Wednesday, December 22, 2021

Heart Felt

 Project:  November 2020 – January 2021

Finished Collaboration


Still catching up on my project postings.  A few years ago, in 2017, I asked Dave, my husband, to collaborate on an art piece with me to show in the 2018 Delaware State Employee National Art show.  We have entered almost every year since then.  This image above is the entry for the 2021 show in February.  It is based on a painting series (below) that Dave did around hearts. 

Original Inspiration Painting



In our collaborative pieces, they have thus far married acrylic painting with fiber arts.  I ran into a knitting technique somewhere called roman braids.  Each of the hearts is made using this technique from my stash of wool yarn.  The braids are then embellished with a silver acrylic thread crocheted along one side.  

Work in progress

Dave used acrylic paints to form the background.  We dipped the braids in glue and placed them onto the prepared canvas.  After drying, the canvas was glazed, glittered, and glazed again!  It was a fun collaborative project that allowed Dave and I to each contribute with our particular artistic talents, just like a marriage!



Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Blue Moon Blanket

 Project Circa 2003-2004


I decided to document this project concurrent with pulling this blanket out and onto the bed as art.  This project was done while we lived in Bloomer, WI from 2003 through 2005.  I was just a few years into my adventure into fiber art and was in the process of acquiring skills and equipment.  I had received a loom as a gift a few years earlier.  That was a blessing.  While living in WI we found a nearby fiber supplier and farmer.  I bought my Lendrum there and some beautiful light silver blue merino wool.  I spun that up.

 

During the summer, I noticed in our field we had mullein growing.  I was looking for natural dye material on our property after having read and taken a natural dye course a few years earlier.  I setup my dye-pot outside.  Gathered and cut the mullein.  This was also when I found Dharma Trading and bought wool yarn to be dyed from their mail order catalogue.  I dyed the yarn with the mullein which turned into a beautiful gold.  At the same time, I wanted to try cochineal.  I had bought a sample kit from Carol Leigh.  So, I overdyed half of the skeins and they turned into a beautiful purple.

 

I was going to use a multi colored warp that included the handspun.  Went through the process of measuring and cutting, setting up and warping the loom.  Tried to weave, and the handspun was too thick.  It broke a lot because there wasn’t enough twist.  It got very frustrating very fast.  The yarn stuck to each other so each treadle was a labor some experience.  I decided to switch the plan around and use a black wool as warp, and the more colorful yarns as weft.

 

After that fiasco, the loom was rest and ready to be started again.  About that time, I learned about a technique manually lifting warp threads following a cartoon to create an image overlay.  I wanted a moon with suggestion of clouds so I let a couple of weft passes from the background sit across the moon image like a cloudy sky. This was a fun exercise.  The overall weave was a weft-faced  traveling twill.






Thanksgiving Kitchen Towels

Project Dates: 10/15/2021 - 11/25/2021

November 25, 2021

Happy belated Thanksgiving Day!  Dave and I were invited to have thanksgiving dinner celebration with some new friends.  How we got this invitation, was a fun time itself!  We had gone over to our friends, our first visit to their home.  Amidst a lot of conversation about the gregarious family life they have, Dave innocently says, “Well, I would like to be invited to YOUR Thanksgiving dinner.”  And there it was, innocently, self-invited!  We tried to back out, because we were both mortified, that an innocent turn of phrase, resulted in that invitation.  But we went!  And then, my inspiration of towels, born out of a desire to thank our host, and a need to have a project on my loom!

I hunted through my considerable stash for towel warp.  I know I wanted to include some cotton crackle.  That made very absorbent towels this past summer.  Given the harvest theme, the colors were in the gold, yellow, and cinnamon range with a hefty dose of beige.  The warp ended up with cotton crochet thread in beige, pumpkin or cinnamon colored tencel, dark beige unmercerized cotton, and gold perle cotton.  The design was balanced along the center line of the towel.


I wanted to try something different for the weave structure.  After perusing from Weaving Innovations from the Bateman Collection (Spady, R., Tracy, N. A., Fiddler, M.), I selected an overshot design, Bateman #364-1 for four shafts.  It was quite an extensive treadling pattern with one hundred and four steps for one complete pattern treadling!


Boredom comes easily to me despite the complex treadling pattern especially with repetitive or single color designs.  Three towels were planned, so I designed three different weft color patterns.  The Bateman pattern and overshot call for a pattern weft and a tabby weft.  The overshot pattern weft was done with the cotton crackle.  For the tabby weft two towels were done in monochrome with the beiges.  The third towel was done in stripes.

 

With a little bit of warp still left after the three towels, I wove a small kitchen wash cloth.  Our friends thanked us for the handwoven gift.  Thanksgiving dinner was a smash hit!

 

Spady, R., Tracy, N. A., Fiddler, M. (2015). Weaving Innovations from the Bateman Collection. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, Inc.