Intention

 

One of the great pleasures I have enjoyed over the years is meeting people who have traveled and generally lived in interesting places, and in some cases, collected interesting textiles.

The above is a photo from the textile collection of someone I met and subsequently stayed with, in no small part so that I could see her collections of ikat and batik from Indonesia and area.

Last night I couldn't sleep, and as is my wont when such happens, I got up and was scrolling through the internet.  I follow a number of textile folk on Twitter and frequently come across nuggets of information that I didn't know about.  

So I came across the term 'intentional bleed' in reference to ikat.

The height of ikat proficiency is to create in the dyebath designs through the resist technique.  The textiles above are examples of the kind of proficiency that dyers/weavers can achieve.  (See the work of Laverne Waddington for her ikat textiles for the height of exactitude.)  There is also a technique where the blurring becomes more of a design element - an intentional bleeding of the coloured areas, one into the other.

I thought about my latest series of warps, where I intentionally blurred the colours of one stripe into the other to make the stripes less rigid, more fluid.

And that's the thing with textiles - and life, to be honest.  How rigid are those lines supposed to be?

When do we stick to the rigid and when do we allow the blurring to happen?

I thought about the hundreds of scarves that I have woven that purposely used the bleeding of one colour into another to create soft subtle shading.

I thought about how I have used weave structure to create subtle shading moving the threads so that some areas showed more warp, some more weft.

I thought about how sometimes a yarn will 'run' colour and stain parts of the cloth that we didn't intend, having intended to have nice crisp stripes.  And how we then judge that effect to be a flaw.

Sometimes we have to embrace what happens, magically, at times without our intending it to happen.

We have to learn when something will be a mistake and when we can embrace it, accept that it isn't perfect, but still functional.

Like each and every one of us, to be honest.

Just some middle of the night musings.

Hello darkness my old friend...

(I dare you to not sing that!  And if you can't, you must be a lot younger than I am.)