine Flowers and Cushions

My cushions have gone to Kuala Lumpur!! My eldest daughter, Ruth,  was was here from KL over the weekend, took one look at these cushions in the sitting room and said  'Where did you get those?' and then, when I explained that I had woven them, said 'Can I have them?'. They have gone to her new garden room where I think they will be happy. They are 20 inches square and have a central opening at the back with Velcro as a closure.

They were woven earlier this year on eight shafts with a green/brown warp in 2/10 cotton and the genesis is interesting. It is a work based on a photograph.

The Kennet Valley Guild did this first in 2008. We asked an artistic member (Ros Wilson) of the Guild to provide a photograph, her choice, which we could all use as inspiration for a textile work. In 2008 it was  a mediaeval brick wall. That caused some fun. This year, it was the artwork of plasticine flowers seen above.

I started by weaving rows of different colours of flowers using the draft shown. The pattern was woven in odds and ends of yarn, all thicker than the warp and it was okay but  a bit dull. So I added petals cut from dyed cotton pinched from my sister's stash, blanket stitched these to the weaving and added machine embroidered stamens to get the results you see. The point being that the collaged flowers are much larger than the woven ones.

There was a third cushion which has also gone to KL but I never took its photo as it was a disaster area which I did point out to Ruth. The weft pattern yarn was one skein of silk chenille which was variegated in red, purple and dark purple. When woven up, it looked lovely and I was very pleased with it. I put it aside for a week but, when I picked it up to do the flower collages, I found it had 'wormed'. I was horrified. I have done a chenille car-rug in the past and that worked fine. It has been through the washing machine and still looks good. The only difference I can see, is that the car rug was chenille weft only but the cushion had 2/10 cotton in it as well for the back. Or maybe it was the effect of using silk chenille which the car rug is not. The effect is to produce little loops of yarn. Not that many, maybe 10 over the whole cushion and Ruth did not care. So it has gone to a new home too. 

What is interesting in these exercises is how people go about extracting ideas from such a photograph. One person isolated a small area of the photo with several interesting flowers on it and then needle felted a similar set of flowers in the same colours on to a tea cosy.  Someone else took a vertical slice of the photo and extracted the colours from it, then turned that into knitting. Quite amazing the versatility of the human mind. The guild does have a whole day set aside to do this so that everyone can look at everything and find out how the ideas were extracted.

Gold Challenge 2005

I thought it would be nice to remind myself of what the 12 pockets held in the KV Guild entry for the Gold Challenge in 2005. I remember going to pick up all the pieces from Chris Fletcher and being astonished to be handed a shoe box full of these beautiful miniatures. Each had to fit into a pocket 1.75 by 2.5 inches. It was really difficult to get the tiny tapestry loom into the pocket!

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!