Second draft after messing around with progressions - flames
Third draft, after deciding the mercerized cotton needed more interlacements
Fourth draft
Sometimes people ask where I get my ideas from.
Well, that depends (you're surprised, aren't you?)
Right now I'm focused on using up what stash I have, so I'm looking at the yarns I have and working with them to make something they will be suitable for. Lately it's been never ending tea towels.
As I was finishing up working with the 2/16 cotton, I dug out the mercerized cotton stash - three boxes of it. As I sorted the colours, I grouped them into potential warp combinations. There was not enough of any one colour to make a warp (sectional beaming) but I rarely do a one colour warp these days. (The all natural 2/16 was an exception because I needed something to use up the dribs and drabs of the dyed yarns and natural was cheap and easy.)
What I had when I finished sorting was four bins - one with medium to burgundy red, one with burgundy red to dark purple, one with an 'odd' blue - dark with greenish undertones - one with 'neutral' things like beige, grey, sage green.
Then I found a large cone of copper - about a kilo - and decided that it could be used as weft on the med-dark burgundy and began thinking about flames. And how appropriate that vision was, considering how the world seems to be on fire right now - Spain, Portugal, large parts of the continent of Africa, the US and Canada. I think Australia isn't burning right now just because it's winter there.
Then I thought about climate change in general - flooding, drought, other climate disasters.
As I looked at the bins of yarn, I thought I could use climate change as a theme with flames as the first.
The neutrals will be drought. The darker reds/purples will be heat. The 'odd' blue will be flood.
Given how fine 2/20 mercerized cotton is, and how slippery, and the colours I will be working with, each warp will be some iteration of a fairly simple progression. For 'flood' I'm thinking of something more undulating, so that will likely be the last one I do. But, and there's the thing, after beaming the first warp with the med-dark reds? There is still a tonne of yarn left. So this series may extend further. As each warp gets woven, I look at it on the loom, I look at it from beside the loom, I check underneath, because the cloth looks slightly different on each side, I think about the colours (both warp and weft) I want to use, and I think about the theme.
And I make changes.
Sometimes tiny ones, like between draft 2 and 3, sometimes slightly bigger ones, like draft 3 to 4.
Most times I don't have any such theme I'm working with, other than 'will this cloth do the task it is intended for? Does it look pretty (to me)?'
But the world is too much with me these days, and here I am...
3 comments:
I'm in Australia.
The 2019/2020 fires started in August, and ended - I think - around February; so winter no longer stops bushfires. However, we're not burning at the moment because we're flooding.
Floods aren't uncommon here, but the scale of these is unprecedented. Some places have had floods over 2 metres higher than previously recorded - and not just once, but some have had this happen four times in the last few months. I live far away from the flood-affected East Coast, and at 300 metres above sea level I'm very safe from floods, but last winter we had high winds coming from a very different direction than normal. Huge swathes of mountain ash trees that were hundreds of years old just fell over. Many of the damaged or destroyed homes still have not yet been repaired or replaced, and the narrow roads on Mount Dandenong were blocked for a long time.
A tip - I lived through the Canberra firestorm in 2003, where the sky was dark orange. None of us could look at anything orange for several years. It will be very difficult to sell any of the fire-themed items in areas affected by fire.
I hope you are safe where you are.
thank you for sharing your creative process. I find it helps me push my own boundaries when I see how others move along a creative path! Juli
Anne, I’m so sorry to hear about the floods. We have been spared wildfires this year, so far. But the temps are climbing and who knows what will happen.
Everywhere is dangerously affected by climate change, pandemics and chaos. Where it will end, who knows. All I can do is weave and encourage people to keep going, keep trying to be a positive energy in the world, even when it seems futile.
Hugs.
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