Weaving Update: Perception

My larger weavings take some time so it's time to celebrate that I'm past the half way point on my current word-based double weave. I have a lot of additional ideas for this one. It doesn't seem...chaotic enough. So I'm thinking about adding bead embroidery and sequins for additional texture on this piece. I haven't done true bead embroidery on my weavings so I'll have to weave a sample piece I can play with. This fabric is a little loose and airy and beads can get heavy quickly. It's just a thought right now.

The middle of this weaving is all orange and black.  It fades out into other colors on either end, but the orange is the central glow. I'm laughing at my younger self because orange wasn't really a color on my creative radar and I kind of hated that my high school colors were orange and black. Here I am staring at orange and black while I weave and it takes on a new brilliance for me. I'm surrounded by orange on a daily basis due to my day job and it's definitely ended up taking the front seat as a color I like to work with in my fiber art in this moment. 

This piece is "Perception" and it calls back to a time in my life where everything felt like it was spinning out of control and what someone else viewed was completely skewed from what was actually happening. I knew what the lies were but the gas-lighting and drinking had gone on for so long I had lost all trust in myself. I have my confidence back...along with some extra that I had never had before in my life. 10 years makes a big difference when you start going in the right direction. I used to joke that it takes me 10 years to get over something, but now I really think it's true. The dramas of my past and the artwork ideas sketched during that time have started to come into physical existence. The first being "Playing with Fire" last spring. Once these ideas become a finished piece of artwork I seem to just...let it go. 

Bruce "helping"

Perception feels timely for this year too. I'm delving into my artwork in the safety of home and friends because I feel on-guard out in the world. Some days I still expect to open my back door to go outside and see the world on fire. I'm working on accepting and moving on, or moving...got my passport updated and have found myself looking into how to immigrate to Canada or what it would cost to move a house of furniture to Europe (mainly for my looms)....I think between myself and my husband we finally have our studio/offices set how we want them and have our equipment upgraded to what we've been dreaming of (my looms, his gaming and music) so I'm not desperate enough to move. I love our house, property, Lansing and our cozy little kitty-filled home.

Gratitude is celebrated regularly here in our home, there was a brilliant full moon this month and I love how quiet and haunting the snow-covered night and shadows feel in our back yard. This giant tree casts the best shadows. 

Yes, And; Stacey Honorarium Commission

On Thursday, October 28th the First Baptist Church of Ann Arbor held an intimate service for the piece that they commissioned me to create in memorial of their pastor, Stacey Simpson Duke.  It's hard to put into words how honored I am to have gotten to create this piece for them. Being hired to design and weave a piece with this level of emotional and personal intention, yet, still have the freedom to create in the way that works best for me was truly a wonderful experience. 

I made it through the service without crying too much and was invited to speak.  A big thing for me with this piece it's the first of my word-based weaving that is not only a commission but will hang in a permanent home.  So far these types of pieces are publicly exhibited but then come back to me. Which has made sense as they relate directly to me and my emotions or how I'm handling (or not handling) something at that time in my life. This was a different level of emotional learning for me. The internet deep dive that I fell into researching Stacey's voice of hope and inclusivity made me feel connected to her without ever having the opportunity to meet her. Once I started learning about her, the ideas and inspiration for this piece came in droves. 

They presented this weaving in the church sanctuary at first and towards the end it was taken to be hung so we could witness it's initial hanging as a group. I was so surprised when I walked into the hallway and they had chosen to hang it from the ceiling in the center of the stairwell. Initially we had discussed hanging it against the wall, but when I had spoken about how my double weavings are visible from both sides at a church meeting back in February the way it was to hang changed, I just didn't realize that it had been confirmed. 

I stayed and answered questions and we spoke about Stacey, a number of people told me that she would have loved it and the other popular comment was that I reminded the attendees of Stacey, with my curly hair and large fuchsia cat eye glasses.

The other exciting thing (to me) about the way this weaving is hung is that the time of day will show off the two sides differently. In the evening the side facing the upstairs hall was in full color and the light shining on it lit lit it up but that light also shines through it. So from the back side, with the light shining through you don't see the colors as vibrantly but you do get the outlines of the words and shapes. I had just given a program about my work and was trying to explain that I weave a bit more open than most and when the light comes through my weavings the colors and often designs disappear making it look more like plain fabric.  This piece doesn't look "plain" by any means, but that effect was lovely to see in-person.  I usually end up with a favorite side of my weavings, but this one is really balanced and I like them both equally, so I'm glad it ended up being hung this way. 

The Service Handout

As much as I always say I don't take commissions, lately when I do they really are worth it, I feel confident that I've done a good job for the group the commission is for and I get a lot of joy out of doing it. And that's how they should feel. This piece actually pushed me to put the most amount of color I've ever included in a weaving before and also learn a vector based design program so I could add movement to the words. I'd never have thought when I was in art school that I would ever end up creating pieces that would be hanging in places of worship (or that I would need to use Illustrator/Inkscape). I didn't think it was out of the question either, I just...didn't know where I or my work was going back then.  

This weaving has so much going on with it that I did my best to narrow down all the detail shots, I hope whoever likes to look at my blog out there enjoys them at much as I do. 

Yes, And weaving update; Half Way

I am just about to the half way point on "Yes, And" which is in the the yellow weft, the brightest color in the middle of 9 different colors, against the black of this weaving. I was able to start weaving this at the beginning of March (I warped the loom and dyed additional rayon in February while waiting for final approval of the size/design). I wasn't sure how long this would take me to weave as I've never had a commission for this kind of piece before (and keeping track of timing can be a pain, so I don't do it on my personal pieces). Commissions take the front seat ahead of most personal projects because I don't like the feeling of someone waiting on me, so I've been weaving at least a half hour nearly every day, up to 5 hours some days. I am now remembering how I finished 3 pieces per semester in college, I wove a lot, I slept when I could and worked more. I have better balance these days. 

I originally quoted about a year to finish this piece but I think if I keep working along this steadily it'll be more like 2-3 more months. That being said, as it warms up I tend to want to start putzing around our gardens in the mornings instead of weaving.  Maybe I'll just start getting up earlier with the birds, that being said, this weather change kicked my butt and I've been too sick to do much but sleep the past 3 days, along with a medical thing I had to deal with last week I'm feeling a bit behind over these past 2 weeks. I haven't promised anything yet, but I'm sure I'll get it done before the projected dates on the agreement in the fall, I just need to see what my weaving pace is once it warms up. 

Hyperlapse x10 of 1 full circuit of the treadling

So far I have 60 hours of winding, warping and weaving on this final piece and about 30 hours of dyeing (I didn't do a great job of tracking that because some of it is just preparing a dye bucket and throwing the skein(s) in to soak for the day) and 8 hours into the design work (that's after I taught myself what I needed to know to work in Inkscape). These numbers do not include the time for the samples I wove to make sure the design was going to all work out. 

I'm really excited to see this piece in full, as I move from color to color I get to see glimpses, but my color sketch and samples are the best I have to go off of to envision the final piece. It's part of what's exciting about weaving, the work has a baseline but you never quite know what the final piece will look like until it's off the loom and up on a wall.

Yes, And: Second Sample and Checker Colors

Before I got going on the full-sized weaving for "Yes, And" I tried a second sample warp with a little bit of color in the black warp. I was curious as to how it might read. I didn't want to be weaving that idea later and think "oh man, this would have been great in Stacey's weaving." I got 6 inches of it done before my meeting with the church to take as a sample to pass around. 

Ultimately I think the color in the black warp is a little too distracting.  The color portions came out as dotted lines in the twill weave structure and I feel like it takes away from the design overall. I am glad I tried it out just to see what it did and so I could confirm that it wouldn't work how I wanted it to with curving text. 

Now this...

I had warp left over to just play and weave fabric. I decided to see how I might want the color to move in and out of each other for the final commission piece.  To keep things simple, a little quicker and not mess with another paper cartoon I went with my favorite pattern: checkers. I really love how this fabric turned out and it confirmed that the way I want to move the colors through the 48 inch long weaving; bright to dark to bright again...I don't want it to look like a rainbow but I still really want to use as many colors as I think will look good without being stripey feeling.   

With the checker pattern I don't feel like the dotted lines of color in the the black warp are as distracting. I suspect its because because the design is straight lines so the dotted lines of colors just sort of fit in. I really love this fabric and I'm torn between finishing it to make it into a little wall hanging or washing it to use as part of a clothing accent piece. One of the things I enjoy about being a fiber artist is I sometimes get to wear my work. 

I had created a smaller checker sample at the end of the warp for "Playing with Fire" so I could see how it washed up. I usually don't wash this fabric as it ends up as wall-hangings so, even though I know weaving has shrinkage, it definitely shrank more than I realized it would. 1 1/8 inches to be exact. The twill allows the fabric to get a little squishy with some stretch.  It washed up really nice though, which is what I was hoping for.

Playing with Fire (Small Weaving)

I doodled these matches back in 2015. I had gotten divorced, I was out a lot and "playing with fire" was feeling like the best description for me and my life at the time. I was either lighting a fire or burning everything to the ground. I liked the look of this small sketch that I had drawn one night and set it aside. I didn't forget about it like I usually do when I doodle, it resonated with me.

Fast forward to now, my life is rather calm and I no longer have to manage drama and chaos. No more "playing with fire" in the figurative sense, it's a reminder of what that part of my life was like. 

So here we are now, I started sampling for a new commission and it seemed to be the perfect warp setup for this image that's been hanging around in the back of my mind and in my computer files for 9 years. I blew it up and started weaving. I don't feel like I have had a ton of success with my hand drawn designs but this is making me think that maybe I'd been trying too hard. Maybe I simply need to doodle and then blow up the design.

Black side detail

I'm referring to the side with more color as the "front" and the black based side as the "back" on this work. I'm quite taken with both sides. Just when I think I like the black based side better, the stark "sketchy" black lines of the colored side rope me back in. 

Colored side detail

This is woven from rayon that I dyed myself, the colored warp is plain weave and the black is a 2-2 twill. The finished piece measures 8.75 in x 16 in.  
 

Yes, And Sample 1

In November and December I went about dyeing new rayon for a church commission that I have agreed to do this year. I did a lot of playing with colors and had a meeting that included putting skeins of yarn that I had dyed up against the wall that the weaving will hang on. We (the committee at the church for this honorarium and I) agreed that saturated colors looked really wonderful and so I set about winding a warp and dressing Beatrice. 

Drafting the way I wanted to warp for this double weave pickup became an obsession. I was rolling it around in my head and sometimes waking up in the middle of the night thinking about what I needed to do to make it work.  This piece is the first where I have one warp threaded as plain weave (which is normal) and the second warp prepared for a twill weave option. The colored layer is plain weave with a striped color warp and the black is twill.  I thought it would be nice to make the more textured fabric in black and it's absolutely wonderful in person. 

One of the things about weaving something that's been in your head can be that you hope it works out in some sort of interesting if not exciting and perfect way, but it can end up being a flop. I was ready, I didn't have my hopes too high, I knew I'd probably have to go in and fix threading errors that would pop up and drive me nuts, or the 2 fabric structures wouldn't play nice together or...something.  It's a miracle. No threading errors and as I started to weave the design it just...worked. I'm still waiting for the shoe to drop on this but it's not, it's just perfect. 

I started with an 8 x 10 of the actual cartoon that I'm working on. The 32 in x 48 in cartoon is just being finalized and working a narrow section of  it gives me a good idea of how the spacing and font sizing is going to look.  After weaving one small portion of the warp (in case I couldn't find the time after a stint of multiple days off in a row) I decided that I wanted to have a long strip to weave and move from one color weft idea to the next. So I printed a 10 x 48 strip of cartoon to work with next. I didn't do too long of a warp because I knew I might want or need to change it up and I didn't want to get stuck with feeling like I had to weave all of it. I think its safe to say that most of us weavers hate to waste warp. So this warp ended up with a 10 x 8 sample and a 10 x 25 sample.

In the above photo I also have a 3rd sample. I tried one more warp with a little bit of color in the black warp.  Just to see how it reads. I didn't want to be weaving that idea on a later project and think "oh man, this would have been great in Stacey's weaving."  I'll talk more about that one in the next blog post.

I met with the church on Sunday. They had a lovely service and afterward an annual meeting that they were happy to have me at to introduce this commission piece in honor of Pastor Stacey. I was so glad to have samples that I could pass around so the church members that attended had something to touch and see as the project was explained. I held the pieces up against the wall. I was afraid to let the blue be too bright, but I need to dye the next batch brighter. I don't naturally tend towards really bright colors, I want more muted tones. This has been nice to get me out of my color-comfort-zone and it really brightens the studio! 

You can check out my YouTube, I post sometimes.
Here I am working on one of these samples.

The Beginnings of a Commission for the First Baptist Church, Ann Arbor

Entrance the weaving will be hung closest to

The Agreement has been signed and I have cashed a check so I think I can publicly talk about a church commission that I am SO excited to be doing. I usually don't take on commissions, but, after a phone conversation and a deep-dive on the internet researching Stacey Simpson Duke's life as a Pastor, knitter and fellow fiber-addict I was quickly moved and inspired. (I could go on and on about her, the people I get to work with to discuss and celebrate her life, and how I'm moved to tears even though I have never met her, but I'm trying to keep my posts project-focused). There are so many reasons I took on this commission.

Proposed Wall, right side above the stairs

This commission actually had perfect timing. The last sampler piece that I took off of Delilah before I sold her I wasn't that pleased with and I'm not really driven to put together the cartoon that I have printed out. I did everything right, the yarn sett was correct, I liked the colors ok, but trying to use stash yarn is hard and it turned out just chunky and stiff. Through this I learned that even though I'm weaving for art-installation work (not wearables), the way the fabric feels and moves is really important to me. I weave with really thin rayon which allows the fabric to be airy. I love how it feels and moves with the slightest breeze. I ordered some small spools of rayon that I thought would work for this new piece and started winding and dyeing it. It dyes up beautifully and is thin, soft and light. It's going to be wonderful to weave with, so I ordered the large 4lb spool of it.

I also have been working on getting a feel for the design. I'm sticking to my usual layered words but we want it to be less static than my usual word-based designs.  Stacey had a lot of energy and brilliant curly hair so the feeling of movement and curling twisting motions comes to mind when people think about her and her personality. For this I decided it was officially time to learn a vector-based design system. Adobe Illustrator was always scary and unnecessary for me back in art school as I wasn't doing any graphic design and here I am, almost 20 years later, needing it. Thankfully, I now have Google and YouTube to help me figure out what I need for a free program and tutorials to go along with it. I downloaded Inkscape and found some videos to show me exactly what I needed to know. We won't discuss how Bryan pointed out that I should try a vector-based program years ago when he painfully watched how I was creating my cartoons with a very time-consuming process in Photoshop/Gimp. I'm needing to make words bend and twist and Inkscape allows for it. Yay for being open to change and learning new programs and tech!

Part of the design I've been carrying around in my bag to look over on occasion

Dyeing for me is meditative. The amount of filling, dipping, stirring and rinsing with water is slow and steady. I'm keeping track of my time but I cut out the wait-time that I have for pots to boil, yarn to soak and dry, etc. I do small-batch one-color-at-a-time dyeing these days and it works well for me. I also keep the kitchen extra-clean to keep dye and fabric separate from dishes and food. I miss having a dye lab but I found I don't need to large-batch dye since I dye project-by-project. I don't even wind extra long warp "just in case I want to do another piece and I'll already have the loom warped for it."  All of my work is fully their own entity these days from the dyeing to finish work. 

I grabbed everything I had dyed so far for our meeting at the beginning of the month to hold up to the wall that the weaving will be going on at the church. I was glad I brought everything I had dyed so far; one color combo was stunning (where I had originally thought it probably wouldn't work) and some of the gorgeous more muted tones that I had dyed looked drab and boring against the wall. We looked at it with no track lighting (the space doesn't have any lights pointed on it right now) and put held them skeins under the lights on another part of the wall to see how it looked. It's very much the color of the wall that's effecting the way the yarn colors play off of it. So I started dyeing to get really bright, saturated colors. 

I ordered more dyes to get a better purple (a base color option I also have in mind) and some other green and yellow options. I'm in love with how the chartreuse green turned out and having fun blending other colors although I'm trying not to go too overboard, they can get mucked up pretty quickly if I'm not careful.  Meanwhile I'm planning to sample a few different striping options to see how they look along with the "wavy" wording" which I hope I will have them ready for when we plan our next in-person meeting at the church to, again, put up on the wall.

I spent about 2 hours winding skeins into balls yesterday, these colors are so wonderful, I haven't done anything this bright in a really long time. I still have a few more skeins to wind and then I'll be able to wind the warp. As I said multiple times in my Instagram reels yesterday, I'm super excited to see how these stripe out in the weaving samples. 

Spinning swift during ball winding

Denim Skirt, Because I can't stop starting new projects!

Over the past few years, as our concert-going has picked up, I have missed having a dark denim skirt in my collection as an option. Sometime in February, as I thought about what I wanted to wear to our next show (Anti-Flag and Flogging Molly) the stack of old jeans in my studio started calling to me.  I started in on this skirt a week before the show.

Cutting, pinning, dyeing, stitching and more pinning and stitching.  I have piles of beads all over my sewing table (a few too many projects going) and I didn't feel like relocating them to get to my sewing machine so I decided to finger-press and hand stitch this skirt. 

I caught most of it on hyper-lapse video.  The seam ripping and stitching at least. I compiled it into the following video with a rambling voice-over:

(I do not pretend to be good at video or editing, 

I figure the more I make myself do it, hopefully I'll get a little better)

I also threw it in a black dye bath with over double black dye I think that it should need and it still only came out dark blue. I'm not sure if maybe the fiber content isn't 100% cotton (as the label says) or if I just need to keep dyeing. There was no time, and, lets face it, I wanted to do some black sashiko stitching on it before it's first concert.

2 nights before the concert my brain wouldn't let me go back to sleep at 4am.  I had been looking at a lot of denim skirts and patches were on my brain.  I added a patch added at about 5:30am, I hated it, asked Bryan when he thought, then I cut the patch out around the spiral stitching that afternoon...I felt really off from not sleeping and for whatever reason, not being able to nap, so I just stitched. I'm going to continue to do various types of black stitching on this skirt so that it'll get darker from the embroidery floss even if I can't get the denim to fully dye black. Thus I have created another personal piece that will probably never quite be done, it'll morph and be a little different every time I wear it. Which is pretty fun. 

I have been getting into a different head space about hand stitching. It's not "too slow" its meditative and controlled. I no longer look at the time that it takes and, just like beads, one stitch at a time...one bead at a time...all of the work that I create is slow and builds up over time to become something wonderful. Everything good takes time and patience. I'm pretty over how fast everything is moving. The days and projects have been flying by despite my attempt to go slower.  How the heck did I finish a hand-stitched skirt in a week in the mornings and my lunch breaks?? It just...happened...and I enjoyed every stitch. 

standard concert dirty bathroom mirror selfie

What a great show!  It was worth being tired.

It turns out I had forgotten how to dye black and I needed to move my bucket dyeing to stove-top.  I need black for my next weaving so figuring out where I flubbed up became important...and I got it. Now I can put it in the closet for the next show or whenever I feel like stitching black again. 

I think it's going to go with most of my wardrobe..

Weaving off Extra Warp

When I prepare all of my large weavings I always put on extra warp and often have extra weft yarn. Most of my larger weavings take me up to 2 1/2 years to create and in that amount of time design choices I made early on can change or I might want to play with something at the end of the weaving.

Sometimes I get to that extra warp and just...play. When I weave in Double Weave Pick Up, it's a plain weave at base. Remembering what twill looks like when the loom is already tied up for it is nice. I do my double weave tie-up as any normal tie-up, 1, 2,3,4. This week I started a very simple twill and just kept going.

I was mesmerized, I had the time and quiet space, I had bobbins of weft to use up. I started day-dreaming of what the fabric was becoming and what I could make out if it. I have a thin strappy satin top that I love the shape of. I could start with something like that....Beaded or loomed straps....who knows. I forget how quickly straight-weaving goes. Still not fast by any means but much quicker than 1/4 of an inch per hour.

Or it could just sit in my stash for years like so many other fabrics. I'm trying not to add projects beyond my focus for new wall/installation pieces. I'm part of a group show this September 2023 and I'm really excited but nervous that I won't have much new work.  Either way it'll be fine, but having a deadline is really helpful for me to get work out of my brain, into the sketchbook and then into reality so I'm using it as a driving force.

*Bonus Content*

I did my first Instagram Live video cutting this piece off the loom. I didn't realize I was recording so I look dumb for the first few seconds 😂. You can find that HERE.