Week Two Blog Post

Week two has been quite a slow week in terms of progress as it always is at the start of a weave project.

I was faced with the first challenge of the week: dip dyeing my warp. I decided to dip dye rather than paint the warp as it is less time consuming. I do not have a natural flair when dyeing as I find it difficult to get the colours to come out how I imagine them to. This made me nervous when I took my warp down to the dye lab. Despite my initial cautiousness the colours actually turned out better than any of my test hanks, so I was pleased with the final result.

As well as dyeing my warp for the first time, I am using another new method, piqué. It means that the threading up of my loom will be slightly different to what I am used to. Whilst threading my base cloth across two blocks of six shafts, I will be taking one thread from the pique warp between every two threads from the base cloth. This means that my threading plan will progress like this: 1, 2, 13, 3, 4, 14, 5, 6, 15 etc.

Although at first I found this method of threading to be quite difficult and confusing, resulting in having to restart some sections multiple times, I eventually got the hang of it.

I am slightly disappointed that it has taken me so long to get on the loom having being set back by the dye lab. Despite this I do feel like two weeks is a good amount of time to make some progress.

My aim for the oncoming week is to get through half of my warp with some great samples as I only have two more weeks left on the loom.



(304 words)

Week One

Week one has helped give my work a push in the right direction to develop on from the summer project into a grounded weave project. On day one I was feeling particularly lost, and as though my work had come to and “end”.

After looking through my sketchbook for inspiration for my warp I was particularly interested in one group of drawings (vertical lines, soft edges, patches of colour, space between colour)

From these drawings I have decided on making a warp that contained isolated sections to be either dip-dyed or painted with dye. I will also be making another smaller warp to add on a separate beam to create a pique weave, inspired by the wavy lines in my drawings. I have made a choice to use undyed mercerised cotton as I have preferred to use this yarn in previous work due to the strength of the yarn. I thought that mercerised cotton should be relatively straight forward to dye.

As I am new to dyeing, having only had a health and safety induction to the dye lab last year, I decided to first test out the different coloured dyes on some smaller hanks of the mercerised cotton. This turned out to be an excellent idea as I soon discovered that I was not very talented at mixing up the correct colours. My first hank turned out to be a completely wrong; brown came out purple and black turned blue. Once this hank was transferred onto a cone, however, I actually thought that it looked a lot better, despite not being true to my colour palette.

On Friday I left three more hank tests drying in the dye lab to be picked up on Monday.

From my experimentation in the dye lab I have learnt that it isn’t as straight forward as I first thought, I definitely need more practice and will need to test the dye on a smaller hank before sacrificing my warp to be dyed incorrectly!

***** Need to scan drawings from sketchbook and add photo of first dyed hank on cone *****


330 words

Boyle Family

The Boyle Family is a collection of artists, who are in fact a real family. "Earth Studies" is a body of work where the artists randomly pin pointed a coordinate on a map, travelled to that destination and recreated a rectanlge of the land.

I am particularly interested in The Boyle Family as the themes explored in their work parallel some of my own. They have turned something that is quite mundane into something of interest, that would probably be overlooked by passers by.

Photoshop Repeat Patterns

I have been using photoshop to create some repeat patterns from my photographs. I like how this technique of repeating a section of a photograph has been revealing some geometric shapes in the repeat patterns.

This process has got me thinking of how I can take my work further, as I feel like I am working in circles and not exactly taking this project anywhere further than making Suffolk Puffs and keeping the "Make Up Diary"

Looking at my work I see:

Rich texture, soft lines, muted colour palettes. 

These are a couple of recurring themes that I have focused on in past work. 

 I feel that in order to progress in this project I need to seek some inspiration from other sources that also possess these same themes. 

24.8.13

Colour

Today using photoshop I picked out a few of the colours from one of my photographs of the make up wipes. I think these colours would be nice to use in small proportions. I will do some more colour work in my sketchbook using paint to try and come up with a colour palette. This will make coming up with a warp idea a bit easier for myself.

Ismini Samanidou