Taking Time – themes and questions

The Slow Movement is a cultural revolution . . . it’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed . . . doing everything as well as possible . . . it’s about quality over quantity in everything . . .

“The beauty of thinking about Slow in relation to Craft is that it is asking me to look at every aspect of what I do, and why I do it, but in a very practical way. To look at making, and showing, and how and why the work is seen and used, and understood”

Malcolm Martin

“One of the things that is attractive about the crafts, or working with materials, is that at its best it can be an ethical practice and that is also what makes it political. When I have interviewed artists and makers about their work and their lives – their work and life is intertwined. When they talk about their work, they talk about themselves, that’s why the object, the work of an artist is never a product – because they are not an object themselves”.

Linda Sandino

Neil Brownsword @ Taking Time

I have just read the catalogue of Taking Time: Craft and the Slow Revolution. This is a touring exhibition from the Birmingham-based Craftspace curated by Helen Carnac. The exhibition ‘aims to show that contemporary craft practice and its methodologies can generate a modern and timely response to current social debates’. In my last blog I showed images of the making and presentation of Calculus, a large tapestry of tiny pebbles commissioned for Taking Time, and mentioned the themes of Taking Time that ‘quietly ask questions about global and local conditions that we find ourselves in today’.

The catalogue is as challenging as the ‘themes as questions’ themselves. The nineteen artists involved each get a couple of pages to tell their story through interview, statement, and image.  For many who read this blog on a regular basis the definition and meaning of craft embodied within this exhibition may seem pretty questionable, though curiously, what came to my mind as I read this catalogue was that those who spearheaded the Arts and Crafts Movement post William Morris in the early 20C (C.R. Ashbee et al) would have had little trouble with the methodologies and ideologies of those making, curating and showing for Taking Time. Weaver, spinner, dyer, designer Ethel Mairet, the subject of my college-based Historical and Contextual Study, was an avid student of the writings of Lewis Mumford, whose radical philosophy of responsible interaction between people, their environment and culture belongs to the tradition of economic and social discourse that Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman continues.

What I find compelling about the whole Taking Time project (some two years in the making) is the place dialogue, conversation and collaboration has had in its conception and nurture. It is quite unusual, but refreshing, to come across an exhibition that has evolved and will evolve further through strategies that enable dialogue to develop and then be given value. The search for dialogue, collaboration, analysis and feedback is something I recognise in my own making during this year when I have unwittingly brought together a collaborative experiment that has so many components found amongst the questions in the themes of Taking Time.

 So without further ado, here are my answers to those ‘questions about global and local conditions that we (artists and makers working in the area of craft) find ourselves in today’.

David Gates @ Taking Time

How can contemporary craft making enable social interaction and embrace collaborative practice?

 Craft has to achieve a visibility, not so much in the exhibiting of the final product, but in the business and process of making. The public perception of craft appears to be: something rather quaint, merely decorative, the product of the personal hobby, a feature of occupational therapy and voluntary arts practice; or as something expensive, difficult to comprehend, not easy to justify, embodying exclusivity and quite beyond our reach. We could be more aware that the making environment within most craft practice is intrinsically beautiful and radiates purpose, and that the artist/craftsperson has a special intrinsic nature too. Historically craft has benefited from a distinct kind of patronage in the provision of space and services, as well as the promotion of the individual vision that is pliable to the needs and requirements of others. Reinstating craft practice and personal vision in locations where social interaction can take place (the NHS, education, museums and galleries, public institutions) could be an effective starting point. Collaborative practice often benefits from crafters being welcomed into acknowledged and secure networks (such as the HOST in West Yorkshire and the FutureEverything festival). Such practice is rarely documented, publicised or promoted and its dynamics are neither understood nor encouraged by the major funding and ILBs (such as the Design Council).

Promise by Sonya Clark

How do we think about the relationships that form an important part of making processes including those between people; people and places; materials and ideas; and the space and time that allows for things to change or be made?

 Here’s an interesting statement from composer Nigel Osborne heard recently on Radio 3. Apply this to craft perhaps. Osborne is talking about a recent performance project he curated – String Theories at London’s new concert venue Kings Place. “It’s a kind of snapshot of a place in time. It seems to me that art now exists in microclimates. It’s not metropolitan. It’s not led by big publishers and big organisations; it gathers in microclimate places . . . so it’s nice to represent new work by its environment, by its place, by the lines that join people together in their lives and make them end up in one place at the same time . . . and there were such a variety of people of so many different backgrounds who were putting in all the things that matter  . . . but don’t usually get a voice. It was a fascinating random slice”.

Gary Breeze @ Taking Time

 How do we understand time constructs that are used within the making process? These may be fast or slow.

 One aspect of computer technology that few artists have picked up is the machine’s ability to capture poiesis – the blossoming of blossoming to use Heiddeger’s words. Poiesis is described in Plato’s Symposium as something that describes the process of begetting and making. It lies outside clock time and is something akin to virtual time  – where an idea of the process of making a piece can be imagined in the mind’s eye in a fraction of the real time of making. The converse of that is the breaking down of a complex sequence of decisions that may come about through improvisation with material. Machine capture with digital tagging and processing can illuminate a previously mysterious sequence of decision-making or physical action.

One of Alice Fox's animated textile images for 15 Images

How can performance, which involves the public in the making of the work challenge ideas of authorship and explore ideas of ownership?

Here’s a reaction to hearing and seeing the web version of Fifteen Images (Le Jardin Pluvieux) – a contemplative work produced through dialogue and collaboration between makers in textiles, music, digital animation, and web design. 

 Hi, very beautiful tonalities! Organic progression with playful mind and fingers of conclusion exponented by spacetime metamorphosis. Now I can understand your interest in weaving. Actually, now when I see that connection (viewing the project link) I also realize that it is textures that I’ve always been mostly interested in music. Texture is like mental progressions within the mind, algorithmically speaking multiple paths simultaneously opening up, closing down, with interaction, similarities, differences – but

the most interesting thing is that it is only the interaction of the mind with the piece you hear and see, that FINALLY is the composition, not just the piece (or mind of the composer and artist) itself, nor the mind (of the composer and artist), but my own mind (and composition and artwork (although someone else’s): by listening and looking at this marvellous piece I just created it – absurd?! – Great stuff!

 Although this may seem a rather muddled ‘stream of consciousness’ response (and by a Finnish composer struggling with his English) it does describe how time-based art can challenge ideas of ownership. This listener (I gather) created his own way through the performance and played with the animation and layering of the images. So what he’s saying is – the work became his . . .

Heindrum Schimmel @ Taking Time

 How can we better understand a making process if we reverse the process or ‘unmake’, literally ‘unpicking the stitches’ to reveal ideas of process, materiality and what an object may look like when it is complete?

This is what the trace aspect of computer analysis of making allows the artist to do – not only can one ‘unpick the stitches’, but more important unpick the decision-making sequence that decided the positioning and choice of stitches in the first place. With such virtual tools simulation becomes possible, not just of the final object, but of the process as well.

Matthew Harris @ Taking Time

 What do site, locality and place mean within the making process and can our personal histories transcend or go beyond our geographies?

 The poetics of place is increasingly recognized as a significant factor in analysis and criticism. There is a growing body of literature on this phenomenon. However, although such study is usually focused on the outcome and not on the making process, the blogging culture with its use of sound and video clips alongside the still digital image is able to both capture and comment effectively on the making process. It can reveal and transcend personal histories and go (via the Internet) beyond the local to the global.

Boomwehmeyer @ Taking Time

 How can an object encourage you to slow down and to take a second look and ask why it looks or functions as it does?

Visual artists discovered in the 1970s that working with film and then video ‘captured ’ the viewer’s attention in an exhibition setting. The time-based factor stopped the gallery viewer in his/her tracks for longer than the oft-observed 10 seconds average in front of a piece. If an object has movement or is attached to interpretative media that might, for example, provide views of the object outside the range of the viewer (let’s say from a range of different angles the viewer couldn’t move to) then the viewer is ‘captured’, will slow down, take another look.

Rebecca Earley @ Taking Time

How do makers communicate ideas of making and how are these spoken about?

 Increasingly makers are considering the web, its forms and structures (blogs, multi-media presentations, open-form browsing environments, social bookmarking), at the outset of, and integral with, the making process. Fifteen Images (Le Jardin Pluvieux) is one such piece. The ‘makers’ have recently learnt that there are aspects of critical explanation and technical language that need to be understood when critical investigation from a particular rather than general direction is engaged. We have recognized that, to best communicate ideas of making, a dialogue has to be engaged that is best governed by the notions surrounding the community of inquiry: an term coined by the American educator Malcolm Lipman. This requires participants to agree upon, and possibly negotiate with each other, shared tools for dialogue. A good example of this is in action is the Radio 3 producer guidance notes for talks and features: every technical term not in common parlance has to be properly explained and demonstrated satisfactorily. This means no listener is left fumbling for a dictionary, reference book or Wikipedia.

What may seem strange to you is that I haven’t yet been to Taking Time (!), currently in Birmingham but touring throughout the UK over the next 2 years. I do know someone who has, and who kindly lent me the catalogue and gave me some of her impressions. I do plan a visit when the show reaches Plymouth. For the best pictorial guide currently to Taking Time go to these Flikr pages here. In my blog for 9 September you can read a resume of the Slow Movement with links to many of the individuals and organisations connected to it.

Ruthin Craft Centre, North Wales

Back in the studio I’m just putting a warp on my loom to experiment further with raphia and tapestry weaving techniques. I’ve nearly finished reading Tim Ingold’s brilliant study of lines – in music, weaving, writing, map-making, storytelling and walking. This book titled Lines: a brief history will be discussed here in the near future. I also managed a trip to North Wales to see, in its final days, the Follow a Thread exhibition of new tapestry art at the Ruthin Craft Centre. An inspiring place and a fascinating exhibition that deserves a blog all of its own. Watch this space. . .

A Beginning and an End

I’m nearing the end of the six-day Autumn School on the 2^nd year of the Bradford College HNC Woven Textile Design. Today we’re going to be considering Realising a Textile Collection and Writing a Final Project Proposal. The spectre of the Final Show next June is already hanging over us and today we’ll have the opportunity to make noises to our lecturer about our intentions. In the seven days prior to the Autumn School last Monday I brought together all the threads of Project 5 whose details I described in my last blog. We had the challenge of an Interim Group Critique, and it really was a challenge to most of us because we were not sure what the expectation was and how much of it would be assessed. After much deliberation I did two things: I wove three samples; I created a web presentation that described my planning, work in progress, work to do, and proposed outcome. In other words I told the story of my Project 5 (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle). Below you can see a display of the web pages that I prepared just in case my lecturers were unwilling to let me show these images from the web. You can download these slides (which also includes a draft mood board and market research images) as a PDF here.

My Group Crit. Presentation for Project 5

You’ll see on the right hand side of my Group Crit. display that I presented my samples in one length. I was persuaded to do this by my wife who reckoned it looked better that way. Several people said – oh, I do like the sections of dark blue (that’s a filler between samples thank you very much!) However, I have put the samples against individual close-up photos.

My first sample with Ikat 'highlights'

These samples I decided to do in the workshop at college. So it was back to the 8-shaft Harris loom, which I haven’t used for some time. After all that experimentation with natural fibres I decided at last to choose raffia as my main fibre and found that Texere in Bradford do a lively selection in different colours. I bought 5 packets in all that seemed to bring together some of the colours I’d explored in my visual realisation work on the parterre. For a warp I discovered a white paper yarn that looked interesting and possible. As soon as I began to make the warp with this fibre I knew I was in for trouble. I had never used anything like it before and I soon got into serious difficulties. I was saved from complete melt-down by Graham the workshop technician who encouraged me to think of a variation on my usual front to back method of warping. I’d seen this done once before by Margaret Eccleston at Farfield Mill, but never tried it.

The second sample using bamboo and sari silk in the middle section

I think Debbie Chandler describes this method as her 3rd way of warping. Here it is: on the warping board instead of tying up the cross, use cross-sticks. Standing at the front of the loom, tie the reed / beater up half way between the front beam and the castle. Hang the cross sticks from the castle so they are behind the beater / reed. Then simply pick off the ends from the cross and thread through the reed. This is a very good method when you have to work with a yarn/fibre that is as difficult as paper.

The third sample using all three raffia colours

The next step was to thread the warp. I decided to imagine this loom as a rug loom and just use 2 shafts and a straight draw. Then, the worst bit of the process – trying to tie the warp up with adequate tension at both ends – without breaking the yarn. Well, thanks to Graham’s help and ingenuity we did it . . . and I’ll certainly know how to do it next time. Putting such a warp on my floor loom will certainly require two people!

Detail from sample 2

I then choose a number of auxiliary yarns to go in a kind of counterpoint with the raffia in the weft. I found a couple of linen yarns of different shades of green, a natural kenaf, a few threads of sari silk remnants and the fabulous white bamboo yarn from Habu that I’d used in my frame experiments at home. I was prepared (and inspired) to weave with raffia after my last workshop with Sue Lawty. She has used this fibre extensively in her work and gave many pointers to working with it. Raffia comes in lengths of about a metre so to weave with it you have to be confident and crafty in making joins between lengths. I deliberated asked Sue Lawty how she did this so effectively, and being the very generous artist she is, she showed me . . . and look Sue, I can do it. Thank you.

The more I wove with raffia the more I really liked it, and I was surprised how well it wove into the paper warp. I do like the unevenness of the colour that seems to produce some very subtle shades and textures. I was quite surprised to discover how well the linen yarns I’d chosen worked alongside the raffia. The first piece is all greens, then the second introduces a blue grey, the third brings in yellow. As I was finishing the second I suddenly thought about painting highlights of colour into what showed in the weave of the paper warp.

The whole of this little weaving project with raffia was hand-manipulated. Along with plain-weave I used just a few of the tapestry knots I know: soumak, Egyptian knots. (I found a wonderful summary of the standard tapestry knots in a little book my wife found on E-bay, called Small-Scale Weaving, it’s Number 17 in the Needle Crafts series from Search Press). The illustration above comes from this book – such a useful reference guide. I twined raffia colours together and layered them too. Every pick was beaten with my trusty metal fork rather than the beater.

Mark's Danish Medallions

Now to the Autumn School itself. We started first thing Monday morning with an interim Group Critique. I don’t think any of us was quite sure exactly what was expected of us for this 10-minute presentation, that is ten minutes of our time and then an indeterminate time for questions (or so it seemed). I think all of us on the course recognize that it is in these presentations, the displays and availability of sketchbooks that we pick up inspiration, information and ideas. Mark was still mining his home territory with visual research based on the shepherd’s hut he had created for his annual holiday location. Beautiful visual work using a latex resist accompanied by a hemp scarf-like sample woven with hemp. This natural yarn was acquired from a local source The House of Hemp. Danish Medallions with and without distortion featured prominently.

One of Mark's images demonstrating geological recycling

Fascinating and inventive work by Jane starting with an investigation into the material taken from children’s paddling pools (some striking colourful samples) to images from a holiday at Morecombe that featured the casts of lugworms! She produced a most beautiful linen scarf that I wish I could show here.

A Clothes-House for Samples

Gail’s work showed evidence of a long journey of investigation (starting with beachcombing) before finding ideas to really engage with. Patchwork seemed in the end to predominate, mixing all kinds of material together in unusual and striking ways. I loved the way she presented these samples on a kind of mini clothes-horse (for socks or knickers perhaps).

A Ceramicist and Knitter

Of the knitters Bridget and Kate were again inspirational in their pathways to their collections of samples. Bridget unfolded the world of bees and the honeycomb; Kate took us to a palm house with recycled crochet, lace and felted wools. Bridget’s market research board (see above) opened up a totally new idea to me: a knitted item as a kind of mould for ceramics.

Shibori - an inspiration for knitter Amanda

Sadly for me after the Group Critique, and the tutorials for some that followed, my other life interrupted and I missed a class trip to Manchester to ‘do the shops’. One class member, whose life doesn’t engage very often with city shopping, described it as an anthropological experience! Seriously though, I think the class found the guided tour of fabrics in Selfridges, Heals, Habitat and then exploring Paperchase most beneficial. Sadder still on the next day, when the class was having a tutorial day in the workshop, I was in Manchester grappling with editing at the BBC and a meeting over a major Arts Council bid.

Thursday I managed, despite some rail chaos, to attend the whole day. This day focused on Professional Studies, a core unit that encourages us to be aware (from within our perceived area of interest – mine being textile artist) to engage with Legislation, Professional Ethics, Business Organisations and Job Roles and Sustainability and Environmental Issues (did you know it takes 10,000 litres of water to make a single tee-shirt?).

Friday was earmarked as a day to grapple with preparation for the Final Project through a unit titled Realising a Textile Collection followed by a kind of brainstorming session on our individual ideas for our final collection. During this session my own ideas were pretty much dismissed by lecturer and group alike. It was then that I woke up to the fact that I had probably gone as far as I was going to be able to go on the second year of this HNC. I went to sit in the next-door university’s beautiful (autumnal) Peace Garden to reconcile myself to this fact. Although I love the textile world passionately, I simply couldn’t see myself jumping through the hoops of the final year without coming seriously to grief. As Dot (Fibre and Fabric) suggested back in August on these pages, I’m still very much a novice weaver and my work is simply not mature enough to deal with the expectations of this final year. I also think you need a lively sense of humour and a very accommodating nature to stick with the vicissitudes of this course. I have neither . . .

I shall miss the HNC programme as a way of reconciling with my patient wife and family the time I keep spending on studying textiles, when I should be composing music and doing family stuff. I shall really miss the wonderful encouragement and technical support Graham, the workshop technician, has consistently given me. And not forgetting those rather bemused full-time students who I have regularly pestered week in week out to let me look at and discuss their work. Finally, thanks to lecturers Gill and Andrea for their patience and ‘good ideas’. I will now have to create my own objectives and signposts . . . perhaps my wonderful Cumbrian teacher will think of taking me back as occasional student!

Sue Lawty (second from the left) and her assistants at Taking Time in Birmingham

Back in September I introduced the subject of the Slow Movement (movement) and mentioned an upcoming touring exhibition called Taking Time. The exhibition opened formally last Friday and my critical friend and sometime collaborator was there with her husband to view a new work by Sue Lawty called Calculus. I had actually decided to focus on the Slow Movement as a theme for the Critical Study element of the Bradford course. Receiving the catalogue earlier this week I was intrigued to see a list of Themes in the form of questions. In my next blog I’ll present my answers to these somewhat puzzling questions. Until then, it’s back to the drawing board as they say . . .

Sue Lawty (and assistants) working on Calculus

The Second Year Approaches

In seven days time I will start the second year of the HNC course in Woven Textile Design at Bradford College, the course I began in September 2008. The Autumn School as it is known will be 6 days in all: lectures, tutorials, seminars, but all practical workshops I gather have now been completed. I passed the first year of the course successfully, not brilliantly, but nothing to be ashamed of ! As for the second year, well, it is made up predominantly of a Project 5 titled Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, units in Professional Practice and Development, a Critical Study of 3,500 words and a Final Project: the realisation and production of a final collection.

One of two samples created in the July workshop with recycled materials

As I’ve already suggested in my blog at the end of the Farfield Residency I have negotiated with my tutor that my second year be devoted to a study of tapestry weaving. I now have a tapestry loom, a developing association with an international name in tapestry art, a second workshop with tapestry artist Sue Lawty under my belt, and lots of enthusiasm to make the very most out of this wonderful opportunity.

Negotiating my textile work around my musical projects in the period between the HNC July Weekend and the Autumn School hasn’t been easy. It has taken me some time to organise the initial preparation for Project 5, a project to be submitted in mid January, but that will have an interim assessment opportunity in just under a fortnight’s time.

I know there are  former HNC graduates who read this blog (I heard from a member of the 2004 cohort just this week), so I must point out that for this final (final) year of the course there is an important change. Project 5 gobbles up Project 6 and becomes a longer and preparatory project for the Final Project. From my position this is most advantageous because it  means I can really prepare technically and artistically for the move from handweaving to tapestry. Project 5 asks for one small / manageable final product and the writing of a proposal for the Final Project.

For next week’s Autumn School the requirement is to present , for  what I understand to be, an interim assessment: a completed sketchbook for Visual Realisation (containing at least 8 drawings, 3 pieces of collage and evidence of work with colour and texture), some evidence of initial Design Development, a mood board, a market research board with an accompanying research file, at least 8 samples showing evidence of experimental work with sustainable fibres and yarns, and the first part of a Professional Studies file focusing on legislation and environmental issues.

For me this is quite a task because late July and August were almost completely taken up with preparations for my Farfield residency and a very necessary holiday in Wales. In September I was due to go off to Portland, Oregan for three weeks, but a family crisis prevented this and I found myself instead struggling to complete a large-scale music theatre work for its first rehearsal early in October. I made a list the other day of all that’s gone on in September – and it was alarming! All that said, I’m now on the way to achieving a state of readiness for the Autumn School.

A section of the parterre in Thornes Park

One of the problems I have found with this course is choosing a subject focus and keeping in mind the technical theme and a market research outcome. For Project 5 this has seemed even more difficult than previously. I have, however, finally arrived at a plan of attack. My subject inspiration is Natural Boundaries, a title that I hope will embrace what I need to produce that small / manageable final item / product. This item will be a piece of textile art (probably based on the parterre in the rose garden of Thornes Park). I will focus on textile art, one of the four routes we can choose from given in the project brief as an ‘end use’ in market research. This final aspect is fortuitous because it enables me to bring together a study of the work of tapestry artist Jilly Edwards (with whom I am collaborating as a composer during the next 6 months) and my emerging interest in the techniques of tapestry weaving.

Six tiny (3cm x 11cm) tapestries by Jilly Edwards

This last week I’ve been able to collect together many of the materials and research sources I need to meet the Autumn School target. There’s been a lot of thinking to do to get this right, and I was so fortunate last week to be able to discuss the detail of my proposed approach to Project 5 with the textile artist I’ve been working with during the summer. I mercilessly raided her studio for journal articles and images, and have been kindly allowed the use of a rich collection of natural yarns and fibres to explore and experience the project subject: Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle. The most important aspect of this opportunity was having a friendly ear to listen to my formative ideas and to be in receipt of so many sensible suggestions, strategies and observations.

Yarns, fibres and journals

The first stage in my progress towards experimenting and handling sustainable and natural fibres and yarns has been to abandon my loom and concentrate on my small weaving frame. You may remember I started using this frame to great effect for the Design Development of Project 4. Having recently seen how two professional tapestry weavers use the small frame loom I became convinced that this should be the medium through which my experimental samples should be created. From attending workshops with Fiona Abercrombie and Sue Lawty I have learnt just enough to set up a warp on such a frame loom and get weaving and experimenting. Here below is illustrated a first experiment just to get the feel of the medium, some off the yarns and fibres, and the weaving techniques.

An experimental sample

The fibres and yarns include a green linen layer, white unbleached bamboo (from Habu no less), a layer of rich blue silk, a weft pick of light blue wool, some raffia and finally a little hemp. The piece is woven in plain weave with a base of end knots and a single line of soumak in the hemp section. I’ve tied up the frame on my loom so I can sit comfortably whilst weaving and have open space under the weaving frame.

A Frame within a Loom

Although I did more thinking than weaving for Project 5 during September I did complete my own ‘re-use and re-cycle’ of the double warp I created for Project 4. From this I have made a sequence of 4 panels, which today I finally ‘finished’ (warm press) and installed above my desk in my studio. This is the double weave opened out at one end to create a single woven piece twice the width of the original warp. I regard this as my first complete art piece at the floor loom. It significantly extends the design and colour palette of my set of double weave sample for Project 4 based on visual realisation of the sea and sky surrounding my cottage in North Wales. I’ve particularly focused attention on the coloured stripe and creating a play of colours through a sustained sequence of striped panels. Producing this has certainly taken up time that might have been put towards Project 5, but completing this work has been a valuable and important design challenge and helped me experience just what it requires in concentration and technical confidence to weave a substantial piece.

Four Panels (above my studio desk)

For the Reduce, Re-use, Re-cycle aspect of Project 5 I’m focusing my attention on a local rug maker – Area of Dewsbury in West Yorkshire. This company makes bespoke rugs and carpets. They have an impressive collection that includes work by the designer Carrie Scott-Huby. This painter and textile artist has her own a label called PinkMoonInspires. This label demonstrates a strong commitment to using recycled materials and Carrie’s current collection of rug designs for Area certainly reflects this. I was surprised and delighted to see  Carrie’s work in this new context because for several years she occupied the next door studio to mine!

Back in July Andrew Warburton, Managing Director of Area, visited my studio during an Open Studios evening at Westgate Studios. When he saw  my loom he generously asked if I would be interested in visiting the Area workshop and offered me access to any yarn remnants left offer from many of his ambitious rug projects. As I now have two looms capable of weaving rugs it seems sensible to begin exploring this aspect of woven textile design. It is very much a world of its own, though not really a part of the HNC course. I’m hoping to arrange a visit soon to Area and look into collecting, re-using and then recycling possible remnants within part of my Project 5 piece for January.

Carrie Scott-Huby's design 'I thought I knew you' for Area - rugs and carpets of Dewsbury

Throughout this busy time of finishing off one project and preparing and planning the next project has been a particularly glorious autumn backdrop. I’ve made several  short trips through autumn colours to Cumbria and most recently to the Devon / Cornwall border, but back here at home in it’s been pretty good too. The park across the road (where I walk or cycle every morning) seems to get more and more wonderful in its autumnal shades. The sun keeps shining and there’s been so little wind and rain to take the leaves from the trees. I even was inspired to write a short and very autumnal piece of music commissioned recently for the launch of a new Chamber Music Project. It was beautifully performed within 10 days of its completion by cellist Tim Lowe and pianist Stephen Gutman. My friendly editor described it as Nigel Morgan meets Gabriel Faure!

The avenue I cycle down every morning

Afterword and image: I’ve started to experiment with a watercolour medium Koh-I-Nor. This enables some rich and illuminated colours that I think will proved invaluable for some of the preparatory work for Project 5. Here’s an autumnal sample.

Autumn images

 

A painting with Koh-I-Nor waterbased dyes

 

 

The Loom Trip

A Loom Trip doesn’t sound very prosaic, but that is what it became known as over the last few weeks. It was to be a 700 mile round trip to collect my very own tapestry loom from its previous owner, the renown tapestry artist Jilly Edwards. We clinched the deal on this loom back in the spring, but it has seemed impossible to find an appropriate time when I could manage the trip. Finally, a kind  invitation to visit a colleague on the Bradford HNC course provided the necessary glue to seal the trip: the opportunity to give an intimate concert in a beautiful home in the remote Lew valley  in mid Devon.

The beautiful Dower House @ Lewdown, Devon

I made ‘the loom trip’ with the textile artist who shared part of my recent Farfield residency, my critical friend, soprano and erstwhile otter expert Alice. She’s been working this past month as an assistant to another tapestry artist, Sue Lawty. Sue is currently engaged on an ambitious piece for a Craftspace touring exhibition opening this month in Birmingham.

Leaving Wakefield mid-morning in the first rain we’d experienced for a month, we made a picnic stop just north of Worcester at Hanbury Woods. This consists of two old commons (sometimes known as Piper’s Common) of some  40 acres now managed by the Worcester Wildlife Trust. These woodland commons contain many ancient beech, sweet chestnut pollards  and oak trees, some over 300 years old. What is lovely about this spot is the way the trees have been planted and thinned out over the years, making the wood feel so spacious and full of light. Last week the leaves were beginning to fall gently, and I found myself tempted to catch those coming my way as an excuse to make a necessary wish! I’m told this is a great place to find those rare chanterelle mushrooms that seem to defy cultivation, but love to grow around beech trees.

After very slow progress through interminable road works around Bristol we turned off the Motorway near Tiverton and enjoyed the scenic route to Okehampton and thence on the old A30 to Lewdown. The final few miles took us deep into a network of valleys on the very edge of northern Dartmoor and onto the estate of the descendants of the author and polymath Sabine Baring-Gould, whose extraordinary novel Mehala I still have plans to transform into an opera – one day!

HNC student Mark & Alice search for otter spraint beside the River Lew

The following day really requires a blog all of its own. It had very little to do with weaving or textiles, more with finding otter spraint and getting nicely wet walking part of the estate, rehearsing Campion and Dowland lute songs, a late afternoon stroll on Dartmoor, performing to our hosts, and then being thoroughly spoilt at the table of the warmest kitchen I’ve been in for some time.

On Sunday morning reality took over and we set off for Exeter to collect ‘the loom’ from a storage centre on the outskirts of the city. Thence to Jilly’s new home, a small but perfectly formed chalet-like structure in a back garden of a city house. No room there for a large tapestry / rug loom with a 72” weaving width.

Here’s part of the e-mail I received when I first asked Jilly for details:

I think it may have been made in Poland, it has no makers name on it and there have been changes made to the loom over the years! But it is in reasonable condition, it is about 25 – 30 years old.  It has two shafts that are operated by the pedals, the rollers are very sturdy with metal ratchets on both ends of each roller and the shafts run well in the runners and they have metal heddles.  The loom is strong, sturdy and of course very wide.  It is so unusual to see such a loom, which is why I bought it, but I am really not going to use it, so for space reasons and I hate equipment just sitting around, I would like it to go to being used.  Your project sounds perfect . . .

 

 

 

Tapestry by Marta Rogoyska probably woven on my loom - now in the Tate London

 

 

The loom had two previous owners before Jilly, Marta Rogoyska and Gabriella Falk. For me, it was comforting to know this loom had been used by three professional weavers, and moreover properly maintained by Jilly’s husband Robert.

My Polish Tapestry Loom - in bits!

Well, that’s all you really need to know about my tapestry loom for now. I got it back to my studio late on Sunday night and early Monday morning my eldest son and I found a space for its dismantled parts in my small studio where it will stay until I rearrange my large studio to accommodate it. I’m not planning to start using it until early January as I have my fifth HNC Project to complete. Then, all being well, ‘A Study of Tapestry Weaving’ becomes the focus of my final 6-month project, a project that I shall artfully connect to the collaboration I’m making as a composer and digital artist to a major and really ambitious installation Jilly Edwards is creating for the famous High Cross House on the Dartington Estate.

The real meat of this ‘loom trip’ was the opportunity to meet Jilly Edwards and visit her (temporary) studio. We spent a fascinating four hours in her ebullient and generous company and came away knowing that we’d met a very special artist.

Jilly and Textures of Memory

What I’d like to try and do here is to discuss what I think makes this tapestry artist so special, and to describe those elements of her practice that might speak to the wider textile community that I know occasionally read this blog. Jilly’s work is well documented in print, but not discussed widely on the web. I hope I can give a personal angle to my own enthusiasm for her tapestry art. I’ve certainly no wish to duplicate any of the writing on her work by the likes of Margot Coates (whose excellent monograph on Ethel Mairet I discussed back in May this year).

Curiously enough Jilly’s textile journey began under the tutelage of one of Mairet’s assistants Joyce Griffiths, who taught Jilly to spin. She studied first as a handweaver, but knew she wanted to explore tapestry. She even adapted her Toika loom by building up the back beam to get a slanted warp (as used in the West Dean workshops). Studying with Fiona Mathison and Maureen Hodge  in Edinburgh as a ’special’ student  (alongside Jorunn Finne and Anne Newdigate-Mills) she adopted the haute lisse, sold her cloth-weaving loom, and didn’t look back. She now uses the vertical loom of Archie Brennan’s design made from ‘Accro’ props and scaffolding, the favoured loom of the famous Dovecote Studio. Pictorial tapestry has only occupied a small part of Jilly’s career. She seems to have progressed quickly to the abstract forms, and acknowledges the influence of the Albers and the Bauhaus, the St Ives school (particularly John Wells and Patrick Heron), weaver Leonore Tawney, and the American minimalist painter Agnes Martin.

Painting by Agnes Martin

Although Jilly’s work is embedded in many of the traditions of tapestry making, when it comes to displaying her work forget everything you might have thought previously about the medium. This isn’t (necessarily) about woven cloth you hang on a wall. Her work is definitely (and mostly these days) ‘off the wall’ (in fact that was the title of a ground-breaking show at the Crafts Study Centre in 2006).

Detail from Textures of Memory

Her signature piece associated with that show is Textures of Memory of 2005. This is a piece some 12 metres long and 5 cm wide. It has become indelibly associated with the artist through its selection as the poster image for the Tapestry Group’s Tapestry 08 exhibition in Halifax. And there it was, in a very smart box in her studio, for us to pick up and explore. But I jump ahead . . . let me introduce you to her studio space.

Nigel looks closely at some sketches in Jilly's temporary studio space

Jilly has just moved house and is awaiting a purpose-built studio in her walled garden. Meantime, she’s joined Exeter’s principal studio community (Exeter Art Space) sharing a high-ceilinged (rather chilly) space with a painter she rarely ever sees.

Work in Progress on A Sense of Place

The woven work ‘in progress’ is tantalising in its rewriting of traditional form. At the loom we saw three strips made up of sequences of small 5cm x 12cm pieces. Imagine a woven piece the size of a railway ticket. To Jilly the stuff of journeys is pretty central to her thinking, and railway tickets assume a significance all their own, proving evidence of the journey and its date and time. The tapestry strips (and there were three on the go) are to be viewed front, back and sides. These strips are able to inhabit space in a totally new way. The sketch below (on the wall behind her loom) shows just one example of how such strips might be laid out.

Sketch for A Sense of Place

Some of these railway ticket sized pieces are presented singly and permanently in glass-faced boxes, a tapestry in miniature displayed like a prize butterfly. Bigger pieces, such a seesaw-like construction about 5-foot long has the woven pieces wrapped onto a steel armature. Also, there are the transparent Muji boxes with compartments containing rolled up tapestry lengths (3cm x 6000 cm approx), rail tickets, delicate leaves, and in one I saw what appeared to be a miniature book.

A (Muji) box of delights

I was really intrigued to read prior to my visit that this artist ‘creates her own language for recording sights and feelings, using colours, shapes and marks that hold specific meanings for her, finding expression in the quality of edge or line’. And there it was, in front of me, exactly that.

In these curious and gently coloured flowing gestures of tapestry there are contained observations and expressive responses from everyday life. The repetitions of regular journeys, celebrated afresh every time as the light, circumstance and seasons change, are found alongside the shock of the new, landscape experienced for the first time. It is tapestry as language, tapestry that will hold and display found objects, objects that act as an aide memoire for the artist, and so a colourful mystery story for the viewer written in a novel script .

One way of really appreciating Jilly’s approach to colour and woven gesture is to get to see The Art Textiles of the World Great Britain Volume 3 published by Telos. This features a section of Ma, a beguiling 90 x 230 cm tapestry of wool, linen and chenille weft on a cotton warp. The play and depth of tone in the central blue panel is unlike anything I’ve encountered in tapestry. You’d be forgiven, seeing it at a distance, in believing it to be painted. Here’s the whole piece:

Ma - Jilly Edwards 2001

What so much of her work seems able to convey is the outcome of a contemplative making. The artist seems to be saying through her work: I weave this so I can think that, or indeed, not think, but open myself up to the eternal now. Is this a kind of Zen-ness of tapestry weaving? The new work for High Cross House at Dartington in Devon is aptly titled A Sense of Place, probably some 90 separate pieces all told – large and tiny – that will reflect qualities special to each room in the house, but also will recount experiences, describe journeys: to engage through touch and texture with the perambulating viewer. There will be music and soundscapes too, gently colouring each space, entering into a dialogue with the many unique forms Jilly is already weaving. The  Bauhaus influenced house conceived in the International Modernist style in the early 1930s is already a totally integrated design inside and out. Jilly is part way towards assembling a further layer of integration with the inside and the outside through the line and trace of thread and weave. It is such a fascinating and compelling idea.

One of a set of five double width hangings in progress

Highly Recommended!

Back in my world of handloom weaving I’ve now completed three of the five  double width panels I’m making with the remaining section of the double weave warp I created in July. It’s been going very well and I’ve had such inspiration from studying a remarkable book from Sweden. Forma Monster (aka. The Textile Design Book) by Karin Jerstorp and Eva Kohlmark is the book I should have had at the start my HNC course. As a manual of basic design strategies and thinking it is unique, and I love it. I can’t recommend this book too highly. There’s an English version published by A & C Black (1992).

I went into college briefly this week to discuss with Graham my proposed workshop day from now until January. I’m hoping to use one of the computer-controlled looms and get to grips with the WeaveIt software. Visiting the library I discovered a copy of Ursina Arn-Grischott’s Double Weave. Recommended by many followers of this blog when I was studying double weave, it is really one of the most exciting and beautiful books on weave I have ever seen. Be warned, it is seriously expensive!

Pleasing Yourself – the world of Janet Bolton

 

To the lighthouse . . .

I don’t stitch and I don’t sew. So what am I doing going to a lecture by Janet Bolton. Before last week I knew very little about her, but a magazine article provided an introduction and made me curious to visit a local exhibition, and then hear her speak about her life and work. I was quite unprepared for the affect this would have on me, and the chain reaction as I found myself looking and thinking differently about textiles and fabric.

two sheep in two fields

Janet Bolton is in her sixties and for thirty years has sustained a gentle (and international) reputation as a textile artist whose work crosses the boundaries between craft and art. This lady puts pieces of fabric together to create patchwork pictures and assemblages that are unforgettable and play with the imagination like few artists I know can. For her the commonplace image – a kite, a lighthouse, a sheep, the button – become symbolic elements that we take into our imaginations. We can all take part in her pictures.

Robert R's Bed

What she has done is take the essence of patchwork quilting, and fashion it in a way that puts it in a new and more general context. Quilting, if what little I know of it is correct, has a very long and on-going tradition that seems so bound up with a woman’s world of family and friendship. It has its own aesthetic and ethnography. I dipped into Cheryl Torsley and Judy Elsey’s book Quilt Culture and was taken aback by the way this activity of both personal and communal design and craft had seasoned literature (such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved) and fine art (Robert Rauschenberg’s Bed) Here’s an abstract from an academic journal article titled Quilt Language: towards a poetics of quilting.

The aesthetics of quilt making can be defined by exploring three ways in which quilts speak: through their formal qualities, their use of fabric, and their social context. The discussion here is focused primarily on nineteenth-century America, where quilts were important historical documents that transmitted information about women and their lives that might not have been available through other means and that otherwise may well have been overlooked. Quilts speak through their ‘graphic wit’, their use of formal elements, and their makers were adept at manipulating shapes, colors, and patterns to achieve dazzling visual displays. Fabric was also an essential element through which quilt makers expressed themselves. As well as providing the basic ‘palette’ of a quilt, the fabric was significant in its own right, whether it was purchased new or it was recycled for its emotional resonance. Additionally, although women made quilts, their significance often transcended the domestic realm. Finally, women used their quilts as a way of making utterances: whether to tell stories about the Bible, to collect images related to their lives, or to connect to other people, living or dead. The quilt aesthetic is still a thriving tradition and the transformative potential of using fragments to piece together a whole is especially relevant today.

 Strong stuff, and a perhaps a world away from Janet Bolton, who, by her own admission seems surprised at the reaction her gentle ‘home-made’ work has drawn – from serious galleries and art critics as well as enthusiastic quilters and craftswomen (who speak with such joy and enthusiasm about her workshops). Here’s a great example I discovered, a blog I thought quite delightful and life-affirming.

Ballooning

The ingredients that seem to have made Bolton’s work so popular, accessible and truly unique are size, simplicity, care about complexity of content, and irregularity of fabric structuring matched with precision of stitch. Very little is made that is larger than 30cm by 30cm, and generally much small (you can’t put these patchwork ‘quilts’ on anything but a very small cot!). The scale just seems to suit the amount and nature of content. The fabric is varied, and is often surprising – but is never crowded. You’ll see a cotton remnant next door to a piece of fine Japanese silk . . . and it works. The colour tones can be close – they can be way apart. And the content – well this is the masterstroke – the content is what belongs to us all, what we all recognize, and what so often pulls the heartstrings of memory, even memories we don’t actually own to ourselves, but ones we have read about, seen on TV perhaps. My wife said when she looked at Janet’s pictures: ‘they have the same magic as the books (and illustrations) of Shirley Hughes’.

Two girls (near as I can get!)

Let me tell you about one image Janet showed in a really excellent sequence of slides in her lecture. Here were four girls in cotton frocks. They were standing as young girls do with legs and arms all over the place, no sense of balance and deportment here (sorry – but I couldn’t find the image anywhere on the web). This is what you recognize from holiday photos – sisters and cousins on the beach leaning on one another. You imagine big smiles, noisy voices, ice cream, sunny days, the sound of the sea, picnics . . . get the idea? In Janet’s work this is the stuff that floats across your inner eye as you gaze at this ‘simple’ assemblage of fabric, fabric that speaks about the perennial pleasures of life: a sheep in a field, a balloon in the sky, kites flying, collections of trinkets on a dressing table, a vase of flowers at a window. Why, why is this all so meaningful, always so meaningful it can make you cry with longing, laugh with joy? If I knew the answer I would be a much wiser person than I try to be . . .

Three girls and three kites

Janet’s website is a model of simplicity and has a good selection of images. It’s worth a look. That said, there are themes and instances of design and content that are missing. So although I’ve illustrated this text with some of her work I have decided to include a few of my own sketches made during the lecture to amplify things I liked and noticed.

The most striking omission from anything I could find on the web was her fascination with H shaped images and what she called ‘arrangements and assemblages’. So I include both in my two sketches. I think they speak for themselves.

Sketches from the lecture 1

The day after Janet’s lecture I found myself thinking very hard about what I’d seen and heard in the context of my own making. Was there something within woven textile design I could weave into my own work? Are colours and patterns of weave themselves meaningful, or could one find a way of bringing such direct images and forms into woven structures through hand-manipulation of some form? I know people do this – think of those pictures and patterns created using pick-up sticks in double weave – but I really dislike most of it! As I considered this I came across in my Sunday paper an article on painting by Fiona Rae. She is an artist who says ‘I feed an image into Photoshop and flip the colours around. Then I paint it for real’. She doesn’t draw from nature – she likes her images mediated through culture. ‘So while Mickey Mouse is a huge inspiration, a real mouse isn’t’.  Her source images are little blobby angels, hearts, pandas . . . get it? This is Janet Burton territory with a post-modern slant . . . and it works.

Fiona Rae

Here’s what a critic said about Fiona’s recent work:

Fiona Rae is a graphic designer’s dream. She uses paint like it was produced on Photoshop. Her colours and textures are so wide-ranging but put next to each other in such a clean cut way, and her style so print-perfect you could see a designer making them. But it wouldn’t be half as good, because it wouldn’t be painted by hand. And it is the extra dimension of texture, and the possibility of human error, that makes the difference. For instance the marbled effect she creates as an under layer to some of the paintings. This is a purely random out come you could only create with a human and a brush.

A Peter Scott image from The Snow Goose

My final encounter with those images and symbols we all recognize can feed our imagination came through the post this week – a copy of Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, a (rather battered) edition from 1946 with paintings by the ornithologist Peter Scott. I’ve acquired this book because my treasured copy has disappeared and I want to share this affecting book with a friend to whom I have just lent William Fiennes’ The Snow Geese, a recent book about migration, home-sickness and a journey of recovery after illness (and, incidentally, snow geese). I remember exactly when I read and fell in love with Gallico’s novella. I was eleven years old and sitting in my school library.  It was snowing and there was ‘no games’ that day, just a well-banked up library fire to sit beside. Then, I had never experienced the Essex marshes. I think I’d read about Dunkirk, but never sailed a boat, and had no idea about landscape or portrait painting. As for snow geese . . . but there was something in the images that book brought together in my head (it wasn’t the illustrated edition) that must have been somewhere in my genes. Since then my relationship with that book has been informed by all the things I didn’t then know and possibly my love for North Norfolk (listen to my Spring Manoeuvres radiophonic documentary), landscape painting, sailing and the rest has been amplified by this (very sentimental – but wonderful) book.

Ready to go . . .

On the loom I’ve just retied the double weave warp I created for my final college first year project in mid July. I’m planning to weave a piece that opens out to double the width, something I tried to do with my last swatch for my college project (but failed – a few mistakes made it impossible). I’ll do it this time. I’ve been planning, carefully, a method of making this work for me. It is probably a little unorthodox, but it’s worth a try. I still love the colours (from my study of sea and sky back in June) and the warp seems as beguiling as it was 2 months ago. It’s going to be a present for my mother in law Margaret. A very late 80th birthday present.

Take One: Developing a Woven Language

Participants will need: Strong wooden frame (ideally not smaller than 60 x 30 cm), scissors, bobbins/fork, 6” ruler, notebook. Warp of choice (variety of thicknesses useful) e.g. cotton seine twine. Weft threads of choice (if not sure, bring options) e.g. linen, cotton, other twines, raphia, paper, thin wire etc. Sewing needles/cotton.

 Last weekend I attended the second of two workshops given by tapestry artist Sue Lawty at Bankfield Museum in Halifax. The workshop title (above) summoned a group of 10 textile enthusiasts of varying experience and ability to ‘explore the structure, rhythm, scale, light and shade of a selected yarn’ . . . and we certainly did!

Three samples by Sue Lawty

I’ve written about Sue Lawty in two previous blogs so I’m not going to dwell too much on how this charismatic and generous artist manages to create such a sense of purpose amongst her workshop students. What I do want to describe here are aspects of the workshop itself: what we did and what the outcomes were.  In the gallery below there are images I have collected of some of the work produced. For some these might seem a little inconsequential, but the effect of engaging in often quite small-scale activities, and what these may trigger or develop into in the future, could be useful and significant  in the longterm.

A Ball of Paper Thread

You’ll see from the opening paragraph we all received from Sue a list of items necessary for us to work with. During a brief introduction Sue suggested we might all work with the same material as weft – a paper yarn (about 10 epi). We were encouraged to make very small warps on our frames and explore freely how this rather difficult and sometimes intractable material might be worked. We were being limited as much as possible – using one material and one material only – and through such limitations encouraged to build a vigorous and knowledgeable relationship with the yarn.

We were shown how the put a warp on the frame using two different approaches. The first was the traditional ‘wrap around’ technique. Sue demonstrated a good way of keeping the tension on the warp by revolving the frame around the warp yarn rather than wrapping the yarn around a stationary frame. The other technique introduced the idea of cutting warp threads to a double length and creating a warp from tying larks’ head knots on one end and tying the other end with the kind of square knot I already use for tying a warp to the front beam in handloom weaving. Keeping an even tension was stressed as so important – and I learnt a necessary lesson here in my failure to achieve this.

My own 'character' - note the edge knots at the bottom

From then on the most necessary tapestry weaving techniques were quietly introduced – those of us who were uncertain about these were gently and individually helped  (without disturbing or frustrating the progress of the more experienced and able weavers). Those all important edge knots I finally mastered using Sue’s analogy with letters – C one way, D the other – brilliant! And then plain weave itself – just so many, many different ways this can be approached and executed. We were encouraged to think about assembling a kind of dictionary of examples, woven ‘characters’ we knew intimately and that might become part of our own personal language state for weaving. From this dictionary we could then fashioned words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs in different scales and rhythms.

A most adventurous piece

I think we were all surprised, amazed, and taken aback by turn at the outcomes such careful execution, sampling and research into the way the paper yarn could be handled. The results of the whole group, even after a couple of hours were so various and most inspiring (look in the gallery at the bottom of the page for a selection). Sue placed a series of craft tables end to end along the length of the room and had us place our frames in a row. She then discussed each, not critically, but making a description of each experiment from which she then applied her own artistic response –’ I would do this, then this and I’d then try this, and did you know that paper yarn takes dye and colour really well . . . ‘ a constant flow of artistic possibility and imagination.

Her words became for me a kind of litany of action: try not to do something you already know; create a dialogue between you and the thread.

Plain weave raphia

From time to time Sue would bring us together, often as a result of a question from  or a dialogue developing with an individual. She showed us, for example, a turning point in her own work – from some twenty years ago following her first visit to Australia. She developed a piece using raphia, a material rich in both limitations and possibilities. What was fascinating here was the unstable grain and colour of the plain weave surface and the sequence of steps Sue began to take to explore the surface texture and structure. As I already know her work using hemp (another difficult / unusual material) specially commissioned for Bankfield (and discussed in my blog on her previous workshop), so much of what was shown in these small-scale examples I could appreciate as the building blocks of technique, material knowledge and practice shown in work produced quite recently.

My drawing of a sampler for Great Edifice 1985 by William Jefferies

Another aspect of Sue Lawty’s approach to developing a personal language was the close study of existing forms, often from outside the usual field of reference for a tapestry weaver. She particularly acknowledged the influence of basket making and had available on her ‘book table’ a fascinating volume on Contemporary International Basket Making by Mary Butcher (newly appointed artist in residence at the V & A). Sue made a special point of using books she had brought with her to illustrate and discuss ideas and examples both with the group and individuals. With me, she mentioned the practice of weaver William Jefferies, a name I’d just come across with reference to a blog I’d discovered by Steve Bremner. On the table she had a short monograph about Jefferies with a great illustration of his abstract work making use of what Sue described as rhythms of knotting. I intend to find out much more about Jefferies, though there currently seems little in print and on the web.

All in all there was so much to take in from what amounted to a very informal style of workshop guidance. If you were alert you could find yourself picking up nuggets of information and guidance being spread informally around the workshop space. Sue was always ready to answer the most mundane and seemingly simple questions. I asked just how she made joins between separate lengths of weft yarn. The answers I got were rich and various, often the result of much trial and experiment over the years – and Sue made one feel that such questions were important and necessary – and that she had asked them and in some cases was still asking them. It was clear her technique never stood still. There was always a different way in a different context, with invariably a different material.

Towards the end of the two-day session Sue mentioned her participation in an up and coming touring exhibition called Taking Time. Searching for a web reference to this uncovered a fascinating trail of personal enquiry and research . . . into what is known to makers and craftspeople as Slow Movement. This ‘movement’ has been particularly championed by Craftspace, a Birmingham-based organisation that promote craft as a rich activity and medium in educational and social contexts, who support and contribute to all kinds of projects from exhibitions to craft within therapy and rehabilitation. Their take  on the slow culture is that ‘Slowness is particularly associated with craft skills: skill which is acquired over time, cannot be rushed and is intuitively learned. Many makers today are developing critical positions in response to our consumer behaviour; questioning modes of production through new processes, looking at issues of stewardship and sustainability, as well as collective making and reworking everyday objects.’

From discovering Craftspace I was led to the work and blog of curator and maker Helen Curac who has been the driving force behind Taking Time. Her blog documents how such an exhibition is being assembled and provides valuable links to a whole community of people related to craft, design and making that (with two exceptions) I had never heard of.

Going deeper in Slowness I explored some of the roots of this movement. From Carl Honore’s book in Praise of Slow (and the intriguing Under Pressure about parenting) to the work and writing of design guru and facilitator of SlowLab Alastair Fuad-Luk whose latest book Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (Earthscan, 2009) brings together nearly ten years work under the slowness banner. Then there was the discovery of the Landscape and Arts Network and a powerful exposition of Slow Making by Jane Frost who says about her paper: Slow Making is done with reflection, care and consideration of the environmental effects of the source, process and use of materials
Slow Making is relationship and action’.

The figure of Richard Sennett, whose book The Craftsman I’ve probably mentioned in these pages, is a central one in relating craft and making to the Slow Movement. Much of the current rationale and ammunition for practising slowness comes from this very readable book by this professor of economics from the LSE. There are, I gather, two more volumes in the pipeline.

Matthew Harris - Scorched

Finally, here are a few words about textile artist Matthew Harris. Investigating links between music and textiles in the course of promoting my Textiles and Music Interact! project completed last month, I discovered a collaboration between jazz musician Keith Tippett and this textile artist from Gloucester (who I then discover is one of those showing in Taking Time). I wrote to Matthew about my project’s work and he most kindly responded with some fascinating illustrations and writing about his music-related work. He’s currently involved with Michael Brennand-Wood in the refurbishment of Bristol’s Colston Hall and has taken inspiration from the graphic musical notations used by composers such a Karlheinz Stockhausen. In an essay on Harris’ catalogue Trace Elements (University of Gloucsetershire 2008) Brennand-Wood writes: ‘Both Music and Textiles rely on sensory engagement to access content. They are so clearly constructed, orchestrated, scored and designed; yet initial response is often a primal reaction to colour, texture, iconography, sound and rhythm’.  There’s a profile article on Matthew by Ian Wilson in the May / June issue of Embroidery.

 

 

Ex 10

Ex 8

soumak knots

Ex 6

Ex 4

Ex 3

Ex.1

Plain weave raphia

raphia sample (Lawty)

A most adventurous piece

My own ‘character’ – note the edge knots at the bottom

Three samples by Sue Lawty

A Ball of Paper Thread

Matthew Harris – Scorched

My drawing of a sampler for Great Edifice 1985 by William Jeffereie

Spinning at Sarn

I’ve been having a quiet week in North Wales with my wife and daughter. No music, no weaving, just a lot of rain and wind, and a cottage full of books to read. Susan and I have found ourselves engrossed by the first two of Steig Larsson’s extraordinary Millennium series and I have notched up a Daphne Du Murier (My Cousin Rachel), Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (my second go at this strange book) and currently really enjoying E.H.Gombrich’s The Story of Art – a book I should have read years ago. Escaping the clouds hanging over the mountain most of the time, we’ve visited a number of car boot sales and restocked the cottage library.

Lynne Shepherd at the wheel

As we left Sarn village, after a particularly successful charity bookstall raid, I noticed a  sign advertising ‘spinning and weaving’. In a collection of huts and workshops we found a small gallery, a pottery and various craft spaces. Making enquiries I discovered that I could arrange a one-to-one introduction to spinning from Lynne, a member of the local guild of spinners, weavers and dyers. So later in the week, clutching notebook and camera, I turned up for a three-hour session. It was exactly what I had been looking for, what I had surmised as an important gap in my knowledge and experience of textile craft.

My guide to this very special craft was a lady who loved all aspects of working with wool. She was clearly well practised in putting the elements of Spinning across to beginners with enthusiasm. Lynne Shepherd is the co-ordinator of the Lynn Guild of Weavers Spinners and Dyers, a very active guild who meet weekly at Pen y Groes. She’s only recently started teaching at Sarn, so I felt myself most fortunate to have the opportunity of this introduction within a few miles of where I stay in this beautiful part of the Lynn peninsula.

A collection of wools

Lynne had taken real care to set up a varied collection of yarns, wools, wheels, accessories, books and all kinds of examples. This collection of resources made her guide to spinning encompass many things I had simply not expected. She was able to tell the whole story of working with wool from the fleece to the garment. She began with wool itself, the fleece to be exact. She had a bag full of Welsh Mountain fleeces and a series of staples that included Romney, Wensleydale, Shetland, Llyn and Welsh Mountain. She stressed how important it was to take great care over hygiene in handling a fleece and demonstrated how a fleece might be combed and cleaned. I was allowed the choice of working from a raw fleece or ready prepared hanks of wool. For combing, in addition to a drum carder, she recommended a dog comb.

The next step was to explain the difference between spinning and plying and the intricacies of wpi (wraps per inch). We looked at what went to make 2 or 4 ply yarns. I was introduced to a basket of ready-prepared yarns that included Torwen, Herdwick, Merino, Alpaca and Welsh Mountain. At last I felt able to hold these natural yarns in my hand and ask all the questions I’d ever wanted to ask. Lynne was keen to recommend Wingham Wool Work as a great source for such wools, and explained how this Yorkshire-based company regularly make visits to guilds across Wales so that members can try before buying wools.

As if to cue, while this examination was going on, a visiting artist preparing a local exhibition appeared to buy a spindle – a kind of portable spinning wheel. I even got a demonstration.

It was then a very small step to examine dyeing, natural dyes in particular. We looked at examples of Kidd Mohair and Alpaca. I discovered the importance and nature of natural mordants, the catalysts of the dyeing process, how to dye in the microwave, how to dye in a glass jar with a piece of copper pipe (!), and how the local Lynn Guild regularly hold dyeing days when members can experiment with having ‘several dye pots on the go’. Books recommended included A Dyer’s Garden by Rita Buchanan (Interleave Press) and mention of the Dye Garden at Trefrew.

A Niddy-Noddy

Now it was time to explain and use the wheel itself. Lynne had brought three wheels with her: one, locally made, with an attached bobbin holder (2 full – 1 on the wheel to enable the plying process to take place), and two traditional Ashford wheels. But first the Niddy-Noddy! I had never seen this strange hand-held device before. It’s a bit like a warping frame for spinners. I was taught how to wind a spun yarn onto it to enable me to make a hank, from which I was then shown the umbrella action skeiner and wool winder. I’d seen both before, and often wondered what they did!

Finally, in this ‘working backwards approach to Spinning’ I got to sit at the wheel to learn the treadling action. Quite tricky. It took me some time to be able to control the wheel motion properly with my foot.

My first attempt at spinning itself from the wool was with a piece of Alpaca dyed green. I found the co-ordination very difficult and it took the best part of forty minutes to be able to feel something of the correct motion. I also managed to master joining a strand of wool on to the spun thread. The spinning action is certainly something one has to practise over and over again – and I did make a useful video from my camera of Lynne’s ‘action’. I did feel, however, that I had captured something of the basics. If I can borrow my mother-in-law’s wheel then maybe next time I come to Lynn (possibly in the early autumn, it may be worth Lynne’s while to give me some further tuition. I do feel that this is one craft that certainly has to be learnt by example (Lynne did recommend one book – The Essentials of HandSpinning by Mabel Ross, published by Wingham Wool Work 1999). I remain most grateful to this thoughtful spinner for such a thorough and interesting introduction, whether I can take the craft forward or not.

A footnote – during my spinning session a mother and daughter spent an hour or so weaving on very simple cardboard box looms! I’d never seen these box looms before and in comparison to my rather awkward frame looms they were great for beginnings (and competent weavers too!). I append some examples to the gallery images. Essentially, these are standard banana boxes strengthened at the top of the box by two pieces of wood taped at either end of the box. Brilliantly simple!

 

A Banana Box Loom

Woven on a Banana Box Loom

The Mother of Alll

Skeiner and Wool Winder

A Niddy-Noddy

Colourful Alpaca

A collection of pre-prepared wool

A collection of dyed wools

A collection of wools

Staples

Lynne Shepherd at the wheel

The Farfield Residency (13 & 14)

This is the final full day of my residency here at Farfield Mill. Today will see the third and final concert in the series I’ve curated for Farfield Mill, their first venture into music. This was a solo recital for guitar of Matteo Carcassi’s Etudes Melodiques.

Ready for the Concert

Having had a really promising rehearsal the evening before I decided not to spend too much time practising, but to concentrate on making a lively display of the two-week residency and deciding whether or not to take my woven piece off the Glimakra loom. With the display I’ve really benefited from collecting and making images of all sorts during the residency. I had plenty of material to play with, and apart from not quite obeying the necessary perspective correction on the wall space, the end result is certainly colourful and ‘different’.

The display outside the Bainside Studio

All the exhibition items on Level 4 and in this ‘corner’ outside the Bainside studio will remain on show until the end of August. Remember all the work can be viewed in detail and with extensive interpretation on my  website – just take the Quick Link marked Fifteen Images from the Home Page. If you are within striking distance of Sedbergh do come and see this work and take in some of the other exhibitions currently at Farfield Mill. The Maggie Ayres show is highly recommended.

A bit of a mess - with kenaf

As to the knotty problem of what to do about my woven piece and the state of the loom itself, I had almost decided to take what I’d woven off the loom. The right hand end of the warp with 10 ends of kenaf was suffering badly as my illustration above shows.

My Woven Garden piece

I thought if I was to restart the woven piece I would strip these kenaf ends out altogether. However, I felt I needed a second opinion (and possibly some Vilene). Well, in the end I got two opinions and the Vilene (which in the end I didn’t use). Alice appeared about midday with her family on their way to 10 days camping in Scotland, and Margaret from the Farfield Weavers’ Group was weaving herself on Level 4. Between them they decided the woven piece should come off, and Margaret showed both Alice and I some valuable and confident ways to do this, and demonstrated a lovely way of making the ends of the warp secure. During my afternoon concert Alice sat in a distant corner of the Level 4 gallery and did this tidying up process while I played away. This has made the woven piece quite presentable, even though there is still quite a lot of darning of weft ends to do.

The residency resume display

The audience for my final concert was surprisingly large! Indeed, we ran of chairs and had go searching around the lower floors of Mill for extras. I was delighted to discover afterwards some of my own friends and colleagues in the audience. I’m afraid when I’m playing the audience is a complete blur, although there was a lady in the front row with an amazing frock that I found distracting at the time! I grouped the 25 Etudes into batches of six or so and talked a little in between these groups about Carcassi, 19C Paris and how the guitar had changed since the 1820s.

Nigel rehearsing for Saturday's Concert. Photo by Alice Fox

As an un-programmed final item Alice joined me to perform John Dowland’s Flow my Tears, the Lachrimae, a tender and reflective end to what amounts to almost a year’s work. This time last year I was discovering Brigflatts and its beautiful garden (in the rain). I attended Jeanette Appleton’s workshop at Farfield Mill and was so encouraged and enthused. A month later I had begun formal part-time studies in woven textile design at Bradford College, and had begun writing a sequence of music collectively known as Le Jardin Pluvieux. (I’m now half way through this sequence of music, textile installations, digital presentations and poetry – after my work on the life and work of Barbara Hepworth for her centenary celebrations in 2003 it is my most ambitious collection of  music yet). In November I introduced myself to a young woman weaving on one of the College dobby looms (ever curious to know what other student weavers were up to). We both, but variously, attended Sue Lawty’s lecture in York, but didn’t meet again until January, when I saw her in a corridor at College and asked, as she’d been to the lecture, if she’d look at and comment on my blog report on this lecture. She did, and from that has developed a six-month collaboration in music, textiles and digitally-mediated art that has been at the heart of my Farfield residency, and for which I am most grateful. Thank you, Alice and your most patient and supportive family.

At Farfield Mill I need to thank the Chair of Trustees Anne Pierson (for believing a music / textiles residency would be a ‘good thing’ for Farfield), Exhibitions Officer Elizabeth Eaton for facilitating the residency, to Jeremy the new administrator who made essential things happen and appear, to the Farfield staff and volunteers, to Margaret, Anna, Susan and Rosie from the Farfield Weavers’ Group, and studio artist and next-door neighbour Tomoko. At Brigflatts meeting I need to say a particular thank you to the Warden Tess Satchell and the Clerk Margaret Stocks, and further down Brigflatts  Lane  to John Rice and Clare Hamilton for their friendship and hospitality.

What next? There is lots of music to finish writing and possibly a change of studio in Wakefield to accommodate my tapestry loom (still in Exeter sadly). Facts of Life according to Gatto Marte has to be complete by the end of September to go into rehearsal on October 11. I need to put aside time to consider the many lessons this residency has taught me. I have learnt a lot in recent weeks about working and presenting woven textiles, often due to kind observations from the online readers of this blog.

Nigel at the loom. Photo by Alice Fox

Certainly what I set out to do over this past fortnight was probably too ambitious, but I only had this small window of opportunity to bring together a body of work and practice. For me, artistically and personally, it has been worth it. Whether the outcomes will be of sufficient quality and interest to catch the attention and support of galleries and centres for textile art able to accommodate this kind of cross-art residency is to be seen. I hope so.

It’s now Sunday morning and there is the final packing up to do. All my stuff is staying here for 10 days while I’m in Wales. I’ll then say my goodbyes to Ruth and her mother Jean at Oak Dene where I’ve stayed this fortnight. Definitely the best B & B in Sedbergh. I’ll then walk to Brigflatts for meeting and then hope to get a lift the 10 miles or so up to Garsdale Station. I cycled it last summer in an hour and a quarter. Walking it would probably take three hours  . . . I just wish it would stop raining.

No more blogs for bit . . . I may be back in September when I start learning to be a tapestry weaver!

Nigel @ Farfield Mill

 An Extra Note: If you’d like to read a resume of the whole Farfield Residency it is now available as a PDF here.

The Farfield Residency (12:14)

Current Listening: J.S.Bach The Art of Fugue

My dear daughter Frances May, as editor of the wonderful, but late lamented Plan B magazine, always used to head her blog with ‘current listening’. This really set the tone for the writing that followed. During my days at Farfield I have listened to more music in a fortnight than I have in months, if not years. Having really got to know Ollie Mustonen’s playing of the Goldberg Variations, it was time tonight for Die Kunst der Fuge. This version of the work for piano intersperses miniature pieces by Gyorgy Kurtag – to great effect.

* * * *

Today I devoted to weaving, as much as time and this really ‘difficult loom’ would allow. I have made some good progress, but ultimately I am defeated and decide this evening I can’t go any further until I can get the loom balanced (shaft pins would help!) and the lams to behave themselves (without those all important washers I have on my Toika loom.

The next part of the woven garden

What I’ve decided to do is to cut the woven piece off and hang the incomplete piece in a small display I’m putting together about my all too brief residency. I’ve asked Alice to help me do this if she arrives in Sedbergh in good time for my recital tomorrow – I need some Vilene (which she has and I forgot) and some moral support! What I’ve tried to do with this woven experiment is to put colours together with particular weave patterns. I’ve made use of pebble weave, crepe, cord, vertical herringbone (43, 41, 21, 32, 41, 43, 32, 21) and towards the end of the piece long and short pointed twill (with a straight draw – 43, 32, 21, 41, 21, 32, 43, 41, 43, 32, 21).

Detail of the Woven Garden

Despite all the problems I have learnt a lot from my concentrated time trying to weave what is certainly the biggest piece I have attempted to date. I realise how far I have to go to make coherent weave and colour structures. Talking of coherence,

Front view of the woven piece to date

Alice sent me the first fruits of her weaving on the rigid heddle loom she warped up during her time at Farfield. I love the image of the weave against the window with the garden outside . . . I’m hoping she might bring the completed piece to Farfield tomorrow to put in the display I’m co-ordinating (see below).

Alice's Rigid Heddle 'Garden' Piece

I finally put the loom from my mind about 4.0pm and after a strong cup of coffee settled down to play through my programme for tomorrow’s recital.  Although I’ve played this work – Carcassi’s Etudes Melodiques – many times, it’s a fickle piece and there are still corners that surprise and infuriate me. But I like it because it gives me such a lot of room for creative interpretation.

After a gentle and clear morning rain set in before lunchtime . . . and it is still raining,dismal for all those people on holiday. After a flurry of visitors this morning, the Mill has been quite quiet. I wonder what people do with themselves when it is raining in Sedbergh. Probably go and explore one of the many bookshops. It’s a good job I’m 15 minutes walk from the town – so far I have only succumbed to two books, and they were presents. Maybe tomorrow?

I arranged my getaway from Farfield for Sunday afternoon. It will be a five-hour trip by train with three changes to arrive in Bangor in time for a fish and chip supper with Susan and Meg. But before that I have to negotiate getting to Brigflatts for Sunday meeting and then a 10-mile journey to the station at the head of Garsdale. A bus surely? You must be joking. Sedbergh only has a bus service that runs on a Thursday – so it’s a taxi or the kindness of friends or colleagues..

Remember that vase of flowers . . .?

This evening I’ve been putting together a kind of residency retrospective: a display of photographs, sketches, warp and weft designs, recital programmes, photos contributed by the online weavers I know. I can certainly cover a good space of empty wall outside the studio.

The Farfield Residency (11:14)

I’m beginning to make some progress with this woven piece and I’m hoping I might complete half of it by Saturday. The kenaf (hemp) that I unwisely used as part of the warp has had a few breakages, but otherwise everything is going to plan. I’ve never woven anything this wide before so I’ve had to learn how to throw the shuttle. This is quite an art and I’m slowly getting the hang of it! Lack of time is beginning to dictate certain aspects of the design I had in mind. I think it’s better to focus on getting a relatively straightforward play of colour than attempting too intricate patterns and effects.

Weaving the Garden

Today I received my first commission as a weaver, a long winter scarf based on the swatches I submitted for the Conceal and Reveal project at Bradford last May. I was really taken aback when this very well spoken lady appeared and enthused about the design and the feel of the yarns (faux chenille from the cheap basket in my local craft shop). I didn’t have the heart to say anything except I might have trouble getting hold of something similar.

Etude Vingt-Quatre - Matteo Carcassi

Most of my time and energy has had to be focused on preparing this solo recital I’m giving here at Farfield on Saturday. I’m playing Matteo Carcassi’s Etudes Melodiques – complete. This is a set of 24 studies that every student classical guitarist plays, or rather plays the first 6 studies. After that they get decidedly tricky, and, as far as I know, I’m the only guitarist in the world who plays all of them! They are distinctly charming, with echoes of the Preludes of Chopin. The problem with playing this work is pacing the performance – it’s quite a lot to listen to (around 50 minutes). So I try to split the studies up into groups of between four and six. Several years ago I discovered that Hector Berlioz had his own copy of these Etudes and certainly, by the fingerings marked, played them. His copy resides in a private library in California. Frederic Chopin heard Carcassi play hem in Paris and is said to have admired them.

I’ve started to pull together a resume display of the residency. This will include lots of photographs, comments, sketches and design illustrations, some of the music I’ve written, and of course the blogs – generally some evidence! Alice has just sent me some valuable photos of me working with visitors on the handloom on Level 4 that carries the invitation to ‘have a go’. She tells me she’s making some progress at home with the piece on her rigid heddle loom that she started here last week.

Susan & Meg @ Mount Cottage 2008

I’m beginning to turn my thoughts to packing up and preparing to travel to North Wales. My wife Susan is battling against bad weather for the third year in succession – although the sun has appeared briefly. Yesterday she managed to break the axle on our trailer bringing barrels of water up to our waterless cottage – the well, despite all the rain, has dried up. That said, she sounded quite cheerful – perhaps she’s got a good crime thriller on the go (her holiday pleasure).  Meg is still chilling I think – waiting for me to arrive (on Sunday or Monday) to organise some expeditions to our favourite places. I’m hoping to read a few books . . . and gaze at the sea and sky.

River Clough looking West from the 'balcony'

Before a picnic tea at the studio I allowed myself some time to draw. I’m captivated by the view up and down the River Clough from the ‘balcony’ on the top floor of the Mill. The constant sound and movement of the river as it wends its way between the rocks is so fascinating and absorbing. My picture doesn’t begin to capture this, but I enjoyed doing it. About six this morning the light and clarity of the views beyond of the river were breathtaking. My photo hardly does it justice.

Looking East up the River Clough

I’ve had lots of visitors during the day and I’m now rather sorry I haven’t kept a visitors’ book. Must do this in (future) residencies. I do scribble down names when I can, but I should do this properly. The process of weaving does seem to intrigue people. It is clearly, to some, a great mystery (it was to me once), and the complexity of it surprises visitors for whom this may be the first occasion they’ve got that close to a loom.

Visitors try the handloom

On level 4 at the Mill there’s a small bookshop, and I found just browsing a rather special book published in the 1980s. It’s called The Craft of Weaving written by Ann Sutton, Geraldine St Aubyn Hubbard and Peter Collingwood. It is the book of a BBC TV series no less . . . and it is brilliant! Highly recommended, but I imagine (by its price) it is rather rare. I ‘borrowed’ it for some bedtime reading . . . I certainly can’t afford it, sadly

The Craft of the Weaver

HNC Autumn School – Day 2

Arriving for a 9.30am start gives time for coffee and a dohnut, from a shop close to the college. But I sit in the Craft Centre Cafe (closed and empty) until it is time to start work in the Drawing Studio. This seems a good moment to write up the previous day.

my own colour wheel

Today’s studies in colour begin with the ‘colour wheel. With an illustration from the Munsell Colour Space the task is to produce a sequence of ‘principal’ colours spread out in segments around the wheel. These colours are selected from the designer goache tubes indentified in the course materials list. With these in place a sequence of ‘intermediate’ colours are produced as progressions between the principal colours: six in all. The final stage is to produce ’shades’ (adding grey) and tints (adding white).

This painting exercise reveals to me just how difficult mixing can be:individual colour react to mixing in very different and subtle ways. Working with six principal colours requires a large and organised palette. I must find out how a painter would organise mixing in goache. This medium is water-based and when used to overlay makes the paint underneath become wet again, only it has a harder surface and texture than water-colour paint.

Completing the colour wheel task led to a valuable explanattion about some of the essential terminology of colour: value, hue, shade, tint, chroma.

The Munsell Colour Space (developed in the 1930s) has its own notation. But the current international standard is known as Pantone. This is used by designers to specify all the above qualities of colour. Curiously, this system does not appear to be present within established software like Photoshop. The class was given detailed notes on the Munsell approach. I’ll need to reference Pantone in a similar way.

My Collection of Ferns

The afternoon was devoted to working on the colour aspects of our first project: organics. I brought in a selection of ferns and bracken found by the lake in my nearby park (very early this morning!). Chosen in the dark (almost) I was amazed when I reached the studio at the differences in these ferns: in colour, texture, patterning and proportion. I needn’t have worried about whether my chosen ‘organic’ would be too limited in scope for this project!

 

A Collection of Fern Images

As with yesterday’s drawing exercises I assembled a group of images on a single A3 sheet, taking photos of each example as I went along. Beginning with direct observation (using water-colour pencils in my notebook) I moved on to more abstract representations, possibly closer to what I might imagine suitable for a woven surface. I should say the latter inclination was not the intention of the exercise, but I was curious to see what might come out of thinking this way. I ended this sequence of example images by making a print from coating a fern with goache permanent green (a veridian green).

A Negative Fern

As a preparation to working on the A3 sheet I made a series of exploratory images in my notebook. These images were in some ways more successful and meaningful than their larger companions. In one of these I responded to a photo I’d taken and turned into a negative. This image had some most subtle colours that only gradually revealed themselves: the negative white was suffused with pink and blue. I tried to reproduce this using a piece of black cartridge paper: not very good.

A Fern Print

I was very surprised at the sheer variety of colour within what appeared at the outset as a totally green fern! The process of making one’s own images from life forces an attention and focus that becomes more and more stimulating. Previously, when I’ve attempted to draw and paint from life, I’ve been on holiday working outside with all the distractions that can bring. Working in a studio is quite different. The intensity of one’s actions and concentration should not surprise  me, but they do. I completely loose track of time and am thoroughly surprised when I realise it’s five o’clock and time to pack up and go home.

Tomorrow we take the images produced through drawing and painting and use them as a basis for COLLAGE.

HNC Autumn School – Day 3

  Today it feels as though Autumn is well and truly here. Gale warnings on the 5.30am news and it is pouring with rain as I cycle to my studio. There’s a lot to deal with each morning before I set off for Bradford.    

A Fern of Sunlight

I swear it is several degrees colder when I step out of the train at Bradford Interchange, but once in the Drawing Studio the sun appears and the room is flooded with light. We share the space today with a Life Class, which I don’t realise until Marina, with whom I share a table, points this out! Marina’s organic material is a mackerel acquired from the city market. Now two days old its smell and patina are becoming  . . . interesting.        

Black Net Background

The task today is to explore the possibility of texture through collage. Our tutor Andrea arrives with a large bag of oddments: fabric, paper, net, card. We rummage through this like old ladies at a market stall. I grab some black net two (green) plastic bags, some white net and a swathe of olive coloured cotton. Immediately I sense the possibility of the black net as a surface onto which I could pin and glue. I find a wall space between two doors and fill this with a piece of black net cut to size.       I then experiment by painting a little cut-out frond of white net. I pin it to the black net – success! Next I make a whole series of fern-like fronds cut from white net, imagining the fern in two halves, the central stem marking out the separation.  

Cumbrian Bracken

I begin to imagine the white netted half as a fern gradually dying on me and study the photo I took in Cumbria of a piece of bracken showing a sequence from its living green to its dry, dead, yellow/brown state through a progression of orange and reddish brown. I paint the white net series in a progression of colour from green through to a ‘dead’ yellow.    

Collage Fern Segment

On the other segment of my collage I begin with frond pieces created from two plastic bags. Much careful and patient work with scissors required. I realise how very impatient I get with such processes. At a loss to know how to continue I realise that the pieces of cartridge paper I placed underneath the white net fronds as they were painted are a rich kaleidoscope of my observed and chosen colours: green, yellows, orange,brown and a little red. I cut the paper into three  fronds I need to balance the net segment. The collage is complete when the seam of a piece of white net is removed and given a new life as a ’stalk’.   

This day of making has woven into it a session in the textiles CAD room.This is a suite of computers adjacent to the main workshop space in the basement of the Craft Centre. I  now have a college e-mail address: 10133943@bradfordcollege.ac.uk . I also get access to a suite of software tools and 3Gig of server space for all those images I’ll create in research and preparation for my woven work. I have access to printers and scanners: essential tools for examining the detail of freehand images or chosen ‘found’ objects.

Collage Colour Analysis

With my collage on the wall I’m now ready to make an analysis of its colour and texture; with colour the intention is to describe the proportions and inemployment  colours used in the collage; with texture a description of the different aspects of the materials I’ve selected and used. Two days hence this analysis will form the basis of my selection of yarns for warp and weft. But tomorrow is a break from practical work: a day devoted to learning about the technology of yarns and fibres with tutor Edward Marshall.

Collage in situ

HNC Autumn School – Day 4

There comes a point in any blog when the writer reflects on whether the subject he or she  is about to write about is lively enough to secure the interest of the general reader. I’ve just reached that point in this on-going resume of a course of study. Six hours of lectures on Textile Technology in one day doesn’t sound very promising to the uninitiated! Well, before today I was certainly very ignorant the world of yarns and fibres and the processes that make them what they are. But it is clear to me now that the essence of creative weaving probably lies in the understanding of the core materials a weaver chooses for a project. It’s not just about colour, texture and quality. The yarn can have properties that effect the very shape of the finished product: it can stretch and expand, take dyes (or not). So whether it is alpaca, viscose rayon or fishing line the weaver benefits from understanding its sources, properties and possibilities.

Our lecturer for this intensive introduction has spent his entire professional life in the world of textiles. Experiencing the journey of wool from an Australian sheep station to setting up textile factories in China (and becoming a specialist in closing down woollen mills down in West Yorkshire) his bringing together of the story of modern textile manufacture was fascinating and comprehensive. He was wonderfully patient with questions from a very attentive class and clearly enjoyed the challenge of keeping us on track with the subject.

Fibres are considered as either natural or manufactured: what exists on or from an animal or plant; what is brought together through the regeneration of a natural organic or produced synthetically through a chemical process. Staple fibres such as sheered wool have a natural length of 30-100mm and require spinning; filament fibres such as silk do not – a single cocoon can extrude two filaments of up to 3km! Manufactured fibres such as polyesters and acrylics are usual extruded in a continuous form and may then be cut and processed through a spinning route. 

Edward's Table of Yarn and Fibre Samples

We examined fibre structures initially through examining examples of animal and plant fibres. Edward took us through the sheep, goat and camelid types. We got our fingers on cashmire, mohair, alpaca, even yak hair. Discovered the mystery of the double-coated fleece responsible for some of the finest and more expensive fibres. We looked through microscopes at cotton, flax and silk and saw for ourselves the cuticles and scales, cortex structures and the medulla (an air-filled canal) found in alpacha.

Regenerated sources from protein such as corn, milk, seaweed and shellfish we learnt were responsible for a large family of viscose fibres. The synthetic, usually made from petro-chemicals, we discovered were an important constituent of many modern fibres that so often blend different fibre types to lower costs or simply to give a particular natural fibre a special quality such as increased strength.

Yarns we found were thought of in long and short fibre types: the long included woollen, worsted and flax, the short mostly cottons. These fibres types also denote processing systems that can including opening, mixing , carding, combing, spinning, twisting. Cotton processing for example can be used on extruded polyester blending cotton and polyester, and using the special enclosed forms of production unnecessary in the woollen or worsted processes.

We had a jolly video courtesy of the EU about the production of linen. To a musical accompaniment of (mostly) Vivaldi we saw fields of flax in Belgium, the process of retting out in the field, and all the modern machinery that’s required to make the linen cloth we like to wear. 

Raising a Knap

The lecture concluded with descriptions of the yarn counts in text, metric and denier and finally (and appropriately) the process of finishing was explained, including the strange business of ‘raising the knap’ illustrated by the teasel in the photo here, although usually managed today with card-wire rather than this ‘natural’ item. We now have to write a report on this journey through textile technology. Well, that’s when making a blog can have its uses as I reckon with this exercise I’m half way there!

There’s a commentary on how this intensive introduction has informed my work with textile fibres over the next 2 months. This blog together with the commentary make up the text of my assessed report for Unit 7 – Understanding Fibres, Yarns and Fabrics.

HNC Autumn School – Day 5

 

Colour Analysis

I returned this morning to the Drawing Studio to put the finishing touches to my analysis of colour: the type, proportion and texture found in taking a number  of perpendicular strips across this ‘organic’ collage. On the left you can see one of my perpendicular strips made from my collage complete with some ‘possible’ yarns to match the colours and textures. Friday’s objective was to match this analysis with yarns I would use as the basis for the eight swatches required for my first project.    

 

A Selection of Yarns

Down in the basement workshop the class were introduced to a selection of yarns and fibres available to us from the college’s own store of yarns found on shelves surrounding two sides of the room. All that knowledge and terminology gleaned from yesterday’s lecture came into its own as we were assailed with talk of ‘2-fold 24 cotton’ ( a fine cotton with a two-ply twist). Now this yarn and fibre knowledge was the serving the context of our weaving needs: if you are planning to do this, such and such a yarn will do that; this is good for warp, this for weft.   

The ruler method for establish the sett (the number of warps ‘ends’ per inch) we now used purposefully when collecting and examining a box of potential yarns. We were given a resource list of suppliers and then worked through a dummy ‘loom plan’, very necessary to work out and record the details of how our chosen yarns will be assembled on the loom according to the requirements of width and length.   

Yarns at Texere

Next stop – Texere Yarns. We make a class visit to Bradford’s yarn emporium, a warehouse full of tempting colours and textures. As if in answer to my personal difficulties (expressed in the lecture yesterday in working out just what happens in the spinning process ) I find The Yarn Book by Penny Walsh (A & C Black). I have no real intention to buy yarn but I recognize there are colours missing from my collage analysis. With some hunting and patience I discover a quartet of green yarns that will not only suit the ‘organic’ project but will be perfect for Le Jardin Pluvieux, my mixed-media piece based on the garden of Brigflatts Meeting House in Cumbria.    

My Green Yarns

Whilst at Textere I discover our tutor Andrea in a distant corner looking through pieces of leather. She tells me a little about her own textile practice: work with expanding and contracting yarns to produce swirls of movement and texture. A combination of little research time, a young child and renovating an old house leaves little time currently for such creative work.   

 

Using the Cross-Sticks

After lunch its back to the workshop and the business of preparing a warp. The warping frames are to be set up for 4 metre lengths. Andrea does a very brief demonstration. Over and under  is the message for dealing with the two ‘cross’ sections (where we will unpick the yarn in sequence for threading through the heddles). I see the use of cross-sticks for the first time and realise that this is the first of many differences I’ll encounter in the European way of dressing a loom.

 

A Jacquard Loom

A short diversion occurs at this point of the afternoon in that we get to see a Jacquard industrial loom in operation. One of the technicians has regular personal time on this machine and gives us a very short demonstration of its operation and potential. After the handloom the intricacy and possibility of this industry standard process seems another world altogether, but here it is right next door to our workshop.

 

Possible Yarns for a Warp

Before starting to prepare my ‘project’ warp I have had to assemble my first loom plan, a plan making use of three distinct colours, a principal (grey green) and two minors (grass green and white). This process takes all my flagging concentration to complete! But before the day’s ends I have made a start on warping these yarns together. Tomorrow, Saturday, the warp will be finished and the loom dressed. You never know I might get as far as weaving!

HNC – Autumn Block – Day 6

Warping Board

Today the business of weaving begins with winding a warp and dressing the loom. Having made a start the previous evening I find I’ve not been accurate in making a correct pathway across the warping board. Previously I’ve working on a board that’s been flat on a table. The one I’m using here stands upright on its own legs. Eventually I sort the sequence of crossing the warp threads over and under the pegs that surround the board. The essential requirement is to make ‘the portee cross’. This enables each warp ‘end’ to be threaded in sequence through the heddles and then through the reed. 

To the uninitiated you must get clear in your head that you start out with a length of yarn on a cone. Somehow this needs to become a discrete and separate collection of inidividual ‘ends’ strung perpendicularly from the front to the back of the loom. Just how does such a transformation take place?

The Portee Cross

On a warping board imagine a rectangle 1 metre square with pegs inserted around the outside frame. Your cone of yarn sits on the floor in a special device called a creel so that your yarn end can be through a guide hook. This makes for a smooth run from cone to warping board. You start warping by making a small loop at the yarn end, placing it over the far left hand peg. Then you guide the yarn OVER the next peg and UNDER the following. It’s this sequence that begins to make the portee cross. Now you follow a sequence of pegs across the board to give you the required length of yarn. When you get to the end peg you retrace your steps (pegs) only this time when the last three pegs are encountered the yarn goes OVER and UNDER in a reverse sequence . . . and hey presto the portee cross is established.

Because my warp plan contains some single warp lengths (a dash of white cotton) when so many ‘ends’ are warped of one colour a new colour has to be tied into the warp sequence. This is something I have ‘not’ tried before – having a continuous warp rather than batches or portees of yarn.

Warping takes me far longer than I anticipate. I make, incredibly, many mistakes. Finally I’m ready to transfer the warp to the loom. The warp has to be securely tied, particularly the cross which must not fall apart, and then a pair of cross-sticks (or portee sticks) are inserted either side of the cross. This makes it so much easier to handle the warp as it is manouvred on to the loom.

Raddle and Cross-sticks in Place

Before I can work with the warp on the loom I have to fix a raddle to the warp beam. This enables the warp to be separated into bunch of threads and then combed out and untangled. The raddle is fixed with two slip knots (could use a couple of G clamps) and then the warp is slipped on to a battern attached to the warp beam. Once the threads are separated into the gaps between the raddle the warp is then gradually wound on to the back beam (pieces of thick paper being inserted as the warp turns to keep the warp yarn from sticking to itself), being combed and untangled as it goes.

 

At this point the loom is turned around so that the front beam is ‘at the front’ – I could have moved around but there’s very little room to do this in the workshop! I now suspend the cross-sticks from the castle which places the all important cross in a good position behind the heddles for me to pick off each thread . . . and get ready to thread each through the heddles.

The Warp tied on to the back beam

First I pull the warp through the heddle space and make two bunches of threads which are tied to the front beam. This is an eight-shaft loom so there are eight heddles, which will be threaded in a eight (at the back) to one (at the front)  sequence. Threading is done with a special hook and as I pull each thread through each heddle in turn the ‘end’ is pulled away from the bunch, and through the heddle itself. I manage to get about half the heddles threaded before, suddenly, it is time to go home. I hope to get this process finished and start to weave early on Tuesday morning.

HNC – Autumn Block – Day 7

After two days in the workshop the class returns to the lecture room for an introduction to the Historical and Contextual Referencing Module. Taught by Pam Brook this is delivered in Year 1 across three intensive days and leads to an assessment based on a 15 minute presentation supported by a research file.

Grove Library

Our lecturer is an impressive teacher and communicator who throughout the six hours of contact time engaged the class thoroughly and actively. She created two opportunities for the class to share and communicate. First, introducing  ourselves through describing our aspirations and interests. Second, following a library induction session, we were asked to ‘find a book and choose an image to share and discuss’. Both opportunities were invaluable on a personal level and enjoyable as an opportunity to learn more about the people we have been spending the last week amongst, and as a way of recognizing the breadth of imagination and intention we collectively bring to this course. 

Pam took us through the course outline and requirements. She encouraged us to actively contribute to illustrating concepts such as critical evaluation. This meant that no one felt intimidated by the language or undermined by any lack of educational experience.

The historical studies began with a sequence of PowerPoint slides on Modernism: the triumph of the present over the past (Robert Hughes – Shock of the New). This was a sensible and revealing presentation that included examples of Pam’s own research field and practice surrounding her recent book on Morecombe’s Midland Hotel, a modernist structure of the 1930s now restored with many of its original features and furnishings. The journey through the design and textile aspects of Modernism took us from Braque to the costume design of Sonia Delauney, to Cubism, Railway posters of Morecombe, the Bauhaus, Mondrian, Corbusier, Art Deco and the fascinating Schroeder House in Utrecht created by Walter Gropius. What came out of this presentation was how influential textile designers have been in realising in both utilitarian and artistic work the value of primary colour and functional simplicity in design, structure and form.

A Jacquard Woven Design of 1934

The morning ended with a brief session in the Textile Workshop’s computer suite by introducing us to the potential and value of databases, access to library journals and museum archives on line. This tied in nicely with the aformentioned library induction where we found out how to access the library catalogue, make and save to disk or e-mail, details of publications held. The illustration on the left was downloaded from a collection of textile images held by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.

The day concluded  with a timeline presentation taking the class through a sequence of illustrations beginning with the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19C up to the 1960s Op Art of Bridget Riley that was such an influence of high-street fashion of Mary Quant and others. The process of moving through such a timeline provided opportunities for a host of discussion topics and observations. It was invaluable to see and make connections between the individual ‘bits’ of knowledge most of us already possessed but would have had difficulty in piecing coherently together.

A sample from the Driver Hartley collection

At the end of this sequence of illustrations Pam produced two wonderful ‘guide’ books from the College’s Textile Archive. These were woven pattern and printed textile books containing samples and weaving specifications collected by the company Driver Hartley in nearby Keithley. They proved a fascinating and colourful record of the richness of woven and printed textiles in the mid 20C and helped us connect with the ‘real’ and local world much of what we had encountered through slide and published illustrations earlier in the day.

 

Print samples from the Driver Hartley Mill

These two books reminded us yet again of the importance of the area of West Yorkshire surrounding Bradford as a crucible for woven textile production in the last century, and how valuable what remains of that legacy can be to the contemporary designer and textile practitioner.

Afterword: from my first visit to the College library I came away with three books – Mary Schoeser’s monograph on Marianne Straub, a study of the textile art of the Bauhaus by Sigrid Weltge and A Weaver’s Life – Ethel Mairet (1872 -1952) by Margot Coates. This last book formed the focus of my brief presentation taking  as my image an example of a handspun vegetable-dyed eri silk. I found the colours unusual and refreshing set into the plainest of weave structures. Mairet is an artist I had never heard of, but I’d certainly come across many of her contemporaries and associates – particularly the members of the Ditchling community in East Sussex of which she was part.

HNC – Autumn Block – Day 8

 

Ready to Sley the Reed

Today finds the class back in the workshop for a final full day of weaving. I’m still rather behind in my progress towards dressing my loom, but I find myself setting about the process of completing this with a will (!) and some welcome help from Andrea and Graham. I start the day at the point where my warp ends are now through the heddles and ready to be sleyed through the reed. After some difficulty Andrea and I find an 6 dent reed, which means that two warps will have to fill each dent.

 

Holding 8 threads in the hand

Sleying the reed requires the weaver to pick out and hold in one hand 4 ends (or in my case 4 pairs of ends). Each pair is then grabbed by the sleying hook and pulled through the appropriate dent in the reed. Once this is done for the whole warp the ends can be tied to the front beam. Now the weaving itself can begin. The process starts with a few weft picks (passes of a shuttle horizontally across the warp) of a header of thick yarns (I choose a colour far away from my own scheme). Then after a preliminary few picks of a very thin grass green woollen yarn I weave a pattern using the warp yarns. Having never woven on an 8 shaft loom it takes me a little while to get to grips with the draft plan provided on the example sheets of patterns.

Tied on with a header

I concentrate on plain weave, hopsack and some different arrangements of ribs and plain weave combinations. These names describe arrangements, combinations and sequences of shafts for each weft pick. The shafts pull the heddles up to make an shed under which the pick passes. These combinations can be something like this: here’s hopsack 12 56  I  12  56  I  34  78  I  34  78  I. The problem I encounter is keeping track of where I am in a sequence. The basic Hopsack is easy, but the more complex patterns can be helped by following a tick chart, which I pick up as a method from some of the more experienced weavers in the class.

Colours from the Collage

Having got started with weaving the warp yarns in the weft I begin to examine the colour analysis I made from my collage and pick out some of the yarns I’ve collected in the workshop and bought at Texere. I concentrate first on building a progression from greens to yellows weaving an inch or so of colour with a different weaves to see how colour is affected by weave and vice versa. I also make sure I pin up my collage and colour analysis (plus one of my surviving ferns) on a strategically placed display board at the back of my loom.

 

My repair!

Throughout the day our tutor Andrea gives demonstrations on her own loom. One of these is particularly valuable to me because it shows how to change a warp yarn in mid weave. Sometimes a warp thread can break, or in my case I discover I’ve ‘missed’ sleying one of a pair of warp yarns. I’ve read about this process, but never attempted it, so I’m very grateful to see it done in front of my eyes (and on my loom too). Clearly there are some very creative possibilities in this practice, but I imagine it will be a while before I dare try it.

 

A Valuable Demonstration

By now most of the class are weaving some pretty impressive pieces, some experimenting like mad, which is one of the great opportunities this course offers. I find myself making reference to some of the woven pieces I’ve seen in the book about the work of Ethel Mairet I managed to read on my train journey last night and this morning. Such simplicity of weaving pattern offset by some very striking vegetable-dyed yarn. Nothing like this available for me here, either on the workshop shelves or at Texere. Dyeing is something I’ll have to wait until next year to explore. That said, I might be tempted to ask Jan Hicks. Jan is one of the  studio artists from Farfield Mill in Cumbria where I received my introduction to weaving back in April this year. 

My Chosen Yarns

Tomorrow will be the final day of the Autumn Block of 9 days at Bradford College. It will be a shortish day as many of the class will be traveling home, some traveling as far as Southern Ireland and Cornwall. We’ll stay for the morning in the workshop and hopefully get a few hours of weaving. To finish we’ll have a final round of information to take in about our first ‘organic’ project and the all-important course and project requirements. This is to make sure we can confidently present the outcome of our first assessed project when we meet in December for our first weekend ‘block’.

 

 

 

 

from

HNC – Autumn Block – Day 9

The final day of the first block of the course has arrived. The class continues to weave on in the workshop, but there’s an air of gathering work together and drawing particular ideas to a close. Graham our wonderful technician has been busy since 8.0am running of cones off yarn for class members to take home. Living reasonably close I’ve decided to continue my work here at the workshop at least one day a week. This means I can concentrate fully for a whole day without interruptions that will inevitably occur back at my studio/office.

My own woven work is gradually moving towards exploring the full palette of the colours I have selected. But matching yarn texture to yarn pattern to colour is quite another matter, and I suppose the very essence of creative weaving. For now experimentation is enough and the opportunity to weave carefully and fluently so valuable.

Satin and Sateen Weave (with Honeycomb)

During the morning our tutor Andrea continues to give short demonstrations to small groups of us at her loom. She shows us Satin and Sateen weaves, both popular with designer weavers. Satin weave stresses and reinforces the warp, Sateen weave the weft. These weaves make use of long ‘floats’, that is a piece of yarn that floats across the weave structure in either warp or weft. Both weaves benefit from being woven on looms with more than 4 shafts. Andrea also demonstrates Honeycomb structures which are particularly distinctive when used with certain yarns in making a 3-D effect. I remember seeing a whole book devoted to Honeycomb weaving in one of the US university on-line weaving archives, the most extensive being at Penn State and Arizona. The following link takes you to a PDF of a  book on Honeycomb patterns  published in 1936 listed at Penn, but held in Arizona.

Example of a Project Display

Before lunch we sit down with Andrea and go through the Course Handbook, which we now get a copy of. We also receive a visit from Colin Lloyd, the curriculum team leader and the HE level academic course manager. He gives us a valuable insight into how our course is perceived by the examination and validation body Leeds Metropolitan University. Our external examiner is Victoria Down. We are reminded that we are following a course using ‘blended learning’ that encourages a particular focus on independent learning and study; we should aim to ‘own’ our individual learning and to some extent our programme of study. There is an expectation of diverse outcomes and  no attempt to hold up a ‘house style’. Contact with our tutors is encouraged and there are set times when they are available to us over the phone.

Example from a Project Sketch Book

After lunch we have a short session together on the presentation we will have to give on our first project ‘organics’. We get to see a number of examples of past student work and are encouraged to adopt some of the techniques in our own practice. During the December 3-day session we will be presenting to each other and to the tutor a visual display of our work and a sketchbook containing the ’story’ behind the display: our notes, loom plans, sketches, and research. By 3.0pm people are packing up to go home, many embarking on long journeys. I stay on for an hour or so to weave to a point that seems a sensible place to put a ‘comma’ in my work.

Part of Laura's Work

My weaving partners on either side of me at the workshop get ready to go: Laura (from Italy, but currently living in a remote part of Southern Ireland) tells me as she takes her woven piece off her loom about her experience of attending a weaving school in Finland. She has even visited the Toika factory that built my loom (and hers); Mark (a doctor from the west country) is taking his loom home and a box full of beautiful yarns he selected from colours found in a corn on the cob!

 

Mark's Work on the Loom

Before I leave I complete a final plan of my woven piece so far, noting the different weaves and the yarns used. I also wind onto a oblong piece of card the yarns I’ve used in sequence so I have a visual and tactile reference to put on my desk at home. It’s certainly been a fascinating and thoroughly engrossing 9 days, that I must now go home an absorb. For me I’ve felt the course achieved a most successful balance of learning weaving techniques and opportunities for observation along with studio-based practical art and design work and getting an introduction to the technology and historical and contextual aspects that surround textiles in general. It’s made me think about where I might go with something that started just five months ago as an getting away from it all interest and has now become very much part of the pattern of my creative thoughts and ideas.

The photos that illustrate this blog are just a selection from a much larger archive. If the reader would like to explore further go to my on-line gallery of images covering the first 9 days of the Bradford HNC course.

A Day in the Workshop

 

A wider play of colour

Just over a week later I’m back for a day in the Textile Workshop. I’m here to do two things: make a little progress with my ‘organic’ project; put another warp on a loom. With the former I want to move gradually though the colours I have extracted from my studies of ferns and bracken, to try out the different yarns I’ve brought together and experiment with some possible patterns. Practising the latter, being comfortable with winding a warp and dressing a loom, is for me so really vital. I need to be able to do this confidently, on my own, without tears! I’ve negotiated this workshop visit with Graham, the workshop technician, who was so very helpful  during the Autumn Block sessions.

When I arrive I explain my intentions: to wind a short warp, put it on the loom and weave a header during an afternoon. I tell him I reckon I may need to do this several times over several weeks. This week I know I’ll need his help, so we’ve chosen a day when he hasn’t that many other students in the workshop. I plan to document what we do very carefully with photos and blow by blow instructions. If this seems like overkill I must explain: the method of ‘warping’ that the HNC course promotes is the European approach, that is dressing the loom from ‘back to front’. I was taught the American way, that is ‘front to back’. During the autumn course, although I was warned I’d be introduced to a different method, it was not the best time for me to learn it (and absorb it). So this is why I’m here today – to practise warping the European way . . . and then I can make an informed choice as to which might be the best approach for me.

An afternoon warp

To anyone reading this who has never done this warping task let me tell you it is the fundamental business of the weaver to learn and master this process. Within it lies the essence of the woven work. It’s like being both an architect and contractor designing the building and then mixing the cement to lay its foundations. One day someone will write a book called Zen and the Art of Dressing a Loom, or the Tao of Warping, even the Inner Game of Weaving, because in the short time I’ve exposed myself to this challenge I recognize it demands things of me that makes learning a guitar concerto or writing a complex computer programme but a walk in the park. I’ve spent many hours lying awake at night running through the minutiae of each move of the warping process. No matter how carefully I read the many (different) published descriptions or study my own notes, drawing and photographs, there is always something I seem to miss, or extra to remember for the next time.

But for now what I want to do is to discuss the differences  between the European and American methods: to share something that (it appears) not that many European weavers seem to know. Suffice to say, I did achieve the objective I set for myself, mainly thanks to Graham’s help and patience. But I’ll be back again next Thursday to do exactly the same task again, aiming this time to be as independent as I possibly can be.

Ready to Sley

So how do you warp from the front? Well, you are going to sley the reed first! Putting your chained warp ready on the loom for this process as you can see in this illustration. It must look so strange to the uninitiated, but let me explain. What the photo doesn’t show is the cross. It’s sitting on top of the reed, but it’s about to be removed and placed ‘in the hand’. There’s no need for cross-sticks (although some US weavers use them) or the raddle. The one drawback I immediately discovered is once the cross is ‘in the hand’ you can’t go off and see to a demanding child, make a pot of tea or answer the door! But it is so very direct, and I discover from Graham that commerical weavers use a variation of this technique, sometimes holding a warp ‘cross’ in each hand . . . but this is quite beyond my imagining. Let’s look next at this ‘cross placed in your hand’. The illustration below I hope gives some idea of what it’s like.

A cross in the hand

Here are  the blow by blow instructions to unpicking the cross and sleying the reed from Debbie Chandler’s wonderful Learning to Weave, one of the few books to explain this method. When the cross is in your left hand the threads are literally stacked on top of each other. You open your hand a little to pick off the thread on the top, closing your hand quickly to keep the rest of the threads in place. Then you fold the thread to make a loop at the end and place the loop between your left thumb and index finger. Then with your right hand, insert the sley hook through the chosen dent in the reed. And so on . . . I should say that Chandler does describe BOTH methods and a hybrid one of her own.

Once the reed is sleyed the warp ends are pulled through the heddles from the back of the loom and tied in bunches to the back apron rod or batten. Then you are ready to beam and comb out the warp. of course the front part of the warp is now coming unchained and being pulled through reed and heddles and will eventually need tying on the front apron rod.

Hand on heart I managed to do this mostly by myself after being shown once, though I do have to admit finding the business of getting the cross threads stacked properly in the hand more than a little scary. I had one terrible Sunday afternoon with a chenille warp that went completely and utterly wrong the moment I attempted to put it on the loom . . . and I remember e-mailing my long-suffering teacher in some despair. But after that I haven’t looked back.

Finally, having looked again at the beautiful illustrations of Ethel Mairet’s woven work in Margot Coates book A Weaver’s Life I discover these images come from the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham. The Centre has unique on-line resources for crafts and the applied arts. One such resource enables you to collect together a ‘light-box’ of the images you want to study and bring them together on a single web page. From  this page you can then explore each image in detail, enlarging it and reading the curator’s interpretation. All the images can be downloaded without copyright restrictions for academic presentations and research studies. Highly Recommended! Here is my light-box of images from the Mairet Collection.

Another Day in the Workshop

My second full day in the college workshop started an hour and half later than I’d hoped. I sat in train outside Leeds station whilst its driver attempted to unlock the brakes! Fortunately I had a book with me, which I wrestled with against the noise and vibration of this stationary train. City of Tomorrow by Le Corbusier was published in the 1920s. It is a strange fantasy of a book underpinned by diagrams and maps of ancient cities. Corbusier’s style is acutely personal, often very long-winded, but with a charm, an innocence almost. In plain language he takes the reader from the wandering here and there curves and peregrinations of the pack horse to the need for the straight-line thinking of contemporary planning. What fascinates me about architects is their ability to think on a big scale, to project their thoughts across space, and in Corbusier’s case across a whole city (something composers should aspire to across time). Like so much of Will Alsop’s work, which I have studied, there is such poetry present in Corbusier’s thinking. I think I should not miss this current exhibition in the Lutyen’s designed crypt of Liverpool Cathedral.

Organic Sketch (First Swatch)

Until lunch I worked on my ‘organic’ piece. I made a sketch in watercolour of what I considered to be my first swatch. This contains a preliminary weaving of the warp yarns as weft and then progresses through the colour analysis I made of the fern collage (now placed on a board at the back of my loom). The sketch made onto squared paper gives some indication of the proportion of colour content and usage. It was a very useful exercise as it made me focus on each colour and its position and effect on the woven area.

Curved Weft

Having made this sketch I decided to add a final layer of weft in yellow, a kind a mirror image to a layer of red. The layer in red has been woven with a progressively looser beat and produces a nice curve. The new layer in yellow/orange starts loose and then becomes more compressed: the result has something of the flow of leaf fronds on a fern and offers some interesting possibilities, perhaps on a larger scale

The next stage was to move towards what might be more rigorously influenced by the structure and play of colour and texture of the fern itself. I decided to adopt a pattern that would emphasize the colours

Sateen Pattern

 and line of the weft. I focused now on just one ‘frond’ of my collage, using just two of its principle colours. With a Sateen weave the play of yellow with green begins to approach something of the texture I feel is present in my collage. Notice how I’ve doubled the picks in yellow in the latter part of the woven pattern. This is something I find myself doing more and more often, and not just doubling but multiplying 2, 3, 4 times even.

 

Click on the image to read Anthea's Draft

After lunch I put this work aside to make another warp and put it on the loom. A re-run of last week, but with as little help as possible. Graham is busy preparing looms for the HNC Year 2 3-day block starting tomorrow. When I arrived this morning Andrea was writing a draft for a piece in double weave using the 16 shafts of a Louet computer-assisted loom. It was intriguing being able to see how Graham interpreted this draft on the loom. He kindly showed me the various stages of its preparation. As for my own attempts, I found a fairly slack wool warp yarn, a little thicker than last week’s cotton yarn. I made a warp of 72 (plus 2) ends and after a few difficult moments did manage to chain the warp successfully. After last week’s session I did create a flow chart to illustrate my photographs of putting the warp on the loom . . . but I have yet to process the photos on a single page . . . all I had with me was the descriptions! Nevertheless I only had to ask Graham a couple of times to ‘look’ at what I was doing, rather than ask him to intervene! Gradually the process is becoming clearer, indeed self-evident. It was only in the final stages that fatigue got the better of me and a few mistakes were made (and had to be undone!).

Outside the workshop I have spent a little time getting to grips with painting in goache. This does seem to be the favoured medium of many weaver / designers. I did find a helpful introduction to goache in the college library. A little instruction in this medium during our initial ‘painting’ day would have gone a long way for me. Watercolour I reckon most of the class were familiar with, but not goache. There is certainly something to be said for combining the two: watercolour for larger, broader areas and goache for the finer points.

I can’t seem to go outside into my local park or walk past a garden without looking out for ferns. I noticed that my next-door neighbour has a beautiful clump visable from my backdoor step. I must photograph or draw these ferns as they are just beginning to turn away from green to gold. My dear wife arrived back from a trip the other day with a tiny pot of ferns for my desk. I am resolved to do many more drawings and painting, and really have no excuse. I can see that such activity will help towards discovering ways to express variety in shape and texture that I really need to develop a play of different ideas for these eight woven swatches required by mid December.

Ethel Mairet fabric

I have started looking very keenly now at just one piece of fabric by Ethel Mairet. This image (sadly not available from the Crafts Study Centre archive) shows in the background a dress fabric in machine-spun, dyed and undyed Welsh wool weft on dyed cotton. In the foreground a scarf machine-spun, cotton slub and undyed chenille weft on a machine-spun dyed cotton warp; plain weave, spaced reeding, fringed ends. I was intrigued to see what the selvedge ends reveal.

Over the last week Radio 3 has been focusing its nightly programme The Essay on the Arts & Crafts Movement. At the beginning of the week there were two excellent broadcast by Fiona MacCarthy whose recent book on Edward Carpenter has been enthusiastically reviewed in Guardian. Her first essay discussed the work of C.R.Ashbee who formed the Handicrafts Guild in London in the early 1900s and then moved this entire community of over a hundred craftsmen and their families down to the rural Eden of Chipping Camden in Gloucestershire, just a few miles from Ethel Mairet’s home at the Norman Chapel at Broad Camden. It was a most illuminating programme altogether and made me want to go out and find MacCarthy’s various books about this period. Ashbee and his wife Janet were close friends of Ethel Mairet’s whose brother the potter Fred Partridge joined the Guild in 1902 as a jeweller.

The series progressed to discuss many of Mairet’s circle, but in the last two programmes focused on studio potters nearer our time, Michael Cardew and Lucie Rie. The former, the father of composer Cornelius Cardew, moving his craft practice into Africa, the latter a refugee from Vienna who established one of the most successful urban pottery studios in London in the 1930s. This last programme was an important reminder that craft does not have to belong exclusively to rural life, something I’ve already begun to consider as I look out from my studio window at the roofs of the city of Wakefield.

Yet Another Day in the Workshop

Bradford College was enjoying its mid-term lull in proceedings as, unlike the university next door, it observes the school-half term. By all accounts it had been pretty manic the previous week and when I arrived in the workshop there was still evidence of the work that the second year HNC students on the Woven Textile course had been doing. During my last visit I’d had the opportunity to see the Louet loom being set up for a double-weave demonstration, in fact an experiment linked to the use of some software new to the workshop, WeaveIt. Students can now acquire this American application for PC at a special (sensible) price, and judging by some of print-outs of the draft Andrea drew up last week (see the illustration in my blog of 28 October) it looks quite impressive. I include an example here.

Click the picture to view in detail

The experiment/ demonstration undertaken during the 3-day weekend block course for the HNC 2nd year can be illustrated not only by this picture of the use of the two warp beams that the Louet has but by a woven example of Jenny’s.

 

The Two Warp Beams on the Louet Loom

Here are two views of the example, back and front. Notice the floats in the reverse side of the swatch. Click on each picture to view the swatches in detail.

A Swatch of Double Weave (reverse)

 

Double Weave Swatch

 

 

 

 

 

You can clearly see the effect of the diamond pointing that is the result of threading the heddles in a pattern that brings together both warp yarns. Sitting beside a number of the Harris and the Jacquard looms were further swatches showing some lively and most interesting experiments with mixtures of texture. being able to look closely at some of this work, some still on the loom, is most inspiring and valuable to likes of me. There is nothing quite like getting up close to the woven piece. No matter how good the photograph there is a certain presence of the making missing.

HND 2nd Year Swatch

 

HNC 2nd Year example on the loom

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I spent the morning, as I had done last week, working on my ‘organic’ project. I continued developing what I hope will be the second of my eight swatches. It’s an extension of a little sateen weave in lemon yellow and grass green focusing on a small piece from my fern collage. I’ve added two more sections to it, gradually darkening the yellow surface by combining first a very thin orange thread, and then a slightly thicker and darker thread woven together with the yellow. I looked for ways I could twist or ply the yellow and orange together, but nothing presented immediately as a way of doing this, so the two yarns lie side by side. But the darkening effect does work, and certainly mirrors what is currently happening to my next-door neighbour’s bunch of ferns as they change from green through orange to brown. Set into the yellow and orange there are now three different shades of green, single weft threads I have woven in, breaking into the sateen sequence by choosing a heddle not to lift by sight rather than sequence. I like the outcome of this little piece of work and realise how much it benefitted from the thought and preparation I made prior to weaving. I did, for example, make an attempt to paint a small sketch on graph paper. Again, I’m very inhibited by difficulties I have with colour mixing.

The basis of my 2nd swatch

As the Craft Centre cafe was shut today I wandered out up the road past the university to a whole food cafe next door to Yorkshire CND’s building. I had a bowl of soup you could stand a spoon up in, and a delicious piece of date cake. On my way back I took a detour through the university campus and discovered how imaginatively the campus had been integrated into its valley setting. The university has a unique Department of Peace Studies and has recently created a Peace Garden surrounding some of the latest architecture on the campus. There’s a signature atrium which feels a little like one of the new breed of motorway service areas you now find on the M6!

I started on my fourth warp later than I’d hoped, having given time to document all that I had done in the morning and to make corrections on the warp I prepared last week. A mis-threading through the reed had been made, but wasn’t too difficult to unpick and rethread. This warp is altogether better in its overall tension than the previous two! For today’s warp I decided on a blue Glenary waxed wool yarn and a white softened Herdmans which I organise in a bunches of 20 ends – blue, white, blue and white alternate, white, blue. I have to leave a little earlier today so by 6.0pm I’m only finishing the raddling process, without too many hitches and mistakes! But again, the time here has been invaluable, and I’ve haven’t needed any assistance.

Woven with Paper! (Old OS Maps)

I realise I’m becoming very aware of what’s on in the textile world. At the weekend I came across a notice about Lustre 2008. This is an exciting gathering of contemporary crafts hosted by the Lakeside Centre at the University of Nottingam over next weekend (8 and 9 November). It’s clearly becoming a must-be-there date for emerging craft practitioners from the Midlands. With funding from the Arts Council and collaborative support from ‘local’ university departments the website had some impressive examples. I particularly liked the knitted work of Akiko Kingsbury, but it was the work of Barbara Massey and Helen Rogers that I loved. Their web site was brilliant! Read their piece in Country Living, especially the section on weaving with paper. This is the kind of contemporary design that has a swing about it that I find really attractive, fresh and bright. Here is a little of their artists’ statement. I particularly warmed to their words about ‘appreciating nature in an urban setting’.

Our inspiration comes from a love of colour, form and line. In our work, we blend these elements into unique and fresh combinations. We live in a busy city and appreciate all that nature has to offer in this urban setting, using the coexistence of the natural and the urban landscape to inspire our designs. Both the modern and the old inspire and inform our work. From our observations we create designs that are sophisticated and naïve at the same time. An enjoyable preliminary step in our design process is the sourcing of materials and ideas. Collections have a great appeal for us. We take photos wherever we go, often of seemingly quite mundane things. Charity shops can be a treasure trove for us. We are excited by old hand embroidered table linens or handkerchiefs, small items of exquisitely painted china, samples of old haberdashery still in their original packaging and well thumbed books. We also look to the past for inspiration for our colour palettes, and different decorative and illustrative styles. Fortunately for us this means regularly visiting museums and galleries, as well as browsing through beautifully illustrated design journals and books! 

Finally, on a wall in the workshop there’s a new display of items from the Textile Archive. One shows Peggy Osterkamp’s ‘How to make a weaver’s knot. Osterkamps is from the Pacific North West who has a great website created as a preliminary to publishing a series of books in 2009 on the European Way to weave. She’s a former assistant to Jim Alders who designed the API loom and some of her short tips (soon to be in the books) are inspired. Check it out – as they say in the USA.

 

Sue Lawty, artist and (tapestry) weaver

I put the word tapestry in parenthesis because this fascinating artist doesn’t. Perhaps it’s assumed, because after all it’s probably obvious that this is what her woven work is. For me the omission is a good excuse to deliberate on what I think I’m up to in the practice of learning to design and make handwoven textiles, and where the differences lie. For me, tapestry isn’t in the game at all. The word belongs to a different language all together. Tapestry – a picture woven with threads of yarn. So what if that picture doesn’t represent a girl with a melon (and do look at Lynne Curran’s woven tapestry here) but is an abstract image that contains structural and tactile clues,  something of the essence of this girl, her melon, (and her melancholia?). Such woven images are contained in a border that resemble that of the painter’s frame or the canvas edge. They are not worn, or part of a furnishing; they have no function except to articulate a (pictorial) space with a representation of a real, remembered or imagined image. This image might tell a story, evoke a landscape, bring together the impossible or fantastic. The French word for tapestry, tapisserie, perhaps significantly, has a slightly different meaning: a  ’collection’ of images that may together tell a story, but also demonstrating aspects of one thing in a non-linear sequence of secondary images, arrange like a series of satellites orbiting around a planet.

At York Museum on 3 November Sue Lawty presented a talk on her work at what must be one of the most comfortable lecture halls in the country.  She talked us seamlessly (for nearly two hours) through a collection of slides that, with a brief excursion into a figurative piece from the beginning of her career, represented her work since 2005 when she began her association and collaboration with the V & A. She made the point at the outset that there seemed to be a kind of circular, even non-linear quality to the progression of images, because the present for her was continually calling on memories of the past. Creativity for her was certainly not a linear process. She found herself finding and taking the same paths, but with a different intent and backdrop of experience.

Since the beginning of her time at the V & A she has kept a blog. This is full of wonderful images of her work, her travels, her sketches and the many references that underpin what eventually comes to be woven. The blog has many revealing and touching moments, as when she recalls how she came to discover weaving:

At art school in Leeds in the mid 70’s, I followed a degree in Furniture Design. Unn was then a part-time tutor on the Fine Art course. She ran a textile studio which happened to be opposite our design studio.The room housed half a dozen vertical tapestry looms and a handful of students working away on various projects. One loom carried Unn’s current tapestry – a detailed semi abstract dreamlike composition in deep blues as I recall. This artist taught by example, and in so doing provided a very rich learning environment of sketchbooks, samples, personal art books and exhibition catalogues – indeed an ‘artist in residence’ before the phrase ever became commonplace. The atmosphere in the room was one of very real creative charge. I was on the outside, looking in – yearning to be involved in this world. An invitation from Unn to step inside, and my life changed (though I didn’t recognize it at the time). A visual melee of rich, enticing colour, earthy smells of strings and twines, intriguing posters and conversation – I soaked it all in. I could almost taste the excitement. And when a loom became free and I was to feel first hand the twangy, taught parallel lines of my own linen warp and hear the rhythmic thud thud of beating down of the weft – I knew I had arrived. Halfway through my final year, whilst I still had use of the college workshops, Unn suggested I made a loom. This I did, copying the Scandinavian design.

So how does her work and her passion for weaving connect with those who weave in a different mode; in that world of designing and making in which the made outcome has a function tied up with human action, human living, often replicated in series, but not confined to being exhibited on one wall, one space. Nevertheless, such an article of handwoven design has what Lawty calls ‘the individual mark of the hand, perhaps an ever precious factor in our increasingly technological and virtual world.’ And so, I came away from her talk feeling that the essence of her approach to weaving, however off (and on) the wall it was, held vital and transferable ideas about the message and expression of woven material.

Landscape predominates her work, but not its colour; her work is largely colourless. There are no bold colour statements. Texture and contour are everything. Hemp, raffia, paper, stone, lead – all contain a dull, bland colour palette that does not reflect light but absorbs it. Natural patterning on rock, patterns made through human intervention (the footprint, the broken stone, a rice harvest on a Nepalese hillside) she translates as a kind of unintelligible text, a linear sequence, so you tend to read the image from left to right. She stresses the making the piece and the image at the same time, but work is often a sewn assemblage (as in her piece for the Bankfield Museum collection titled Terra) of sample-like swatches. Sequences, series, collections, assemblages, left to right, right to left, up and down. Pebbles so tiny, but in their thousands seemingly woven across a 6 metre wall space – as in Order – only work as an image in this way. There are also maps, paths, aerial views, and panoramas (she has climbed and trekked in the Himalaya and the Alps). Recently woven work from different cultures, particularly the Coptic and Egyptian from the V & A’s collection, has an increasingly important role in her scheme of things.

All in all the range of sources is invigorating. Her work has a fantastic energy: contained in woven sequence, bound by the conventions of warp and weft, and the result of such patience and restraint. Her very generous talk was threaded through with a sense of passion for the way weaving was for her the medium that truly expressed what she saw and experienced of the natural world and as well as those mysteries of scripts and languages we ‘read’  in the textures of rocks and plants. She may have started out with pictorial, even figurative work, but she now has found a way into an abstract domain that feels to me closer to what I sense I struggle with, translating something that comes out of life into the keenest of abstractions. 

The mysterious woven script

Detail from Order

A well-trodden path

Oronsay

A section from Terra

The Store @ The V & A

See Sue Lawty’s work at the Cloth and Culture NOW show at Manchester’s Whitworth Museum – until the end of December. Not to be missed!

A studio afternoon: a workshop day

Last week I succumbed to taking an afternoon off to work in my own studio as well as spending a day in the textile workshop at Bradford. I reckoned if I didn’t dedicate some quality time  to developing my skills in drawing and painting I’d make no progress in this area, so I had to set aside an afternoon. Most of the weavers I admire seem to come from a Fine Art background, or at the very least have had some prior experience of basic skills through attending an art foundation course. Sadly, my drawing and painting have been holiday pastimes. The more I consider what this whole craft is about the more I sense the necessity of finding ways to abstract the experienced or imagined object. I reckon this can only be done through mark making on paper, and experimenting with the fluid analogue medium of paint. Photographs take you some way, but unless you are going to use an SLR camera with ‘real’ film and do the developing yourself, nothing quite compares to the intensity, patience and careful concentration required by drawing from life.

A 3-part Sketch

A whole afternoon sounds very extravagant: it was probably a couple of hours at most. But I had planned carefully in advance what I wanted to do. I had some recent photographs of the ferns in my next-door neighbour’s garden, now gradually turning from green to golden brown. I knew I wanted to try out this technique of making an image and then extracting a portion of that image to make a new image the same physical size as the original, but magnified. It’s the double set-square trick that allows you to make  ’windows’ of different sizes. It’s a great exercise, and one that I could sense produces potentially valuable results in the cause of abstraction.

The other task I set myself was to practise working with gouche, a medium I was unfamiliar with prior to this course. I painted a sequence of colour slabs, oblongs and squares, trying to produce a surface devoid of brushstrokes. That exercise in itself was invaluable: I realised quickly one needs a gentle touch with the brush. When my coloured slabs had dried I cut them up into discrete pieces and started to play around making arrangements, simulating some of the gouache and water-colour sketches for woven pieces beloved of the Bauhaus weavers.

Painted Blocks

When I had an interesting pattern I took a photo of it (my camera on a tripod and using the 2 second timer), employing flash to hide any joins and shadows. This was a great exercise to try, and I plan to go further with it next week by mixing and painting just the colours I’m using for my organic project.

When I arrived at the college workshop on Thursday morning I found Sandra, a 2nd year HNC student, had taken a leaf out of my book to come into college to practise feeling comfortable about putting a warp on a loom. Fortunately for me, Andrea also appeared and was able not only to advise me that I needed to extend my current swatch, but was also able to quickly and effectively show me how those Bauhaus weavers wove those weft-based blocks of different colours across their carpets and textile surfaces. I had intended to experiment (because I couldn’t find a reference to this technique in any of books on weaving I have at home), but it saved a lot of time and effort to be shown very clearly how it was done!

The business of extending my current swatch took some serious time, thought, experiment and execution. In fact so much time, that I made no further progress on preparing another warp as I have done each week for the last month. But I have something that now fits the requirements for one of these eight swatches due in mid December, and I’ve managed to do all the writing up, noting all the technical steps involved in creating this piece of work. What you can see in the sequence of photo illustrations below is the bare-bones of the technique as shown by Andrea, and how I managed to integrate this technique into my extension of last week’s swatch. What I’ve attempted to do in the second stage of this swatch is to take the greens I’ve selected for decorating the yellow and orange surface as the main surface colour of the top half of the swatch. The problem with doing blocks with these three greens was the disparity in the yarn thickness: the darkest almost turquoise green was much thinner than the other two. This made it necessary to weave a double pick to every single.

Painted Blocks

A 3-part Sketch

A Contemporary Egyptian Tapestry

Graham gave me some interesting advice about working with yarns of different qualities and textures, kindly demonstrating some possible techniques. He took away one of my more extreme yarns to see if it had any Lycra in it. I gather the test for this is to place the yarn near a steam iron. If it’s Lycra the yarn should then crumble up dramatically. This can produce wonderful textures when the yarn is woven into a warp. I finished my workshop day by spending time in the computer suite getting the feel of working on my sketched and painted images in photoshop. I needed to remind myself how to print and transfer all my collected images from my internet server onto the dedicated space I have on the college server.

A Contemporary Egyptian Tapestry

At the end of last week I decided I should share my review of  Sue Lawty’s talk with the HNC class, with the intention of promoting a discussion on and around tapestry weaving and the business of abstraction. So I e-mailed the group and the staff with my blog address. A few people have acknowledged the mail, but I think the notion of any kind of discussion is probably a bridge too far! Anneli kindly sent me some images of wool and cotton tapestries from a gallery in Egypt currently exhibiting at Gallery 47 in London. I admit these are colourful images, and probably highly accomplished, but a world away from the sparse, restrained Coptic images Sue Lawty showed us last Monday from the V & A collection.

A bit of a bad day in the workshop

 

Notice the error? I didn't at first

I’m sure everyone who has learnt to weave has a day they’d rather put behind them and quietly forget about. I’ve had four brilliant sessions in the college textile workshop and came away each time feeling I’d made real progress. Today was my fifth session and I had planned at the outset to complete the blue and white warp I had started two weeks ago. I’d decided after making (quite successfully) three plain warps I should do a pattern with two colours.

Two Warp Yarns

I took my inspiration from that yellow and black warp I’d studied on the Ethel Mairet scarf I illustrated here a few weeks ago. I found two interesting yarns, a blue linen (Glenary waxed @ 14 epi ) and an off-white cotton and wool mixture (Herdmans softened @ 17 epi). They looked great together. A fortnight ago I’d had no problems getting the warp as far as the threading stage. I reckoned I could knock this off in an hour or so . . .

When I sat down to do this I found to my horror that I had put the warp on the front beam. I’m supposed to be practising warping back to front. Now, I can warp front to back, and this is, in retrospect, what I should have done. But no, I took the warp apart and re-raddled it on the back beam. Mistake no1!! I discovered linen really does not like being raddled twice. I even managed to put the wrong end of the warp on the back beam batten! Finally, I abandoned it and made another warp.

3 Chained Warps

Now preparing warps is getting a whole lot easier for me. I’ve almost stopped losing count of where I am (I usually warp in lengths of 20). I have also (finally) learnt to chain the warp when I get it off the warping frame. The patient person who gave me my first instruction on this went over and over this process. Could I do it!? Eventually I learnt after a fashion, but only after practising with a piece of rope. It took a moment of truth in my own studio last week to finally crack it, as I realised I’d missed an important part of the jigsaw of the process – what you do at the end – tieing up the final loop in the warp to the final loop in the chain itself (which stops just before the cross! 

In the college workshop I’ve seen Andrea put the lease sticks into the cross whilst the warp is still on the warping frame. I decided that I wouldn’t do this for once, but see if I could it at a later stage (imagining that I’d want to hang up the warp or transport it home). The first time I tried putting the lease sticks into the cross – disaster! I thought I’d done it correctly (untied the safety thread around the cross) to discover I’d missed a chunk of cross threads. Nothing for it but to warp again! Second time around I managed to do what I wanted, but I did tie the warp using the choke ties I’d learnt to tie initially (and never seen used in the workshop). 

A Helpful Sketch

For some reason the raddling process with this mix of yarns seemed to take forever. I found the linen increasingly difficult to handle and the lease sticks kept falling out. Holding the two bunches of yarns – those raddled, those yet to raddled – seemed really awkward. Eventually I got to the threading stage and then to my disappointment I lost confidence in my ability to remember all the successive stages thereafter. Here my photos and sketch book drawings came to my rescue. I went into the computer suite and brought up the web Gallery of Images on my Mobile-Me .Mac site. This gallery contains a complete photographic record of the HNC course to date and my workshop sessions. If there are any images interested readers would find useful they can be downloaded – or you can even upload images of your own that you think are complementary and you’d like to share. Even with this photographic record I do find making illustrative labelled drawings in my sketchbook really useful.

By the end of the day I’d only got to the threading through the reed stage, but I had begun to realise I’d actually learnt a great deal. I made a check list that included:

• Make sure the loom is positioned back to front before you bring the warp chain to the loom;
• learn the appropriate knot for fixing the batten to the apron cloth;
• remember how to hang the lease sticks from the castle;
• don’t forget to allow for the selvedge when threading the first heddle;

This list goes on quite a bit!

A Linen Yarn

Here I’d like to back track and discuss my warp plan. Because this is only a trial warp I’d decided on no more than an 8″ width. My yarns were: Blue linen / 14 epi ; off-white mix / 17 epi. I warped these two yarns in sequence of 20 (blue), 20 (white), 40 (blue and white wound together), 20 (white), 20 (blue), 4 extra for selvedge. This made 124 epi. What I had certainly not anticipated was the difficulty I experienced wwith the linen yarn. If you look at the photo on the left you’ll see it is a very uneven thread in its thickness and it gets easily distressed. Linen comes from the flax plant linium usitatissimum. It’s the strongest of the vegetable fibres, much stronger than cotton. It’s a lovely texture for clothes, but wrinkles easily. In commercial weaving I learnt from Graham (who kindly offered a solution to my problems handling the stuff – spray a little water on it) humidifiers are used to help in the threading process to keep the yarn manageable. 

So a long and rather frustrating day, but in retrospect I came away from it considerably wiser (and more determined than ever). There were a few moments when I did feel tempted to walk away from the whole business, but with only one day a week I can devote to this study it didn’t seem a good idea.

The Weaving Group

A Quiet Space to Work

I’ve been away this week to Cumbria. In my profession, every so often, it’s necessary to retreat to somewhere quiet where I can work undisturbed for a few days. Usually, it’s to get a new composition started: quality thinking time. Sometimes, it’s to make some progress when progress hasn’t been good. This week it’s an experimental few days to see if a new location can work some magic on preparations for a concert and progress on a piece that’s getting a little behind schedule. This quiet place, I found last summer, is just one of those special locations that seems to weave its magic from the first visit, and one ends up longing to return to see what else it might reveal. At the moment I’m experiencing it for the first time in late autumn. To get an idea of what this is all about take a look at this little ‘work in progress’ presentation on my website.

I first came to this part of Cumbria earlier this year to learn to weave. Once a week my former teacher weaves with a small group of fellow weavers at Farfield Mill in Sedbergh. This 19C woollen mill has become a centre of excellence for textiles and has its own studio community of weavers, embroiderers and many other crafts. A working mill until the 1960s it was saved by the town’s residents and still manages to operate its Dobcross looms for special woven projects. On its fourth floor there’s a varied collection of hand looms, and this is where the Friday Weavers meet to spend a day working on projects that they leave in situ for the many visitors to see.

As I hope to join this group on a regular basis from the New Year I was kindly invited to join them for lunch. The result was I got to spend the most valuable afternoon studying the varied projects the members of the group were working on. I can’t really begin to do justice here to all the notes I made, the questions I asked (which  were most generously answered), the ideas that were generated, and the inspiration I received.

3 shades of Indigo

Margaret was working on a table mat, ’something simple’ she reckoned! It looked far from that (see the pattern, a ‘goose eye’ by Margaret Davison,  in the gallery below). Her warp was in white linen and the weft was going to be in three shades of blue linen, self-dyed (3 stages of indigo).  When I arrived she was half-way through threading heddles and I noticed that she had hung the reed from the castle, having initially used the reed as a raddle. She then brought the reed around the back of the loom ready to thread. Once threaded the reed would be removed and replaced ready to sley from the front. I mentioned to her that on my Toika loom the raddle has special hooks to allow it to be hung from the castle in a similar way. I noticed Margaret’s slip knots (again, see the gallery) were beautifully executed, and I resolved to master this elusive knot, not quite in my repertoire yet – it’s doing it one-handed that defeats me!

Susan's Folding Loom

Susan’s Christmas decoration was in its final stages when I got to talk to her. She was using a little folding 4-shaft loom (like the one I did my first weaving on) and executing a pattern that is the sort of thing that could have been done on a inkle loom. It’s a warp-faced narrow piece she was going to split into a number of similar hanging decorations. The thick green wool she’d dyed herself, adding a red cotton and a glittery gold fancy thread. The weft is a very thin read cotton. Look at the finished piece in the gallery below. Later in the afternoon  Susan moved over to a Dryad Carpet Loom that the weaving group had brought into service for the first time. This is a copy of the loom William Morris designed and presented to the V & A. I’d come across a V & A publication from the 1920s on weaving carpets. It had a really excellent summary of the techniques, and at the back of the book the very plans for making such a loom yourself. It’s something I really want to have a go at (not making the loom I must add, just weaving on it).

Laura's Rug

On a big floor loom Laura was working on a commission for a large rug. Before I arrived she’d re-sleyed the warp to make it denser and was now getting down to some serious weaving.The warp is cotton – orange and yellow @ 40 epi, black at 60 @ epi. The weft in plain-weave is @ 12 ppi and for this she was using 3 Roughfell 2-ply yarns simultaneously bound alongside a single-ply Bluefaced Leceister thread. Laura described to me how she prepared the warp: she works out how many ends she needs of each colour and makes a separate warp length of each; she then works out the threading pattern through the reed (which she uses as her raddle), threading one colour at a time. 

Rosie's Place Mat

Rosie was in the closing stages of weaving a place mat on a 4-shaft table loom. The warp was in white linen, the weft the same but with the occasional blue (hand-dyed) linen stripe (see below in the gallery). The mat is a balanced weave of twill (almost a herringbone) ends and a plain-weave middle. It was beautifully simple and the touches of colour ‘really’ effective. This for me is a perfect example of woven design and execution where less is definitely more!

 

Anna's Bute Loom (1912)

Finally there was Anna’s ‘3 piece’ – a project to make a jacket, waistcoat and scarf from the same pattern. Anna is working with the oldest loom in the collection, a Bute from 1912. It’s a four shaft, 4 treadle floor loom. She’d prepared, like most of her colleagues, a computer draft of her design. This shows brilliantly exactly what was going on. For me, being able to study this plan against the loom and garment itself was so valuable. I have to admit to having great difficulty imagining the process of threading a warp-based sequence of patterns via the heddles. I was reassured by an experienced weaver later in the week that it takes a long time to be able to do this, but working with computer software really helps to develop such visualization skills..

Anna's Plan

I can say now with confidence that I truly understand her computer draft – having spent some time puzzling over it and coming back the following day to check it out. Anna had taken her inspiration from a slub containing three colours, orange, gold and brown. She created a warp in a series of segments mixing cotton and silk of these three colours together – a thick and a thin (a repp?) wound onto the warping table simultaneously. Her tie-up and treadling pattern is based on a simple 2:2 twill (12,23,34,41 and 13,23,24,14, both or which can be reversed). This whole project was great for me to study at the stage she had reached – nearly complete.

Finally, it’s time to present a gallery of images that extend the pictures I’ve already shown above – with warm thanks to the generosity of the Weaving Group at Farfield Mill.

Two Workshop Sessions

Last week I didn’t write up my workshop session because I devoted this blog to describing time spent in Cumbria. So now it’s necessary to cover two workshop days,  which saw me produce two further swatches towards my target of eight. The first was very carefully planned; the second more improvisatory.

Cumbria Ferns

Swatch #3 explores the pattern of spores (sporangia) collected together into heart-shaped pods on a fern leaf known as sori . On the back side of the leaf these pods are placed in parallel rows and are often dark red in colour – maybe it’s time to find out a little about the extraordinary family of ferns and the terminology of their structure, look here for a friendly concise introduction. The prevailing idea of this swatch was to produce a weft-faced surface created from randomizing a ’slice’ of an 8-bit computer-generated  binary sequence to make the shaft lifting pattern. With such a sequence the non-repetition of each pick pattern I reckoned would cause an unstable tension on the weft, enough to produce a curve or wave-like motion in the proposed parallel patterns of red threads.

Swatch #3

With a little experiment this proved possible to execute and the result speaks for itself. I use 8-bit binary sequences to create rhythmic patterns in the music I compose. I have a library of 4, 8 and 16-bit patterns such as this example from a 4-bit pattern: 1000, 1100, 1111 etc. I then decide how many different patterns I want for a particular phrase or section and how many occurences. I can even build a template like this; a a a b  a b a b and the library system picks a sequence of binary patterns such as: 1000, 1000, 1000, 1101,1000, 1101, 1000. Listen to (and look at)  a piano piece called Toccata I made this way.

Swatch #3 - detail

I completed this swatch in a couple of hours partly because all the working out had been done previously at home. This left me time to complete my blue and white warp and weave a little. I’d chosen to explore rib patterns in this piece along with the effects of building up different sizes of rib. I felt this really suited the colour and nature of the warp I had created with a blue linen and a mixed wool and cotton white. This is a pattern I shall certainly develop further.

Blue linen / White cotton & wool mix

Swatch #4

Swatch #4 is a response to the pleasure I had with rib weft and warp-faced weaves on my blue and white piece. The whole structure uses different forms of these weaves. the colour play is based on the dark green yarn present in the warp. This brown-flecked green wool yarn is wound onto the shuttle bobbin with a thin lemon-green cotton. This produces a variegated effect similar to that found when looking at a mass of fern leaves. Threaded between ribs of various sizes and densities a white cotton boucle thread is gradually introduced until it takes over the whole weft. A sequence of X patterns is created by using an inverse sequence of shaft lifting patterns 1-8, 2-7, 3-6 with 4-5 double rib then 3-6, 2-7, 18 returned. The swatch is completed with a mustard-coloured chenille yarn, again wound together with the lemon green cotton.

Before starting on the swatch I’d had my first tutorial with Andrea. For me this was a timely opportunity to survey the progress of the different elements that make up the course. In preparation I had added photos to some of the swatch design illustrations in my file. I made sure I could illustrate aspects of my research on abstraction with the study I had undertaken of Winifred Nicholson’s Variations on a Cyclamen and Primula, a goache sequence of 1935. I also gathered together my reading list to date and surveyed all those web links collected – many used in this blog of course. In the tutorial itself I found I had to make quite a vigorous case for including this blog and my on-line gallery of photos as part of my sketchbook / diary. Clearly this kind of approach is not altogether common practice. I do understand the reluctance to regard the digital image and typescript word as worthy companions to the drawing and handwritten comments of a sketch book, but I am determined to present both: the electronic part does provide a very necessary focus for reflection and record of process. With the macro lens of the digital camera it is possible to show a level of detail in a woven piece very difficult (and time-consuming) to replicate in a drawing or painting. With the blog, the opportunity for making links, referencing to images and texts to amplify what I’m learning and experiencing, seems just too valuable a medium to ignore. It’s also clear that (some) textile designers now use the web most creatively, and for their clients it certainly is often the first stop in considering the value of a designer’s work.  I was also anxious in the tutorial to argue for delivering only 6 swatches at the assignment conclusion: on the grounds that it was necessary for me to develop and practice skills of making a warp and dressing a loom in the European way taught in the workshop and expected in industry (a point made by a third year student I spoke to this week).

At the end of the second workshop day I spent a little while studying the work-in-progress of a number of 2nd year full-time students weaving on the workshop’s dobby looms. Here in the gallery is a selection: an intriguing mix of styles, techniques and materials.

Cloth & Culture NOW Conference

The Cloth & Culture NOW exhibition has reached Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery. Part of Manchester University, this gallery houses the North of England’s major permanent collection of textile art. It was my first visit despite the Royal Northern College of Music being almost next door. C & C NOW’s curator Prof. Leslie Millar had organised a conference  titled Sense of Place: art and the construction of identity. The programme was a lively mix of exhibiting textile artists, a number of prominent UK academics, a curator from Latvia and as a lively coda a Dutch artist with a passion for gingham!

A Puppet Show by Sandor Nagy

First off was Dr Jeremy Howard from St Andrew’s University who presented a paper titled Embroidering the Truth. Focusing on the early years of the 20C he pointed out how fine artists had moved into textile design as a way of articulating the notions of nationalism and cultural identity surfacing in many European countries. Unlike some of the other speakers at the conference he chose the minimum of images and showed them to the maximum of effect. I found afterwards I could actually remember many of them – not so with most of the other presentations. A lesson here surely for our forthcoming Historical and Contextual Studies presentations in May. After an effective survey of European movements he landed on his own special interest in the Gödöllö cultural community in Hungary with its weaving school established by Istvan Medgyaszay in 1907 and its major textile artist of the Hungarian Art Nouveau Sandor Nagy. The Gödöllö community had very similar preoccupations to the Chipping Camden craftspeople of C.R.Ashbee’s Guild with its emphasis on the whole (good and healthy) life of its craftsmen and women. Sadly Gödöllö as a community only lasted until the early 1920s but it had many influential ‘friends’ and visitors including composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, and was clearly a precursor of the weaving studio of the Bauhaus.

Dyed Batik by Mary Lloyd Jones

Next up was an intriguing paper by Dr Moira Vincentelli from the University of Aberystwyth. Talking about ‘Cloth, Clay and Identity in Wales’ she again chose her images with care and restraint. She ranged over nearly 200 years of traditional practice in craft making: pottery, costume, quilting, tapestry and batik. Recent practice was certainly the most interesting part of her presentation: Lowri Davies with her take on the traditional Welsh lady in costume souvenir; Audrey Walker’s community tapestries in Fishguard celebrating the rout of French invaders and her Mondrian-like This is an Apple confection; the 7th generation potter Caitlin Jones use of scripts. She finished with a discussion of Mary Lloyd Jones an artist lately come to textiles who paints with dye. Her large-scale hangings feature at the National Museum in Cardiff and often incorporate the script and language of folk tales.

Before lunch Prof. Leslie Millar invited two of the exhibition’s artists from the Baltic countries Estonia and Lithuania to introduce their work and engage in a conversation. Severija Incirauskaite-Kriauneviciene and Kadri Viires were both reticent and almost inaudible speakers who needed serious stage managing (which they didn’t get) to bring out the best in their creative stories and presentations. Both artists clearly had original and singular ideas but seemed overwhelmed by the occasion. Better to hear them speak in their own language with a passion and intent than struggle to answer difficult questions. An opportunity lost.

Linen Hand Towels by Alison Morton

Lunch was welcome, but the time left after the last session running over made it difficult to make the most of meeting some of the celebrated delegates. These included Alison Morton who is one of the great names of craft handweaving in the UK. I only managed to talk with her at any length on the bus to the station after the conference had ended. The Whitworth are currently preparing an exhibition of her father’s work. Alistair Morton was a student of Ethel Mairet and was a celebrated painter as well as a designer weaver. His family owned  Edinburgh Weavers, a company that according to Mairet’s biograher Margot Combes ’successfully combined art and Industry’. Morton was close friends with Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, though his paintings resemble the abstract work of Winifred Nicholson. Alison I discovered still weaves (beautiful linen work) on Ethel Mairet’s Danish Lervad loom.

In the afternoon session Professor Anne Douglas talk on ‘co-creation and improvisation as a way of working with traditional culture’ was hit by almost every technological gremlin going. So much so that her talk only presented a glimmer of what I discovered later on her excellent websites was a great story with some inspirational outcomes (that included an opera for singers and knitters). I recommend spending time looking at the web presentation of her Shetland Island On the Edge project of 2003 titled Maakin. Wonderfully evocative photos and great ideas. The funding to make such a thing happen must have been truly  awesome!

Velta Raudzepa from the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Riga, Latvia came with a vast collection of slides and long historical survey of textile art across two centuries. The centre of interest was clearly the Soviet era and the many references to its legacy since independence the early 1990s. Textile art is a force to be reckoned with in Latvia as some of the websites of designer weavers demonstrate. The Latvian government promotes the art form widely in touring exhibitions internationally.

The conference ended on a lighter note – a thoroughly engaging presentation by Dutch artist Yvonne Droge Wendel on her project Universal Pattern. Her website from which she took copious examples says it all – gingham is everywhere and owned by every culture and society. Similarities with Sue Lawty’s World Beach Project (see my earlier blog in November) abound – there are photos of that red and white check from everywhere you can imagine. I was waiting for that picture of Alaska’s celebrated ‘hockey mom’ wearing it, but she didn’t included it. Shame!

Two Further Days in the Workshop

It snowed in West Yorkshire early on the on the day I usual visit the workshop. The trains were running, the sun was shining, but in Bradford it was all too much and the College decided at 4.0am to shut up shop for the coming day. The staff had been warned by e-mail the evening before (to look on the college website), but not the students. So I turned up . . . and had to turn back. I decided that this really had to be the day I would bite the bullet and put a warp on my own recently acquired loom. Because I can only devote one day a week to weaving, and that’s my day in the college workshop, my own loom has been languishing unwarped. I’d had a batch of white linen warps wound and hanging up ready to go on, but seemingly no proper space of time to do it. Also, I was uncertain which way I would eventually decide to dress the loom, front to back (the way I had been taught initially, or back to front (what the College course expects). In the end there was no contest – it was front to back, and with a longer distance from cross to the ‘top’ end of my wound warp chain the cross seemed to sit perfectly in the hand and the threads appeared in perfect order one on top of each other. My only unresolved business is to make a proper header. The one in the photo is temporary to enable me to see any mistakes (there were a couple of mis-threadings).

First Warp on my Toika Loom

Missing a day has meant two visits to the workshop this week – in preparation for the first project ‘hand in’ on December 13. I had two remaining swatches to complete and already had worked out roughly what I was going to do in both of them: #5 would be focused on herringbone patterns using a variety of different yarn thicknesses; #6 would include the crepe pattern, some further blocks (see swatch #3) and a weave block with spaces between weft picks. With both these swatches I wanted to introduce some neutral coloured yarn to offset the relatively strong colours (greens, yellow, orange and red) I have been using throughout this project. 

Swatch #5 - Herringbone Patterns

Swatch #5 brings in a new ‘fern’ colour – mustard. This is very evident in my pictures of dying ferns and blends well with the orange/red of the sporangia on the fern leaf and thick Z twist yellow wool yarn I’d chosen to dominate this swatch. In the opening layers of this swatch I have hidden the effect of the herringbone pattern by using not only mixtures of colour but mixtures of thickness. I also started introducing a neutral colour in the form of a very thin William Ross linen and cotton mix, essentially two very thin yarns that were only loosely twisted together. Although this yarn was difficult to weave the ‘loose’ effect mixed with a dark green cotton in the pointed diamond herringbone pattern brings a lot of movement to the centre layer of the swatch. The swatch opens with a 4-shaft herringbone pattern that I made into an 8-shaft pattern by mirroring the original. The final layer using only the thick yellows inverts the pointed herringbone to produce a weft rather than warp-faced pattern.

Swatch #6 - off the loom

In Swatch #6 my intention was to create a piece entirely with blocks. I wanted to feel comfortable with this technique which I’ve so admired in many of the Bauhaus weavers’ designs. That said, I realised there were two outstanding techniques I needed to include in my swatch series: creating a very loose weave with gaps (a technique I’ve admired in some of Ethel Mairet’s work) and finding a way to use the crepe pattern. This inclusion means that my swatches as a whole employ all the recommended patterns for the project except for twill, which I’ve purposely avoided as unsuitable for my rendering of my chosen organic subject. I prepared initially for a block piece by selecting 8 different green yarns and winding them onto the quills I would use to weave with. I’d planned to do rows of four different colours. In the end I’ve produced a 4, 3,2 arrangement of blocks with uneven displaced zig-zag joins between colours. I’ve contrasted this with a very pale yellow linen and the neutral colour introduced in Swatch #5. All the blocks and the yellow ’spaced’ pattern have been woven using a pattern I can’t find a reference to! It’s a 4-shaft pattern (14, 23) that I chose to allow me space to work easily with the quills in making blocks. This time creating blocks seemed to go really well, and even managing yarns with different thickness too. This meant when working with the thinish lemon green yarn that for every one pick of the other greens the lemon green needed two, making a kind of rib effect. The resulting mix of patterns is interesting and might be worth pursuing on a large piece.

So that’s it for the weaving part of the first project for the Autumn Block. I now have to ‘finish’ these swatches off the loom: darning the loose ends (I have a tutorial with Susan who is an expert needle woman – her mother taught the subject!), lightly washing the swatches in warm water, possibly with a handwash liquid soap, then steaming and ironing dry. Then it’s ironing on to the reverse of the plain-weave sections between the swatches pieces of Vilene to prevent fraying of the warp/weft ends. I then have to ‘present’ the work on a mounting board in as professional and imaginative a manner as I can! Everything has to be correctly labelled and referenced to pages of technical details that are required to accompany each swatch.

There’s a little matter of a report / essay for Unit 7 Materials – Understanding Fibres, Yarns and Fabrics. Here I’ve put together the blog from Day 4 of the Autumn Block course with a kind of commentary on how I’ve responded to this input and developed my knowledge and understanding in the following 2 months. You can read this commentary in the Pages section of this blog.

Finally, two extras to this weaving work. I had the friendliest letter from linen weaver/designer Alison Morton who I had met at the Manchester Conference at the end of November. She included in her letter a short essay about her approach to weaving with linen and a batch of photographs showing the range and distinction of her work. I’ve included a quote from her essay in my commentary I mention above.

Rug by Mona Cunningham

The other ‘extra’ was visiting Bedazzled – a really varied Christmas show at the Yorkshire Craft Centre Gallery. This is a show bringing together mainly the work of past students as well as other established craft makers and designers known to the College. I loved Richard Wilson’s ceramics and having rarely bought anything in this area of craft could imagine living with his beautifully coloured pieces. There’s an impressive rug by former student Mona Callander that takes the Bauhaus block principle into new territory – beautifully executed. I know I’m going back to buy one of the digital prints on fabric by Amanda Ross – there are two assemblages of Canadian ferns I reckon I should give a home to. Helen Farrar’s imaginative jewellery has probably provided my Christmas present solution for my thirty-something daughters. The colours she works with have a ‘wear with anything’ quality.

All Six Swatches in a Single Piece

 

HNC Seminar Weekend Day 1

After burning the candle at both ends of the day (and some patient help and advice from Susan and my assistant Phil for designing and printing the swatch labels) I managed to set off for Bradford on Friday morning with a finished presentation of my ‘organics’ project in a rather unwieldy A1 folder. Along the way I’ve learnt to darn, wash and finish my swatches, prepare their display on mount board (many thanks to Helen from the Craft Centre Gallery for the advice and ideas!), and gather all my digital images together to create a slideshow.

Sadly our lecture for the day – the second part of Unit 7 on textile technology – was cancelled due to the lecturer’s illness. Sad in many ways, but the compensation was that the class was able to have informal time to study each others presentations. Andrea gave us a run down on our next project (submission date February 20!). Pam Brooke very kindly stepped in to give some most generous time and advice to those planning their Historical and Contextutal Studies presentation. She  has also lent me an early edition of Ethel Mairet’s A Book on Vegetable Dyes hand-printed from the Ditchling Press – and probably quite valuable. It was about to be thrown in a skip by the College librarians! Nobody had taken it out for about 20 years . . .

During Andrea’s session some of the class did express personal concern about the recording and presentation of technical details. Jane quietly put us right, and when I looked at her own file of technical details later, her approach was exemplary and a model for us all. The solution: make up your own technical sheet on Exel.

I spent most of the free time available carefully looking at the detail of my colleagues presentations, particularly the many excellent accompanying sketchbooks. I have to say that for me the most interesting and impressive work on display came from the knitters, and their presentations were very much the tip of the iceberg of their collected work. As Bridget said: you can knit anywhere and once the pattern and design is established it can be quite straightforward to produce a series of experiments in a single evening.

For once I’ll cut the descriptive text and simply present below a gallery selection of images from presentations and sketches. During Day 2 I’ll gather some comments to attach to each image. A more extensive collection of images can be found in the Organics album on my on-line gallery here.

Cheryl

Miranda

Nigel

Mark

Laura

Anne

Jo

Jane

Gail

Bridget

Annelli

Kate

Mandy

HNC Seminar Weekend Day 2

 

A Page from my sketchbook

Today each member of the class gives a presentation of their project work: ‘organics’. We each have about 15-20 minutes to explain to our colleagues and tutors the story of our project work. The sketchbook is the medium here for tracing progress from initial subject idea to the visual research and design development that informs each of the eight swatches most of us have chosen for our final presentation. Many of the class began their preparation well before the Autumn School began. Mark, for example, had focused on walled gardens prior to choosing a corn on the cob from Jane’s shopping basket when it was suggested that it would be difficult in the confines of the drawing studio to draw and paint a walled garden – from life! That said his restrained, almost minimalist collection of swatches was impressive.

Marina's Presentation

Known as the Group Crit, this exercise was most inspiring and highlighted the very different ways many of us had approached the project. Once the presentation was given each of the two tutors (for weaving and knitting) questioned the student, and then we were allowed our questions too. It was quite clear that some of us were already producing work that, in the right quarter, might hold commercial promise. The care and imagination present in many of the samples, and sketchbook recording of design development, made many of us think hard about what we had achieved. I know I came away thinking: I could have done a whole lot better than I did. There were so many gaps and shortcomings.

As a weaver I have to admit to being fascinated by the presentations of the knitters. Their integration of colour and design I found most inspiring. Much of their work was worlds away from what my mother used to do in front of the television! I am resolved to have a go with the needles this Christmas break. If my 12 year old daughter Meg can knit I reckon I must stand a chance.

One of the hardest things for me to do was decide a single image of each presentation for the inclusion in the gallery of yesterday’s blog. I did take photos of every piece and some example pages from sketchbooks. Class members reading this can find all this photos on my on-line gallery. If you feel my choice doesn’t do you justice please say so and I’ll change the image.

Definitely part of a collection

Overall there seemed to be two styles of presentation: one that was clearly a ‘collection’; the other a record of a journey of discovery, the process of development was evident. Those who produced the ‘collections’ had, by and large woven many, many samples and had gradually identified a common theme or style of execution. For myself the presentation as a record of a journey in steps of technical achievement and design thinking is where I am right now. I think it will be some time before I can view such presentations as collections.

Having taken up the whole morning with the Group  Crit. the rest of the day is devoted to the visual research element required by Project 2 and an introduction to ‘hand-manipulation in weaving’ in the workshop. Project 2 is quite a step further on than ‘organics’. It has no global theme as such, more an observation that ‘as a textile designer it is necessary to develop the ability to translate visual research and design development into original, exciting and innovative fabrics’. This notion of  aspiring to be a textile designer is gradually beginning to sink in for me. In truth, before I started this course, I had not understood just how remarkable textile design can be in summoning up place, period, season (and that’s just for starters). Textiles can reflect and amplify  aspects of architecture, the human body, the urban and the rural, tradition and innovation.

There are two components in the initial visual research that are new to us, the Mood Board and Market Research Board. Well, the first isn’t an entirely new concept because during the class visit to the full-time students’ studio on Day 1 of the course we encountered several good examples. Here’s one  Mood Board created by a 2nd year BA student. As to Market Research, this component  asks the student, for the first time, to begin to develop knowledge of end use and particular types of textile products produced across the industry. We are asked to focus on either a brand or a designer/maker and produce a board, which visually represents the images from the retailer or designer best suited to the type of fabrics we are intending to create. 

The last hour and half or so is spent in the workshop gaining an introduction to three techniques that requires hand-manipulation in the weaving process: Inlay, Rya and Leno. But more on these in the next blog!

 

 

HNC Seminar Weekend Day 3

I’m a little ashamed that it’s taken me three weeks to get around to writing up the final day of the Seminar Weekend. I have an excuse – a bad case of the flu. It’s only this week that I’ve been able to get myself properly in gear and get back to work. Spending a little time each day on my loom over the holiday period, and thinking about the next project, has been part of my recovery programme. But to round off the Bradford Weekend Seminar . . .

The final day, Sunday, was devoted to time in the workshop working on Inlay, Rya and Leno techniques, and having an individual feedback tutorial with our tutor. I started badly with this exercise in hand- manipulation techniques because I found myself with a warp of very tough rafia which was really difficult to manipulate. As soon as the first student finished the first tutorial session and went home I got onto her loom and found I could do these three techniques without tears. The inlay technique intrigues me probably because it’s a link to the work of Theo Moorman. Moorman’s wonderful woven tapestry, that acts as the backdrop for sculptor Austin Wright’s Wakefield Nativity installation, is one of the treasures of Wakefield Cathedral. It was meditating on this very special modernist nativity that was probably the catalyst that made me start weaving last year. Of course this year I’m looking at it with different eyes, and I can work out how it has been made. Yesterday was the Feast of Epiphany, so the crib and its tapestry will be in situ for another 3 weeks until the Feast of Candlemas. When the crib is dismantled I hope to make a proper photographic record of it. 

The Moorman & Wright Nativity

An example of Inlay technique

One of the most valuable aspects of the workshop day was being able to examine a number of woven pieces made available as examples. The piece I found particularly interesting was a black and cream baby’s blanket. I took quite a few photos of this and intend to study it in some detail, trying out some of the techniques myself. Here’s the blanket as a whole, but I’ll put some of the close ups I took in the gallery at the end of this blog. I’ve been unable to find out very much about the techniques of inlay except for the Theo Moorman’s practice, which she does explain quite thoroughly in her own book. However, I did come across a fascinating review of a lecture given at the New York Guild of Handweavers in 2004 which I urge you to look at if Theo Moorman’s work with inlay is not familiar. The review also gives details of two books on her work and is, I have to say, a whole lot clearer in its description of Moorman’s technique on the 4 shaft loom than her own! My other source of information about inlay comes from Chapter X of Luther Hopper’s Handloom Weaving of 1910. I’m told that nobody consults this book anymore, but I have to say I continue to be surprised by the imaginative way it presents concepts and information. Hooper played a crucial role as loom designer, writer, teacher and silk specialist in supporting the Arts and Crafts Movement in the early 20C. All his books are available in facsimile editions  on line at the Arizona University archive. There’s also a brief autobiography and account of his work by a former student you can download here. Hooper uses the tapestry weaver’s term brocade alongside the term inlay. He gives some prominence to the importance of  ’the manner in which the brocading process was developed. Especially as it led to some of the most important inventions in the history of weaving’. He gives some examples of the origins and practice of brocading in India and includes in the photo plates at the back of the book some valuable illustrations. Hooper’s own diagrams are always clear and revealing. Until his early 40s he was a wallpaper designer, marrying into a family of silk weavers which started his interest in weaving and its traditions. His book is full of poetic illusions and Classical references. I also learn he was a enthusiastic violinist and a fine music copyist, particularly of Corelli’s violin music.

My attempt at Inlay and Leno

My own attempts at Inlay, Rya and Leno were satisfactory but hardly inspired. I have to say that some of my colleagues did the most extraordinary confections, some of which I include in the gallery below. The Swedish technique of Rya has yet to convince me, but leno has possibilities as a way of creating space in the weave. I’d like to know more about the origins of Leno and to study some examples. Hand-manipulation techniques seem to have come into their own with the Japanese Saori weaving movement. Saori weavers visited the UK in 2004 (Dartington Hall) but as yet have not taken hold here as the life-enhancing pastime that seems to have taken root in the USA. Any one interested in weaving as  an adjunct to occupational therapy (like my daughter Hester – an OT in London) should look at this seriously. It’s the described as free-style weaving – a subversive mix of tapestry and handloom weaving. It  has its own special 2 treadle looms built to be suitable for children and the disabled.

I’m including here some images and links to producers of yarns from home and abroad. A batch of sample cards had arrived in the workshop earlier in the week before the Seminar Weekend. Some of these were inspiring, others questionable. I loved the Habu yarns and the company’s website is a beautiful creation in itself. The Stroud-based company True Colours doesn’t have the class of the Habu collection, but they will dye to order.

My tutorial / feedback session was the last of the day (as I live closest to Bradford). It was a positive experience and I came away with a detailed batch of critical comments and observations for which I am most grateful. Ok, I didn’t do all the swatches I should have done, but I did compensate for this by giving attention to drawing, painting and my own ‘freestyle’ research. Putting on five warps in the workshop during the project period was also deemed to count for technical progress! But my real reward has been to begin weaving with a little confidence and direction on my own loom. I’ve also started to have a few ‘ideas’ of my own, as well as getting such pleasure from encountering the work of other weavers on-line. Just before Christmas I received my first ‘comment’ other than that of my HNC colleagues. Thanks Dot!

 

 

Swedish Yarns

A Habu yarn card

Jo’s leno creation

Anneli’s virtuoso design

Mark’s striking leno design

Marina’s inlay experiment

blanket detail 2

Blanket detail 1

Back in the Workshop (2009)

Colour Coded Charity

With only just over a month before the ‘crit date’ for Project 2 (Hand Crafted Textiles) I had only made up my mind last week as to the content of my proposed visual research. I had toyed with the idea of ‘charity shops’ until I realised that I might have trouble defending this area as a cultural artefact! There are eight charity shops in Wakefield. All of them have very distinctive logos using a maximum of three colours, and several shops organise clothes on display by colour, not by size. I had (stupid?) ideas about designing a range of woven bags or tea cloths  associated with the visual design message of these (mostly) national charities. 

Cineraria and Cyclamen 1927

As the first workshop day of 2009 approached I realised I had to be more pragmatic and choose something a little closer to the letter of the project expectations. I’ve chosen to focus visual research on the abstract paintings of Winifred Nicholson. I already have a small collection of books of and about her work, and access to her son’s limited edition monograph Unknown Colour, the only source that details the ’story’ of these abstract canvases. Very simply, this painter, known principally for flowers and landscapes, spent several years in Paris immediately after her marriage ended to Ben Nicholson. There she studied and became friends with Braque, Mondrian, Picasso, and Arp. She put away her flowers and produced a series of extraordinary abstracts (with just a few lovely portraits of her young children who accompanied her to France). World War II intervened and she returned to Cumbria and war work, her abstracts put on one side until the 1970s when they were first shown (to some amazement) in London.

I have decided to explore  a small group of these remarkable paintings as a source for woven colour and structure. To enrich the visual research element I hope to examine the context that surrounds these paintings: just how they ‘connect’ to her previous work and her life, preoccupations and influences. Landscapes, flowers, her children, her friends, her home are all captured in paintings that are a distinct and wholly original ‘take’ on the modernist project that from the mid 1920s she signed up to. I intend to study at least one painting ‘in the flesh’ at either Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester or Bradford city galleries and to experience for myself something of the luminous quality so often described as belonging to her work. She often talked and wrote about searching for ‘the unknown colour’ ( the extra colour of the rainbow she called it  - indeed the rainbow and the prism fascinated her throughout her long life). Winifred often referred to painting as ‘unweaving a rainbow’. In the early 1950s she became a close friend of the poet Kathleen Raine whose poems often invoke elemental things, ‘the doves, the rainbow, echo and the wind . . .

Angelus

I see the blue, the green the golden and the red.

I have forgotten all the angel said.

The flower, the leaf, the meadow and the tree,

but of the words I have no memory.

I hear the swift, the martin and the wren,

but what was told me, past all thought is gone.

The doves, the rainbow, echo, and the wind,

but of the meaning, all is out of mind.

Only I know he spoke the word that sings its way

in my blood streaming, over rocks to sea,

A word engraved in the bone, that burns within 

to apotheosis the substance off a dream,

That living I shall never hear again,

because I pass, I pass, while dreams remain.

I’ve set seven of Kathleen Raine’s poems to music in a large-scale song cycle Stone and Flower. It was during writing this cycle (for the Barbara Hepworth Centenary celebrations in 2006) that I first discovered Winifred Nicholson’s work, in a painting of Ullswater in Cumbria, where at nearby Martindale Raine created her first collection of poems, published in 1946 with illustrations by Hepworth.

Triumphant Triangles

I started my workshop day with a notebook, my watercolour crayons and Andrew Nicholson’s book Unknown Colour. First, I chose to look at a very bright abstract called Triumphant Triangles (1930). After about 20 minutes of making a colour analysis I realised  that behind the orange and yellow triangles of this painting was a formidably rich and complex texture of colour that I couldn’t hope to ‘unweave’. So I chose a much simpler abstract with a tiny palette of colours called To and Fro (1931). Just making a coloured sketch of this painting revealed so much, taught me so much. Actually, I was astonished at what I’d missed in the first 10 minutes of study. I started to discover colours I hadn’t noticed, shapes I’d not acknowledged. Furthermore, I realised that I didn’t possess the critical verbal language needed to describe the painting (I’ll have to do something about this!). I ‘now’ understand why painters so often make copies, and how important an activity that can be. When I studied Bridget Riley’s work for a sequence of chamber works called Touched by Machine? I remember coming across copies she’d made of Seurat’s work, whose complex pointillist approach showed her the way towards the optical play and engagement with the viewer that is such a feature of her work. I suppose when I trained as a composer there was still an expectation that one explored pastiche (this sadly rarely happens anymore). I remember being quite adept at creating Debussy and Copland. More recently I’ve focused on Beethoven’s Cello Sonatas, beginning a series of ‘commentaries’ that say what I think they mean for musicians and listeners today. Just last year I put Howard Skempton and Kevin Volans under the magnifying glass in an effort to learn to be simple, to say one thing and one thing only.

To and Fro

Yarn Wrappings

As I started to look for yarns and make wrappings I became completely convinced I was on the right track for this project. It not only had lots of potential for visual research and design development, but I could also use this material in the market research and fabric realisation part of the project ( I could see how these hand-manipulation techniques of leno and inlay could play a lively and effective part in taking the elements of a Nicholson abstract into the woven medium). As to the mood board element in visual communication, I’ve started to consider a more radical mode of presentation than the one suggested in our project brief – but more on that anon.

I began my take on To and Fro with the briefest of sketches. I really wanted to see what happened when I worked directly with the colours and shapes of the painting. I started keeping careful notes of everything that I did, but soon the rush of ideas and the desire to improvise and experiment made me put all recording aside. Very foolish really – so next week I’ll come armed with my voice-activated recorder so that I can just speak the sequence of raised shaft patterns rather than try to decipher them (unsuccessfully) from the weave later on.

My 'To and Fro'

Doing inlay was no problem, but leno took a few experiments and mistakes before I remembered just how to do it. It’s role in this woven sample is but a token one, but enough to see that working with leno would enable me to produce shapes in the weave such as the lozenge that feature in To and Fro. Altogether my first workshop day of 2009 was thoroughly satisfying, and I came away feeling that getting this second project together was not only possible, but had such possibilities too.

To and Fro - a different perspective

Drawing and Weaving

To and Fro

I feel this week that I have begun to get the measure of what I have to do for Project 2 Hand Crafted Textiles. With just under a month to complete all the work required for this project I’ve returned several times to the four pages of the project brief for clarification. Slowly it’s sinking in! For me the challenge is choosing areas that enable me to ‘develop the ability to translate visual research and design development into original, exciting and innovative fabrics’. Visual Research seems the the key component of this process, and having chosen the world of 20C painter Winifred Nicholson as my subject I’m already on my way towards a portfolio of drawings and design development that is beginning to contribute to Fabric Realisation. Last week I began analysing a Nicholson abstract from the 1930s, using that picture to inform my choice of colours, yarns and hand-manipulation techniques. This week I’ve continued to focus on the same image, but taking two components of the image that I didn’t do justice to previously. 

The first component is the series of black diagonal lines that cross the picture. This seemed a great opportunity for inlay. I had to make a pattern first on squared paper and then carefully follow it! The angle across the weft wasn’t quite what I’d hoped for, but it worked after a fashion. Using a black linen yarn there’s an interesting irregular width to the lines – that I like.

Diagonal Inlay

The second component is the square tilted on its side at 45 degrees. After much searching I found two yarns that colourwise I felt much happier with as reflecting Nicholson’s original colours in her picture. The background ‘cardboard brown’, just the colour of the cardboard bookmarks we use in the studio to do yarn wrappings, is pretty close, and in linen. The white, described as ‘natural szx’ is an Anais Final 12 80% acryl/polyacryl and 20% viscose, I’m using for the inlay. I decided to experiment on this swatch with what I understand to be overshot, a technique popular in the USA. Here is Ann Sutton’s description (from The Structure of Weaving): ‘Sometimes a thread will weave into the base fabric for a short distance, float on the reverse of the cloth, and also on the face of the cloth. When floats are in the weft this is the basis of the huge family of weaves long known to handweavers as overshot patterns’. And later . . . ‘In most overshot patterns, a plain weave ground pick (of the same yarn or thickness as the warp) must be inserted in between each pattern pick (1 and 3, 2 and 4, alternately in all cases). Both plain weaves can be inserted if neccessary to elongate the pattern’.

A Kind of Overshot

Well. my approach to this is a little unorthodox (don’t look too closely at the photo!), but I got the idea, and for me, with a four shaft loom, Overshot is a particularly good medium to explore. My first teacher introduced me to Overshot through Ann Sutton’s book (see above) and rummaging in her studio box of examples she’d woven as a fledgeling weaver produced the most beautifully executed table mat to a traditional design in Overshot (‘woven as a gift for my mother-in-law’ I remember her saying with a twinkle in her eye). These two swatches took most of my weaving time in the workshop and made up what I felt to be a useful day.

Cyclamen & Primula (1923) Kettles Yard Cambridge

The afternoon previously I found a couple of hours to do some drawing. I decided to begin my Visual Realisation work proper by going to what I regard as the signature image of Winifred Nicholson: a still life in front of a window with a view. Throughout her long life she returned again and again to this subject, but her most well known piece, painted in Italy in the 1920s, I’ve long loved and admired. It’s in Kettles Yard, Cambridge where I had the privilege of being Kettles Yard Fellow in 1985 – wonderful to have your office in house with a ‘real’ Picasso in the loo! I went out and bought a little cyclamen and placed on it my table: it is such a fragile flower. Nicholson left her flowers in their white tissue wrappings, containing somehow the delicate flowers and strong green leaves within a cocoon of shapes both flowing and angular, perfectly complementing the mountain landscape in the distance. My landscape is a roofscape of Wakefield, looking out towards the Town Hall clock. I didn’t have another appropriate plant, so I chose a bowl of fruit. But first I drew the cyclamen on its own: two drawings, the second a small detail of the first. I photocopied the first drawing several times ready for my next experiment. Wonderful how a photocopy can sharpen up a drawing!

Next I found some red tissue paper and wrapped the cyclamen. My idea was to paint a transparent wash across the photocopied drawing, and do it several times and with several colours, each time moving the wrapped shape around the cyclamen so that the tissue shape in relation to the plant changed. Here’s an example of my efforts. This I like very much and I’m looking forward to exploring some way of representing this on a woven piece.

Cyclamen in paper

The next step was to take out the camera and photograph the wrapped cyclamen in situ on a window (with a view) and a bowl of fruit. At the end of this blog you can see one of my close up images (see the rest on my on-line gallery). These gave me some lively ideas about collage. Painted tissue paper seems high on my list of possibilities here. All in all I felt this was a promising start to my Visual Realisation and I’m looking forward to my next opportunity to spend time on this kind of work.

Wrapped Cyclamen

This brings me to Design Development. In some respects I’ve already begun this work alongside the experimental swatches I’ve been making that illustrate hand-manipulation techniques.I am assembling a palette of colours drawn from analysis of Nicholson’s work. This is fuelling already ideas about their potential for textile design. I’ve got to start this ‘conversation with myself’ (recommended in the project brief). What better place to do that than in this blog, which I intend to start next week.

As for Market Research and Mood Boards (part of the unit on Visual Communication) we are required to choose either fashion or interiors and focus on one or two brands / designers ‘which best fit the type of fabrics we will be producing. After some research I’ve decided to look at the work of two Welsh textile designer/makers: Laura Thomas and Cefyn Burgess. Next week I hope to begin my on-line discussion of their work. I’ve already received a more than generous letter from Laura allowing me to use images from her website. I should warn my college tutor that I am considering producing my ‘market research board’ and possibly the required ‘mood’ board as an on-line presentation. 

Finally, I’d like to share a design from one of my colleagues on the Bradford course. During the December weekend we met up to show our work I ’snapped’ this woven piece in a collection of woven examples not included in this student’s presentation. I was intrigued enough by it to write to her and ask for the pattern, which she has kindly sent. here it is:

Anneli's Herringbone Piece

Hej Nigel,

This is when a loomchart would come in handy, but as I am not at all confident about it I will ‘talk’ you throgh the process and hope it will be clear enough fot you to understand.

The weaves are  plain weave ( I call it tabby, aparently that is american), 2/2 twill and hopsack.

1.  5 ends of tabby ( I don’t cut the yarn here but keep it aside and weave in the end once to keep it ‘running along’ until you need it again after the first twill bit)

2.  The Herringbone Twill –  lift heddles 1+2, 2+3, 3+4, 4+5, 5+6, 6+7, 7+8. This completes one run and the diagnal carries on if you want it to.   Do four rows of tabby or whatever you fancy, and to get herringbone effect, you now reverse and weave  7+6, 6+5 etc  and after 1+2 complete with a few rows 

of tabby, I did 10 or 12.

3.  The Hopsack – This is so simple and effective, I like it a lot. Lift 1+2, 5+6 and weave two ends  ( or more) in the same shed, securing the yarn on the shuttle around the selvedge threads.   I did two and then two ends with the background yarn after having lifted the heddles that were down before,  that was 3+4 and 7+8.  Then more tabby and so on.

The blue yarn is cotton, sort of merserised I think, and quite thick by comparison to the warp, also cotton.

Good luck then – I’ll look forward to seeing the result !    Anneli

         

A final cyclamen - in close up

 

          

 

Working against the clock

Triumphant Triangles

When I arrived at the workshop I was greeted with the announcement that for the next three weeks there wouldn’t be a loom for me to work on. The second-year full-time students needed to use all the 8-shaft looms having pressed the powers that be that they should have practice and guidance on dressing a loom. Well, I know how they feel, having felt myself woefully inadequate in this quarter last September. That said, I realised I had just a day to create three more swatches to complete my group of pieces demonstrating facets of hand-manipulation in weaving, pieces that also made reference to the subject area of my Visual Realisation: the work of painter Winifred Nicholson.

My focus for these swatches was Nicholson’s Triumphant Triangles, a striking part-landscape, part-abstract, begun in the 1930s in Paris, finished in Cumbria in the 1970s. I think the triangles were painted first, their background added much later. Before sorting out a design I needed to add to my palette of Nicholson ‘colours’: very light blues and her special and rather elusive violet. This violet she ‘discovered’ on a visit to India with her father in her late teens. It fascinated her throughout her long life. Needless to say I couldn’t find anything like it, but I did find a lovely silver greyish blue, a cotton / linen mix called Shannon. The colour reminds me of that silver light of a summer dawn before the real blue of a hot day takes over. The orange and yellows I already had, along with a kind of oatmeal brown. 

Swatch #4

Now I could say that this first swatch on Nicholson’s triangles was carefully planned and meticulously executed, but it was the result of a mistake and some face-saving improvisation. I can only feel a little better about it knowing that the great Bauhaus weaver Anni Albers encouraged her students to improvise at the loom. She felt that until you actually worked the material with your hands you couldn’t fix a design. I had a design of sorts that I’d sketched out in my notebook, but almost from the outset I realised it wasn’t going to work. So what you see is a real improvisation. What is extraordinary is that (as you’ll see later), this design owes something to the designer/maker Laura Thomas whose work I have decided to focus my attention on as part of the Project 2 brief. Certainly the loose red inlayed (outlayed?) threads at the bottom reference to her prize-winning Chromascope. 

Swatch # 5

The next swatch attempts to merge ‘Shannon’ blue gradually into violet ‘and’ include the some triangles in orange and yellow. What you may find odd is the use of that oatmeal brown as a way of ending the colour progression in the background from blue into violet. It was very much an afterthought, but one I don’t regret. You’ll see later on in this blog that I’ve been exploring different neutral shades of white, cream, grey and light brown in combination with yellow, orange and blues. So this decision I’m sure came out of those experiments, and the fact that this purple and light brown are adjacent colours in Triumphant Triangles.

Swatch #6

By five o’clock when I started on the third swatch of the day I have to admit I was wilting. I have to stand to weave on this table loom and frankly six hours (with a break for lunch) is quite a long time for me to be on my feet. It took me a little while to remember how to ‘leno’, but eventually I got it to work. As I experimented I suddenly had a great idea: representing the lower half of the series of  triangles with a sequence of leno patterns. OK, it’s a bit untidy, but the design and the play of colour pleases me no end, and I shall certainly develop this piece. You’ll see that I’ve discovered and used an even-whiter blue. This is an acrylic yarn with flecks of reflective white spun into the blue.

So unless I can borrow an 8 shaft table loom for the next few weeks I shall have to resort to making my Toika 4 shaft floor loom believe it’s something it isn’t. Fortunately, in the three pieces I have described here I have been using just a plain weave and a simple rib pattern, both of which work well on the 4 shaft loom. I particularly want to do a swatch that brings the Nicholson colour palette into the warp. That’s the next step.

Reference Image in Goache

The little weaving I’ve managed to do on my own loom has, curiously, some connection with this Nicholson project in its choice of colours and yarns (remember I decided back last September it was better to weave at College for a whole day once a week than odd moments at my office / studio where I keep my loom). Two weeks ago I finished the first of a series of trial A4 size ‘panels’. This week I spent an hour getting out the goache paints to make a reference image of this panel. For my last project I painted reference images of all my swatches in watercolour. This is first I’ve managed in goache, and the results gives me a little encouragement, so I include it here. Nicholson often painted her abstract work in goache to get that flat quality so beloved by Mondrian, a painter who became an important friend and inspiration to Nicholson in her Paris years.

Now this panel started life as an experiment in using linen and trying an unbalanced weave. I also wanted to try Ethel Mairet’s technique of binding sections of plain weave with a slub or thick woollen yarn – as I do here with a beautiful Cumbria-dyed rough Herdwick wool kindly donated by Nancy from whom I bought my loom. I’ve also used a kind of skewed twill pattern and its inversion as a central figure of the panel (in dark blue). Ribs feature strongly throughout this design and also that arrow effect made when bringing two 2/2 twills together, another inversion technique I suppose. I started this panel when I was recovering from a bad bout of flu just before Christmas; it was definitely part of my convalescence. I’ve derived a lot of pleasure from its gathering design. Very little improvisation here. I carefully planned every step.

A Linen Panel

I had planned to finish this week’s blog with a proper introduction to one of my chosen designers/makers selected as a focus for my Project 2 submission. I realise that time is against me – I’m traveling a lot this week and this is being written on the sleeper to Plymouth – so what I place here will be no more than a taster. I saw Laura Thomas’ work at the Harrogate Craft show last Spring before I began to learn to weave. I felt it had something fresh and different about it, and now I’m a little wiser about this woven world I appreciate and admire her work and her imagination even more. She has a great website and a lively if infrequent blog. Her work covers such a range of processes and outcomes, from mixed media art pieces and hangings to commercial commissions for major international clients. Shot through all this is her Pembrokeshire background, a part of Wales I love and have walked with my daughter Frances May. I recognise the tone of her colours that owe a lot I think that great Pembrokeshire painter Graham Sutherland. So here for now are two images to get us started: a Laura Thomas mood board and a prizewinning art piece Chromascope.

Chromascope © Laura Thomas

On the subject of mood boards I have decided to produce my offering in a digital format using a technique my office assistant , programmer and copyist developed to illustrate a vocal composition called Esther Dyson’s 12 Design Rules. This throws short pieces of text by Internet guru Dyson into the Fickr search engine and pulls out a sequence of images which will always be different because the number of new images per minute uploaded onto Flikr seems to grow exponentially. My digital real-time mood board will pull images from a folder of chosen images, which will slowly appear and disappear in different shapes and sizes, but always keeping the screen full of light and colour. You know, I might even write some music to go with it!

Mood Board © Laura Thomas

Soumak, Moorman & Selby

I had a nice surprise almost immediately after completing the last blog: a note from the Bradford College textile workshop to say they’d changed their plans and I could keep weaving my swatches on the loom I’ve been using for this second project (deadline just a fortnight away). So when I went in on Thursday I was able to pick up where I’d left off and complete one more swatch. This makes six for my collection of hand-manipulated samples based on the colours and structures of Winifred Nicholson’s abstract paintings. If you’ve followed my progress on this project you’ll see I started with browns, pinks, yellows and whites, modulating through yellow and orange, to blues and Nicholson’s signature colour – violet. Today I decided to bring the browns, the blues and the violets together and introduce a new fibre – mohair. 

Soumak inlay

At the outset I was unsure exactly what I would do, but I knew I wanted to pick up on both paintings (To and Fro and Triumphant Triangles) and find a way to bring my chosen colours, fibres and yarns together. For the  background I wanted to maintain a play of plain-weave and this hopsack derivative I’ve been using for several weeks: a very light blue ‘Shannon’ – an acrylic and cotton mix, and an oatmeal linen. I wasn’t very happy with the standard inlay technique I had been using so I experimented with the soumak. This is a kind of running knot in the weft used in carpet weaving. I really like the effect of this knot and you can see I’ve used it both as a straight border and as a running diagonal. Soumak carpets are woven traditionally in the Caucasian Mountains and often hold intricate patterns. The running knot used for such patterning can slope in either direction (depending which way you knot it). When the knot is done in alternate directions it produces a kind of herringbone effect. In my gallery images below you can look in detail at my diagonal lines of soumak, knotted in contrasting directions. The blue-violet and the dark brown with a hint of purple are both mohair, the light brown and blue 100% wool. I have a wonderful little manual of such knots published in 1933 by the V & A Department of Textiles: Notes on Carpet-Knotting and Weaving. I include two pages from it in the gallery.

Margo Selby's London Shop

At the beginning of last week I found myself in London with a little time between a meeting and  attending a research colleague’s professorial address. Grappling with the very icy pavements I walked across Russell Square, around to the front of the British Museum, and in a little nearby courtyard of shops in Bury Place found myself at Margo Selby’s shop. Margo is a real success story in my book. A young Royal College of Art graduate with an impressive track record and a keen business imagination, she is a rare example of a designer/maker with a distinctly urban outlook. No country colours for her. She’s a Londoner and her woven work reflects the city. Her pieces look great on the web, indeed I reckon how they look on the site feeds back  to her design sense. Margo invites visitors to her shop to go downstairs to her basement two-room workshop complete with two assistants (busy making up cushions) and an AVL 24 shaft computer loom. She was delightfully welcoming and kindly spent 20 minutes answering my many questions. She reckoned herself to be a very technical weaver and rarely did anything away from her computer loom. Swatches for her latest range of mohair scarves I was able to handle – to see exactly how it’s done! At the moment her shop is showing two distinct weaves: the mohair double weave and the intriguing silk and lycra ‘bubble’ double cloth fabric, the latter contributing to a whole host of  fashion accessories and able to give a striking 3-D effect. A visit to her website is highly recommended, but the shop is even better because you can see examples of other designer/makers such as Laura Thomas.

The Annunciation from Moorman's Nativity

At the beginning of January I showed in this blog an image of Theo Moorman’s woven tapestry for Wakefield Cathedral’s Nativity crib. Last week, after the Feast of Candlemass, the tapestry was taken down and carefully put away until next Christmas. This was a great opportunity to examine it properly  because the sculpted figures (by Austin Wright) stand in front of the tapestry, so it’s difficult to get close. Moorman is a weaver whose rather special technique of inlay we have been encouraged to examine during this project. So, for what it’s worth, I now have a photo record of the whole tapestry, with all the significant images taken in close-up. I did spend a little time drawing one image: the Three Wise Men set against an intricate backdrop of holly leaf (and berry) patterns. It was very difficult to draw and my attempt only gives a rough impression I’m afraid . . . but a good exercise none the less.

Cottage (detail) from a Zambian sketchbook © Alice Fox

On the subject of drawing I’ve had the good fortune to study two sketch-books this past week, the work of a part-time student on the degree course at Bradford College. The first was a kind of preliminary to the drawing course on the degree – a collection of images and experiments, a kind of pre-drawing collection focusing on mark-making and most significantly for me approaches to collage and textured assemblage. The second was a collection of  ’proper’ drawings coloured in wax crayon and koh-i-noor washes (a watercolour-like range of bright lively colours). This sketchbook recorded a precious family visit to Zambia and mixed disarming images of children with first encounters with the African natural world of animals and plants. Both these books I’ve found so inspirational, and a most helpful reference point for the work I know I must do to make the Visual Realisation part of this course meaningful and useful. Thank you, Alice.

Le Jardin Pluvieux (the basis of 15 images)

With ten days or so to go there’s still a lot to complete for the project submission. With the weaving at college complete – I just have one piece on my loom at home to finish – I should get there. Thankfully, I’ve just completed a 25-minute composition I have been working on since last November. This completion allows a little extra space to finish the mood and market research boards. Sometimes when writing music you have to make a final push and do nothing else for a few days, which is what I did for three days solid over the weekend. This new piece, 15 images of a rain-soaked summer garden, in versions for piano and wind octet, I hope to publish on-line with images of 15 woven panels reflecting the colours of a garden observed though the panes of a window (see above). The penultimate musical ‘image’  is actually generated from an 8-shaft weaving sequence – but more on that next time when I can display both the woven sequence and the music side by side. You can get a taste here of this new composition, and the story and location behind it.

 

 

Moorman panel in detail

Moorman panel sketch

Moorman’s shepherds

Margo Selby’s mohair scaves

A Margo Selby Scarf

Margo Selby’s lycra and silk patterns

Final Swatch

Soumak in detail

Soumak Carpet (detail – back & front)

Soumak carpet designs (detail)

Joined up thinking

The time has come to pull together all the different strands that make up Project 2 (Handcrafted Textiles). The more I work on this project the more I admire its design and intent. For someone like me who has grown up without getting too involved in decisions about home furnishing or (to some extent) what I wear, the business in woven design of facing up to the reality of an acceptable and realistic commercial end product is quite a step to take. My wife and daughter (#4)  are serious shoppers and think nothing of spending an afternoon looking for a jacket with all the right colours to highlight or match an existing wardrobe. But more than that they both seem to have grown up with an innate sense of what ‘works’ in shape, structure, colour, and texture. In short, they know how to look.

An inlayed dog - from a Laura Ashley draft-excluder!

I feel I’ve taken quite a leap in the last two months in learning to look. First it was examining  two chosen paintings, intently, analytically and with purpose. As the basis of my Visual Research and all the other connecting areas I couldn’t avoid it! And it’s been wonderful, such a pleasure. Now I’m facing up to looking (intently, analytically, critically, and with purpose) at this ‘end product’. This is to inform and feed into my fledgling designs. Imagine me, Dear Reader, walking into Laura Ashley ‘Home’ and  . . . well, not shopping, but going to look and record. I was stunned actually by the range and sheer design imagination of it all. Ok, some of it I wouldn’t give house room to, but then my priorities and way of life preclude arranging for the LA home visit specialist to come and help me choose the right shade of floral wallpaper to match my DFS leather suite – aghh! – we inherited a beautiful late Victorian cottage suite so I’m spoiled. But there were many sensible and servicible designs alongside some really clever patterns I would have been proud to have executed. I realised that already that the process of learning surrounding this college course has made it possible for me to begin to ‘read’ fabrics and weave structures they often contain. I am already becoming critical in an informed way. Dare I say it, the whole experienced opened up a new chapter in my relationship with my partner of 22 years: we have something new to share and enjoy (beyond music, books and children). I discovered just how embedded design and fabric sense has become in her critical view of the textile and fabric world.

Quarante-huit, quai d'Auteuil (1937) Winifred Dacre

Earlier in the week I finished my last piece of ‘project 2′ weaving in the college workshop, seven swatches in all that demonstrate different hand-manipulations in weave and make reference to the colours and forms of Winifred Nicholson’s abstract paintings of the 1930s (she used an old family name Dacre for many of these paintings). My final swatch involved a kind of manipulation left over from the last project – replacing ends in a plain cotton warp to bring new pattern and colour possibilities. Now, I’ve learnt to replace broken warp ends, but replacing bunches of ends was new and a little scary. I had planned the visual side of things very carefully. My intention was to take the colours and yarns I’d used for the soumak knot inlay in swatch #6 as the basis for a sequence of warp strips. In the weft I would focus on placing  twill and ‘lightening shape’ patterns to produce the diagonals I’d been creating previously in inlayed designs. I also wanted to explore a background modulation of colour from pale ‘early morning’ blue through oatmeal brown to lilac. 

As I was about to cut the warp ends a voice behind me said, ‘you don’t need to do that’. Graham, our so generous technician  kindly pointed out that I could simply thread the new warp strips on top of the existing warp ends . . . and it worked a treat. In the gallery below I’ve laid out the sequence of process: choosing the yarns and laying them out in appropriate lengths on the loom, pinning the bunches to pins in the woven header between the six and soon to be seventh swatch, threading through the heddles and reed (I choose to replace strips threaded on 1-4 shafts), then hanging the spare yarn off the back beam using a bunch of perns, and finally weaving. One miss-threading caused me some angst early on, but once that was sorted it all worked beautifully, and dare I say it who shouldn’t, I’m pleased with the result.

The woven warp is now at home waiting to be divided, darned and finished, then presented formally on mounting board and labelled. All the technical details of each swatch have to be noted (on an Excel sheet – thanks Jane) and I’ve taken to providing both a photo and painted analysis of the swatch colour structure. It’s so different from my first collection of project swatches – there’s not a green in sight and the swatches (some of them) begin to look as though they have the ingredients of a collection.

Fro and To (2009) Nigel Morgan

Back in my studio, where until yesterday it was a hive of a very different kind of industry – finishing the printed copy of a new score – I’ve been putting together the three additional elements of this project. The first is the Design Development – ‘having a discussion with yourself’ focusing on the potential of your Visual Realisation work for development into woven textiles’. So where was I with my Visual Realisation ? Not as far as I’d hoped – but there was enough to kick-start this process. If you’ve followed this blog there’s the series of cyclamen drawings, wrappings and photos. I can now see tremendous potential in using Theo Moorman’s techniques and/or Overshot (based on some of Ann Sutton’s contemporary approaches to this) to overlay (wrap) one colour or structure across another. My close-up photos provide some possibilities for strong colour groupings I’d never have realised in a standard image (see these in my on-line gallery). Next, my series of mark-making studies based on shapes and structures from Nicholson’s To and Fro. I worked with charcoal, brush and ink, soft pencils / hard pencils. I used a Winifred Nicholson device to add colour to neutral objects – viewing them through a prism and highlighting these objects and lines with colours from the spectrum, predominantly yellow and red, indigo and violet. I photocopied and scanned many of these images, handcolouring some of them with highlighting crayons (neon colours). Finally I produced an inverse To and Fro (a Fro and To). There’s more, but that’s enough I think! I could mention my goache experiments trying to paint a still life from directly above ( A Nicholson device) and my attempts at collage with tissue paper (en maniere de Nicholson). Next stop the second three day Weekend Seminar.

Garden Panel # 1 in its first draft form - as a yarn wrapping

A Coda: last week I talked about bringing together original woven panels with each movement of my new piano work Fifteen Images of a Cumbrian garden. Here’s a detail from the first draft of Garden Panel #1, just to give an idea how it might look.

 

 

Swatch #7 -1

Swatch #7-2

Swatch #7 – 3

A bunch of Perns

Swatch #7 – final

Swatch #7 – detail

The February Weekend (part 1)

The Print Room, Bradford College

Although this ‘February weekend’ was three days long, I’m planning on reporting on it in just two posts. The first will be devoted to the tuition side of the weekend. The second to the HNC Year I group presentation of its work for the second project: handcrafted textiles. So to begin with let’s see what I learnt! There was a morning lecture on testing, finishing, dyeing and costing with a hands-on session trying out some very basic dyeing. This was to make up for the day lecture we missed before Christmas. By the time we’d had a brief resume of what we’d covered back in September, there really wasn’t enough time to do justice to either the group of subjects to be addressed or the lecturer’s contribution. Such a shame as our first textile technology day had been fascinating, and for some of us very necessary.

Dyeing Tools

We did, however, get to explore the print room, adjacent to our workshop. Many of the group were really fascinated by seeing what went on here, and through the kindness of the studio technican, got a valuable introduction. We learnt that it is quite common for weavers to print onto warps and that the crossover between print and weave is particularly lively on the full-time course; the whole group later discussed negotiating a day’s introduction to print for later in the year. The dye room lies immediately off the print room and couldn’t really handle the size of group we were that morning. I plan to go back there on my own, if I can, and do the little assignment set us (in groups of four) on my own. This assignment asked us to create a batch of intermediate colours from three primary synthetic dyes. 

The afternoon session was spent with our lecturer in Historical and Contextual Studies. In my ignorance I had expected a formal lecture, but the session was devoted mainly to further individual tutorials on the 15 minute presentation we each have to give in early May. I wasn’t convinced that this was really necessary (having sorted out my topic and approach before Christmas), although it was interesting to hear each member of the class give a further digest of their proposed subject and their progress to date. 

Block design © Andrea Wilde

Saturday morning and early afternoon was given over entirely to the Group Critique. This I’ll discuss in my next post. So I’ll fast-forward to the remainder of the afternoon in the workshop. The main focus was weaving with block structures. A technique new to many of us, this important concept enabled us to be introduced to the Dobby loom and computer software for designing weave structures. We also had the valuable opportunity to see some fine examples of work with blocks from our own tutor’s portfolio. 

A Chain of Lags

Before I start describing the workshop demonstrations let me introduce you to the dobby loom. There are currently six of these in the college workshop – I gather there are more in a store somewhere. four of these are in the very distinctive design of George Wood, a former ships engineer turned loom maker (and about whose company in Shepshed, Leicester I can find almost nothing). Professional weaver Ros Weaver (featured recently in Modern Textiles and Carpets) suggests they are still being made. They are certainly in use by many of the professional weaving community and a resource in most textile departments of colleges.

A Barbara Massey Dobby Sample

Just two weavers I came across this week use Geoge Wood looms for quite innovative work, Alpa Mistry and Ptolemy Mann, both working with the techniques we were introduced to last weekend. I also checked out Barbara Massey’s portfolio (she has appeared on these pages previously in her partnership with Helen Rogers), where there are some really intriguing pieces of work using unusual materials and fibres – and some fascinating designs. This is a weaver whose mix of technique and practice I should love to explore further. You can view her blog here.

A dobby demo

In the fortnight before the course I watched the workshop technician dress five of the six looms (the sixth is a Louet ‘magic’ computer dobby – about which more later). So I had the chance to ask a few questions and observe the warps being assembled. The looms are 16-shaft, and instead of the manual shafts of a table loom or treadles of a floor loom, are controlled by a single pedal pivoted at the back of the loom. The principal features are that the shafts are suspended from a row of spring-controlled hooks; a knife is fitted into a rising and falling frame; a rotating cylinder carries a chain of lags that are pre-pegged according to the lifting plan. Well, that’s Marianne Struab’s excellent description, and her book Hand-Weaving and Cloth Design (sadly out of print) is the best introduction I have found so far on the techniques of weaving with this type of loom.

 Now to this weaving with block threading and dobby pegging. We were shown one approach, and sadly there was no space in the tutorial to discuss the why, how and where this all came from. The demands of time and 9 weavers to five looms having to weave at least three swatches during the workshop hours, made this impossible. To be fair we were shown some inspirational samples that I presume were woven on a dobby loom. An identical block threading was prepared for the five looms, but each had a different dobby pegging (read treadling), giving us the opportunity to at least view five different patterns, even if we didn’t get to weave them! These patterns (replicated in peg positions on each loom’s chain of lags) included sateen, plain-weave (with gaps), mixed twill, and ribs.

George Wood Dooby Loom

As far as my limited time on research has revealed there are many different approaches (and names) to doing things with block threading. Invented in Asia, as early as the 11C the technique was practised in England in weaving the silken groundwork of embroideries. Luther Hooper (in Chapter XIV of Hand-Loom Weaving) gives an extended example of what he calls diaper-weaving, not a weave itself but a method of weaving. Across the Atlantic there’s this crackle weaving, introduced brilliantly on the pages of Peg’s blog talkingaboutweaving. But I do the technique, and those who have written about it, a disservice by even beginning to summarize all the approaches. Just to mention one ‘block’ specialist that leapt out of the web – Rosalie Neilson from Oregon.

WeaveIt

I found the physical business of weaving on the George Wood loom pretty awkward, but I’m sure after a few sessions on my own (and not against the clock) I’ll sort it out. What I have to grapple with is the design element and how I can develop lively ideas to make the best of the opportunity to use such a loom, which I’ll have for several weeks (once a week) at least. I’m still at the point of trying to explain block thinking and design to myself. What may contribute to developing an understanding is using the WeaveIt computer software, an American application for PC that the college have adopted for its workshop computer lab. The software also speaks to one of the Louet magic dobby looms in the workshop. During the weekend we had an opportunity to try WeaveIt out. It seemed pretty good, but for me (being a Mac user of longstanding) there’s an excuse to leave the computer side of things on hold,  at least for the time being. Like the good Lisp programmer I have tried to become I believe in working things out in my head rather than fiddling with graphical solutions.

The Group Critique

This is the second of two blogs I’m devoting to the HNC Year 1 February weekend. It’s Group Critique time! This is where the members of the group present a digest of their project submission in front of the ‘group’ and our two lecturers. We are supposed to have just 15 minutes maximum each, but right from the start this stipulation went awry. We all learnt an important lesson: if we overrun this session we all lose out – individually we all want to show what we’ve done, but frankly there’s only so much most of us can take (and take in) at one go! This is ’such’ an important and valuable opportunity to seek a critique from tutors and fellow students that I think we all agreed it was a shame for us to defuse the potential of the session by telling the whole story of every personal project adventure. I’m reminded of the way I was encouraged (by an experienced colleague) to work with my composition students when they met for such sessions: only choose the golden moments, imagine you are doing a radio / TV interview and you can only show/play examples in 10 second (max) bursts.

I’m planning here to give a brief review of all my colleagues work. No more than a 100 words each and one photo. My review has to take in the sketchbook, the mood and market research boards and the swatches. If I fall out of line I expect lots of comments of censure! So here goes. Just to say the order of presentation almost reversed the order at the first ‘crit.

Anne's Collection

Anne is a weaver and she chose the antiquities of Ancient Egypt. Her sketchbook was just amazing – such a feast of colour, research, experimentation, and in so many media. Studies of location photos (sun and shadows on pillars), the use of candle wax as a base with acrylics, food colouring, PVA and corrugated paper, all kinds of mixed media. All very tactile, all very accomplished. She’d tried rya knotting and very irregular leno. Her colourscape was pretty convincing too. I’d been in the British Museum quite recently – in the refurbished Egyptian galleries so I can vouch for this!

Anneli's Collection

Anneli is a weaver and had chosen Portmerion, the Italianate village in Snowdonia. Inspired particularly by the (’summery’) colours and designs from the Portmeirion pottery she produced a substantial collection. In an interesting contextual twist to her presentation, she referenced her work’s subject to the social changes in the 1960s. I’m very inspired by Anneli’s weaving skills, her work is so beautifully executed and finished – as it was here. Using rya, leno and inlay her colours seemed brighter than the gaily painted houses in the village. I’ve been inspired by Portmeirion too: in my double-bass concerto subtitled The Prisoner.

Laura's Celtic Collection

Laura is Italian, and a  professional weaver living in Ireland. She had focused on Celtic sources: ancient crosses, calligraphy, the colours of the southern Ireland coastline. Her presentation was a model of conciseness, giving us a very revealing insight into the lengths she had gone in experimenting with weaves, designs and proportions. Her table mat collection was impressive in its coherent colouring (of subtle veridian and lemon greens) and intricacy in the play of inlay, warp and weft. She admitted having trouble with the market research presentation, probably because her own professional experience in this area had yet to be developed. 

Jane's Collection

Jane chose a sculpture by Henry Moore after a visit to Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Her visual research was bold and comprehensive: lots of different media explored and techniques used from 3-D paper maché, collage and rubbings from the sculpture itself. She really had deconstructed the sculpture! Her woven swatches included all the handcrafted techniques on our list, including soumak and Spanish Lace. Rya featured prominently. But, she revealed, she had not enjoyed the project, despite presenting a most effective and convincing display. I’ve been inspired by Yorkshire Sculpture Park too – but in music – particularly the sculpture of Barbara Hepworth,

Bridget's Collection

Bridget was the first of the knitters to present her work. She had focused on Malingware, and a pink vase from her own collection. I had never seen this pottery and was intrigued at her ‘knitted’ response. Although pink dominated her colour thoughts, her keen attention to exploring structures was evident through Photoshop manipulation, watercolour, edible lustre dust (?!), and wax and metallic crayon. Her knitted pieces were decorated with paper flowers and were thoroughly convincing as a collection.

Cheryl's Japanese hanging

Cheryl is another knitter. She had based her collection on her love of things Japanese. Her knitted pieces showed evidence of connections with martial arts, traditional dress, and calligraphy. There was an inscribed hanging scroll that made quite an impression. In discussing her work one of our tutors mentioned the unique local collection of Japanese fabrics at Redbrick Mill, Batley, which seems a great source of exotic fabric inspiration near at hand. Cheryl had sensibly chosen the etsy.com on-line craft site as her market research focus. 

Kate's Japanese Collection

Kate’s presentation had something delicately special about it. A Japanese theme, based on a lovely old jar, but a world away from Cheryl’s striking martial reds. Here we were in the world of the faded tints of the ukiyo-e (the floating world of images) and the pictures of Hiroshige. The lengths to which Kate had gone to replicate the subtle greens of her jar were fascinating to behold. She also produced a separate picture book of images upon which to base her visual research. Her knitted pieces were as delicate and restrained as the designs on her jar.  

Mark's Collection

Mark had chosen his 16C home in Devon as the basis for his woven work, what he described as a ‘near at hand’ project. It was a captivating presentation enhanced by his own mood board photos and anecdotes about restoring and living in such an extraordinary house. The woven swatches were based on colours from tiles in his home, and the leno work wonderfully and effectively echoed window tracery. His sketchbook was a rich collection of drawings and mixed media experiments, including rubbings of window frames, all in all showing a convincing progression towards eventual design.

Marina's Collection

Marina produced an Arabic wedding dress at the beginning of her presentation – its embroidery the starting point for an impressive collection of swatches in vivid reds. I was intrigued at some of the inlay effects she had managed to achieve. There was one swatch with a lightning-like arrow in three colour – I would love to know how it was done! The visual research was very comprehensive and ranged from references to Paul Klee to the use of hand-made paper. 

Gail's Collection

Gail’s ‘Inspired by Matisse’ woven collection I found quite captivating. The colours were definitely ‘right’ – that slightly bleached Mediterranean look. There was some impressive (and very loose) leno and in one piece she had used Theo Moorman’s technique of inlay and overlay to great effect. She’d used a range of yarns from dress-making threads to felting wool. Gali’s sketchbook showed an adventurous journey of visual research – lots of cutting and sticking of coloured paper just as Matisse did in his final years.

Jo's Collection

Finally, Jo had focused on architecture as her theme for woven work. In particular she had chosen that extraordinary hotel in Dubai, the Sail. She produced a large and rich collection of responses to this image, many of the pieces full of beautiful and intricate working. The colours she’d chosen were exactly those you see on those travel brochures for the Arab Emirates. Her sketchbook showed the use of photo and collage, and how to employ an empty white square frame to illustrate and highlight colours.

Well, what about me you may ask? My collection was the only one that was not well received critically. It was described as too minimal, the colours muted, the visual research not comprehensive enough (the subject not really considered quite appropriate), lack of evidence of experimentation with yarns and fabrics, and the presentation (which used some innovative digital media) difficult to assess. My first response was a) to defend myself (a mistake!), and b) to consider resubmitting it.

Nigel's presentation 'in preparation'

If you’ve followed this blog my rationale is all therein. I don’t regret doing the work the way I did, but I certainly recognize that it had serious shortcomings and the critique has given me much to think about. I continue to feel the minimal nature of the woven outcomes made it possible for my work to be aligned convincingly with my market research and this was, according to the project brief, not an ‘add on’ but a necessary part of the project thinking – which must include the subject chosen. At the moment the demands of another creative occupation make it necessary for me to interleave visual research with my weaving of swatches: this is not the expectation. When I can find a way to complete the research before weaving, then perhaps the presentation and outcomes of my work with be more effective.

If you want to see some of my colleagues impressive and varied work in more detail do go to my on-line gallery here. Remember you can enlarge any picture on this blog by clicking on it!

Block Threading and Dobby Pegging

The theme of the workshop sessions held during the HNC group’s February Weekend was Block Threading. I’ve already discussed this in some detail in an earlier blog. I now found myself in the workshop on a Thursday poised to come to grips with block threading on my own. During the workshop sessions most of the group attempted to weave three different swatches on five available dobby looms: it certainly wasn’t the atmosphere to slowly work out how the threading and the dobby pegging (read treadling on a floor loom, shaft-lifting on a table-loom) interacted. I could sense this was no problem at all for most of the class, but for me I found, even with the computer visualization on WeaveIt, not all my questions were answered.

A Louet Dobby Loom

 I devoted the whole of my weekly workshop session to painstakingly answering all my questions, and towards the end of the day weaving two swatches. I decided I would use the Louet Dobby loom. This is a small footprint 16-shaft loom with a dobby mechanism that has a revolving tray of fixed lags into which you place hard plastic pegs. None of this removing the lags and hammering in pegs on this dobby loom to set up your patterns. This Louet loom is similar in design to 24-shaft ‘magic’ Louet which interfaces with a computer, the dobby ‘pegging’ handled in the software. Both Louets can be stepped forward or backward and the lifting pattern engaged  by means of a pedal or on the non-computer loom a stout handle.

Straub's Example

I began my exploration of the Louet by focusing on the dobby lags already filled with a peg pattern. We had been supplied with the draft notation showing both a threading plan and the weave notation. First hurdle: remember to read the draft from top to bottom. Threading (first) is directly above the weave notation (second) – and none of this front to back American nonsense. In Marianne Straub’s wonderful book Handweaving and Cloth Design she shows exactly how a Dobby-loom lifting plan works. She even includes (for beginners) an additional notation for the position of the pegs on each lag. I only ‘wish’ I’d had the foresight to bring the book with me to the February weekend. I continue to find so much is assumed in the course notes provided and rarely any referencing to what these diagrams mean, and as there are many different approaches to draft notation it’s easy for people as stupid as me to get confused. 

Pegs and Lags

So I struggled for quite some time to understand the way the pegs in the lags lined up with the draft I’d been provided with. Eventually I got there! Next stage was to understand how the threading matched up with the lifting plan. It was at this point I reckoned a little bit of experimental weaving wouldn’t go amiss. So I chose a yarn that clashed purposely and horrendously with the soft green and lime and an undyed linen warp and started to see what happened when I wove according to the lifting plan. Hmm . . . lots more questions now, mainly to do with the selvedge sections of the warp.

On the workshop days I heard fellow students talk with authority about ‘catching the selvedge’ and ‘locked selvedges’. I did ask one or two people what this meant but found their explanations confused! So I cornered Graham the workshop technical expert in a spare moment, and he kindly and patiently explained all, including taking me through the threading of the selvedge portions of the warp I was working with. I now understood why I’d had such a hard time during my brief spell on one of the George Wood looms when I’d seemed to need to ‘catch’ the selvedge most of the time. I learned later that the warp I’d been weaving on hadn’t got a ‘locked’ selvedge to help me out. Essentially, this means that by sensible threading (which seemed to be in everybody’s warping vocabulary except mine) you can make sure you ‘catch’ the selvedge every time – depending on the complexity of your draft of course.

The warp before weaving

Let’s take a look at the warp I’m going to weave on, and attempt a description. The warp is made up of  three-colour blocks threaded across 12 shafts with a selvedge on 13-16: the first sequence is of undyed linen (10 + 12), a lime 4 8s cotton (12) and a green cotton/linen mix (12), the second (12 -12 -12 ), the third  (12 – 12 -12 ) with a final 10 of undyed linen. The e.p.i is 14, width 8″ with 128 ends.

First attempt

My first weave attempt using the horrendous clashing red / orange linen worked through the given lifting plan and then reversed it. It took me a while to realise why each block pattern was separated by an empty lag, but I can see the great sense in this if you want to play with the pattern sequence. Anyway, it all seemed pretty straightforward, but I did want to produced something which looked reasonable. Finding a colour to match the greens that also made the most of the changes of pattern across the blocks wasn’t easy until I stumbled upon a lively multi-coloured yarn, something I would normally steer away from. But I think the results speak for themselves. I wove a whole pattern twice and then doubled the weft throw giving me a thicker quality to the effect and requiring just one pass through the lifting sequence. It was getting pretty late when I finished this, and that’s my excuse for some rather compressed selvedges on the double pass weft section of my woven piece. Say twenty times: ‘I must remember that  making a double shoot requires a lighter touch laying the weft on the warp and beating it too’.

Detail from my 2nd swatch

Last week I didn’t make it into college, the first Thursday I’ve missed since I started. I was due to work on the George Wood dobby-looms and my tutor felt that as the technician was away that day I perhaps couldn’t handle it. Probably wise, and, as ever seemingly, I have been struggling to finish the editing of a new score (a wind octet for a Canadian summer festival) so I was quite glad of an unexpected day at my studio. But this week I’ll be back, hopefully with some ideas about the next project, that is if it is unnecessary for me to resubmit the last project, which is still to be assessed. My eldest daughter (a geographer) gave me a great starting point which I’m playing with – the aerial photographs of Yann Arthus-Bertrand, images that both conceal and reveal (one of the titles of Project 3).

Aerial photo by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

So much to learn

I was going to call this blog ‘disasters I have known’, but I thought that a little negative. Come on, we in the blogging community of weavers all make mistakes, only we don’t use them that often as material for our reports. I thought I might do just that this week because I realised, after getting over the disappointment of a session that went wrong at home this weekend, I had learnt such a lot and been reminded about so many aspects of good practice. Writing about such a session seems a good way to lay it to rest.

Blocks are the current subject on the HNC technical curriculum for the 3rd project of Year 1. Last week I duly spent quite a useful day at the College workshop making some progress, weaving for the first time since the February weekend on a George Wood dobby loom. More on that later. Let’s start with my weekend disasters, and my attempt to start a ‘blocks project’ at home. My home, when it comes to weaving, is actually my office (my wife would say it is my home because I spend so much time here!). I call it a studio because it is in a building of artists’ studios, and as I’m a musician the two rooms I have are  full of studio equipment – computers, recording gear and  . . . my loom. In some ways this is not a good thing, but I live in a small house with a large family and unless I had a folding table loom I don’t know where I’d weave (even that would be difficult). Anyway, I’ve had a studio / office all my professional life except for 5 years when I stayed at home to look after my (then) infant children. 

My loom is a Finnish Toika, a 4-shaft 6 treadle floor loom acquired from a lawyer (a rare-breed sheep enthusiast) who planned to weave rugs in her retirement. That didn’t work out so I was in the right place at the right time to acquire what is a beautiful loom with all the bits – and, generously, some beautiful wool from her sheep. The loom can be expanded to 8 shaft, but I haven’t got around to that yet. It came with 6 and 8 dent reeds, because the original owner only wanted to weave rugs. I’ve ordered a 10 and a 12, but they are still in Finland I think. 

A 2 Block 4-Shaft Weave

For this blocks project I did want to weave some of my swatches on the Toika, and a little research (I’ve already mentioned on these pages) showed that there were many ways I could do this using just 4 shafts. One of the most interesting approaches I found in a chapter of Debbie Chandler’s book Learning to Weave. This chapter discussed and demonstrated the Atwater-Bronson lace weave  ’ structured so that some threads group together, leaving spaces or windows in the fabric’. I spent half an hour one evening last week puzzling over the drafts and then writing them out to explain the detail to myself. It’s an intriguing way of doing things, even though without actually doing it myself, I couldn’t quite visualize why the threading left spaces or windows in the fabric’. I knew if I did it, all would be revealed. Step one, as you can see from the weave diagram above was to change the tie up on my floor loom, something I hadn’t done before. This little exercise, which proved very easy in the end, really made me examine how the countermarche loom works. Until this point (I’d just used the standard tie up) I’d not properly understood the clever mechanism of lams. To get the tie up  shown above I just had to change pedal 2 (LH) set up as 2 &3  to 2,3,4, and pedal 3 (LH) set up as 1 & 2 to just 1. That was all.

The Culprits

Sometime ago my wife found some cheap craft yarn in a charity shop. It was thick, chunky, polyester and about 5-6 epi. There were three colours, just what was required for this exercise, together with the 6 dent reed I had. At this point I should have recalled a disaster from the past – the first time I tried to use chenille. I keep a bit of this yarn on my desk just to remind me of that terrible Sunday when, try as I might, I could not get this lovely material on the loom (then a folding Ashford 4 shaft I was lent by my first teacher). When I came to pick the threads off the cross in my hand (remember I learnt the front-to-back method of raddling with the reed), I couldn’t even see the separate threads! Everything merged into a blur of red.

Past Evidence

A second disaster was making the warp length too long . . . and this is really stupid . . . I measured for 5 metres . . . and forgot (can you believe) that I needed to measure  the whole journey around the warping board, not just to the end peg! Such thick yarn also needed really careful handling and lots of choke ties to keep things in place. Two of the five warp lengths just became confused and unusable as I tried to prepare to sley them on the loom. I managed 3 out of 5 – but I had far too much length. I realised, and not for the first time, that for me the practice of warping just has to be done regularly, and very very thoughtfully and carefully. I found, to my shame, I’d forgotten so much. For example, when I came to do a slip knot, to temporarily  tie together  the groups of ends sleyed through the reed, I’d forgotten how to do it. There’s quite a long list of such things to remember anew I have now pinned to my notice board.

Three out of Five

After all that humiliation my day at college last week sounds rather good. I received my assessment for my second project, and despite the doom and gloom of the group critique when it looked for a while that I might have to resubmit, that has been avoided. Along the way I’ve had some very generous and helpful comments from present and past students, as well as some of the on-line community. Thank you all. I haven’t replied to all your comments, but I’m grateful for what you’ve suggested I think about . . . and I will consider all you have said.

Sateen and Satin Blocks

After my assessment tutorial I spent the day working on a George Wood dobby set up with a Sateen (weft) / Satin  (warp) dobby pegging. I’ve woven with these patterns in my first project and in my first experiments under the wise tutorship of Laura Rosenzweig, a professional weaver from Cumbria who gave me my first lessons in weaving. It was reflecting on my success with these patterns in neutral colours that shaped my first ideas and experiments for this blocks project – with an 8″ 14 epi cotton ecru warp on one of the George Wood dobbys. I gathered two collections of yarns: a synthetic group and a mohair group. Black, grey, black with gold, lighter grey, grey with brown flecks covered most of my colour palette. Weave on this dobby was hard work after the ease of the Louet dobby the previous week, and the pattern itself didn’t help because I invariably had to ‘catch the selvedge’. With some of the yarns I had to beat very gentle to make the Satin pattern clear at all. I started to get into the idea of playing with the sequence of pegging, using the reverse lever position and skipping sections. But it was hard work in comparison to the Louet – you can’t really sit down at this loom – I was so tired by the end of the day I managed to leave my portfolio (presentation board of swatches, sketchbook and file of loom tickets) on Bradford station and had to drive back to Bradford later in the evening to collect them. Thanks to Harry for handing them in to the station staff.

My first scarf - with Sateen / Satin Patterns

What you see on the photo above of my day’s work doesn’t appear to amount to very much, but it has given me plenty of ideas for working on something with neutral colours – something I so enjoyed doing when I first started weaving.  Sometimes, for me, colour seems intimidating and a blight on the imagination! Next week I plan to make my own dobby pattern, pegging a few lags and fitting them in place myself. Before I do so I might just put a different warp on the dobby that’s available, just to remind myself I can do it really, and the back to front method, raddle and all. I’ll have to make sure I’m in the workshop ‘very’ early to fit all this in.

Better Blocks

The front garden camellia

I’m pleased to say this week has been a whole lot better than last. Perhaps it’s the change in the weather. Spring has arrived and our beautiful  front garden camellia is so full of flowers there’s very little green leaf in counterpoint to the pink. In the park across the road the forsythia is casting its bright yellow in swathes, leaves are really budding on the trees. Nature aside, the warp on my studio loom is nearly in place, and despite a few hiccups (like ‘dropping one of the shafts last night as I tried to access a few more heddles from behind the shaft pulley tie), I’m pleased with the possibility this warp now affords. The addition of the blue, a very soft synthetic bouclé, is a definite improvement. I saw some really imaginative warps using bouclé yarns currently in progress by year 1 degree students. For (mostly) first time weavers these students are producing some impressive work – every loom in the workshop is currently in use. So it’s like Spring in the workshop – a riot of colour.

Almost ready to go

I suddenly looked at my loom one very early morning this week and thought, no I won’t look at ‘the book’ (Debbie Chandler’s Learning to Weave), I ‘know’ how to do this, and if it goes wrong then I reckon I can fix it. Two of my favourite on-liners this week kindly identified Peggy Osterkamp’s three volume reference guide as being the ‘by the loom’ reference. When the next commission comes along I might treat myself. Until then it will have to be Debby Chandler and Marianne Straub (not forgetting Laura Rosenzweig’s invaluable teaching notes) as my loomside helpmates. Last week’s blip really toughened my resolve, and I noticed last night there was a more measured quality present in all I was doing to thread my warp.

In the workshop last week I had two quite successful sessions. In the first I replaced the Satin/Sateen peg plan with a more straightforward lifting pattern. This is pretty much a plain weave with one of the two block patterns carrying alternate blank spaces to enable a single float to lie across the tabby pattern. With the neutral yarns I’d chosen this worked very well, and I was inspired by the effects I could get. I’ve now learnt to change sets of lags and I find myself really playing with the possibilities that the forward / neutral / reverse lever on the dobby looms provides, that and skipping parts of the pattern. 

First session block weave

The second session began quite late in the day, but had a happy outcome. I wanted to design and weave from my own peg plan. I decided on a variant of that hopsack I’d used in my last project, the one that creates an arrow-like pattern with the arrow  able to point to the left or right, individually or back to back. I planned it out on squared paper then, with a short tutorial from a friendly part-time degree student, prepared the lags myself. First you have to find a chained length of lags that’s served its purpose. Next you have to knock out the existing pegs with a neat little tool that I’m sure has a name, but I don’t know it yet. With a hammer and this tool inserted into each hole of the lag (turned upside down) you knock the pegs out with the lag placed into the top of a box with no top or bottom (name someone please) .Then with an empty collection of lags you insert your own pegs, knocking them gently in with a hammer. The final part is to turn your lags upside down so the pegs are facing down onto a hard surface. Now you take the bottomless/ topless box and place it over the collection of lags and tap gently to make sure that pegs are pegged at an even height. If not, it’s possible some pegs might not engage with the dobby mechanism.

Still Life with Pegging Tools

My own peg plan

With all this done the lags are placed on the revolving cylinder on the dobby  (you have to use a step ladder to reach this comfortably). My pegs dutifully engaged, I had about an hour to start to experiment with patterns I could make. The result is not brilliant, but was enough for me to recognize what I have to do next week to improve the weave. I was not exhausted as I had been last week by weaving on the dobby, which is probably the result of watching how gracefully a year 3 student was weaving on a similar loom next to me. I’m always a little reticent watching nearby weavers so acutely – for all the reasons I’m sure you can imagine – so I make a point of introducing myself and asking if they mind their work being scrutinized, if only from a distance. As a coda to my workshop session I must acknowledge the time Graham, the workshop technician, so kindly spent explaining to me how 8-shaft patterns can be achieved on a 4-shaft loom. This was fascinating and as I want to do his explanation justice, I’m going to save it up for the future when I’ve tried some of his suggestions myself.

Second Session Pattern

One of the features of the Yorkshire Craft Centre where I weave every Thursday is its regular exhibition programme at a most generously-sized gallery. At the moment there’s a show by  Group-Seven, seven artists, some with connections to Bradford College. It’s a real mixture including painting, photographic collage, and print. The latter is represented by Amrik Varkalis whose work I loved the moment I saw it. There’s a set of  engaging mono prints of a family, almost cartoon-like figures like a child might drawn, set against a caricature of a northern urban townscape. But what really caught my eye was a series of large, unframed  and adventurously colourful still-lifes that I just wanted to take home and put on the one empty wall in my studio, the wall against my composing desk. If anything was to convert me to print it is this sort of work that carries in the simplicity of its mainly primary colours such life and energy. It’s a ‘must see’ if you are near Bradford. You can see more of Amrik’s work here.

Print by Amrik Varkalis

And to continue this theme – on Saturday afternoon I spent a rare half an hour in Leeds City Art Gallery where the whole of a long gallery wall has been put aside to show the gallery’s permanent collection of still-life paintings. I still can’t cut loose from my fascination with Winifred Nicholson, and there she was represented by Renee’s Room, a classic from the 1930s, though subdued, a still life of a plant beside a window with a sliver of a land and seascape present. I made an annotated drawing, again fascinated by her restrained use of colour. There was also a lovely ‘Flowers on a pink ground’ by a contemporary Ivon Hitchings, a painter who is often aligned with Nicholson. Studying woven textile design has so made me aware of the magic of colour organisation, play and structure, and in paintings I’ve looked at for years. It’s been worth all the hardwork and worry at the loom to have had such technique and mystery revealed. As Anni Albers said in her book On Design, you can only understand such things by working the material in your hands. So true.

Renee's Room - from a sketch of the painting at Leeds City Art Gallery

Interesting Interruptions

I’m writing this blog on the train to London to see my daughter Frances and attend the first rehearsal / workshop of my latest orchestral adventure, Utopias. The blog is a little earlier than usual because this weekend I’m spending two days on a course at Bankfield Museum, Halifax with weaver Sue Lawty. Train journeys are good spaces for blog writing and I usually write up my workshop  sessions at Bradford on the way the home. But not yesterday, because I had a trip by car to make in the middle of the day to visit Don Porritt.  

Don Porritt and his prototype tapestry loom

Don has become a bit of legend in hand-weaving circles as a specialist in loom construction, repair and maintenance. I first met him when he visited my studio to assemble my Toika loom. I had dismantled it (to his instructions) at its previous owner’s and had carefully labelled every part. During the hour or so it took to reassemble it he gave an engaging summary of his fascinating career: mechanical engineer and gold and silversmith, renown teacher at  Leeds College of Art, to loom designer and specialist.  His interest in the loom came about when his wife announced she intend to learn to weave. So like the resourceful person he is, he built her one, and to his own design. He quickly realised that there was market for his expertise: as an engineer who could repair and balance looms, often building replacements for worn out or damaged parts; as a agent for selling looms and accessories, particularly for the Finnish company Toika. A travelling scholarship had already taken him to Finland in the 1960s, and with a little knowledge of the language, he was able to make a technical contribution to Toika looms, which he maintains today.

I went to visit his workshop in Menstone, about 12 miles from Bradford, to pick up a 10 and 12 dent size reed I had ordered. My loom had originally arrived with a 6 and an 8 dent reed as its former owner had only intended to weave rugs. Arriving at his wonderfully organised two-floor studio I spotted the prototype of his latest design project – a portable tapestry loom. What you can see in the photograph is the loom without its neat folding legs – these collapse when not in use and cleverly attach to the frame. He’s currently making three of these looms and hopes to have at least one ready to show at Woolfest in the summer.

The next stage of my block pattern

Back at college, after seeing more of the West Yorkshire countryside than I had anticipated, I concentrated on developing the block threading lifting plan for the dobby peg system I have been using for the past fortnight. Last week I did my first dobby peg plan, just an eight lag 16-shaft pattern. This week I reflected on this first pattern and made further changes to it, weaving a new sample section. As a response to the traditional lifting plans for block threadings I’d studied on the dobby loom, this one was possibly too subtle (and too limited), but it did demonstrate a different approach. I decided that what I needed to do next was to enlarge to scope of the lifting plan to two sets of 8 lags, the second having a marked contrast to the first and making much more play with longer floats than the previous one used. This took much thinking about at the ‘design on squared paper’ stage. Eventually I put something together that plays on the plain-weave ‘miss a lag’ pattern I had used previously. This is a great conceal and reveal pattern, and Graham (the workshop technican), was enthusiastic about some of the effects I was beginning to achieve, albeit that it had not been my intention to consider the project brief at this point. I simply wanted a) to get to grips with block thinking, and b) work with neutral colours on a ecru cotton warp. Regrettably, I had a number of false starts to getting this new longer pattern on the loom. First time around I managed to drop the lags when fitting them on the loom . . . and, of course,  some of the pegs fell out. I then realised I’d put the pegs into the wrong side of the lags! This means that on the photo there’s only a few picks of the new pattern completed – to test the pegs were properly engaging the shaft springed pulleys on the dobby. I just ran out of time to do more.

Detail of this enhanced weave pattern

In counterpoint to this activity I got to see some valuable examples of degree student work, as a result of last minute preparations many students were making to take part in a local competition, closing date today. Graham was holding a kind of clinic to help these students produce an extra level of information on the loom tickets than that normally required by the college. This included such necessities as registering the weight of a square centremetre of woven fabric. Because of this I got to see a really intricate Jacquard woven hanging in Chenille and a series of samples boards produced as a result of a student’s African adventures last summer. Her delightful sketchbook I featured in this blog back in February. I came away from viewing these knowing that what I can possibly do in two years on the HNC course is unlikely to get anywhere near such invention and technical confidence. A salutary reminder that I have so much to learn, and so much ground to cover.

My Current Studio Project

Back at my office / studio, during the evening before my workshop session, I had the pleasure, and it was a pleasure, to complete putting a new warp on my loom. Suddenly every thing worked as it should: tying up to the back beam, raddling through the reed, beaming on to the back beam (using sticks rather than paper as a separator for the first time), tying on to the front beam and getting  that all important even tension across the warp. I was so pleased with myself that I phoned my wife to come up to my office and see (judge) the result. It was a lovely moment to be able to say I did ALL this myself, and to weave a few picks too!

Finally, I received an e-mail this week from the Craft Study Centre at the University of the Creative Arts in Farnham to remind me of their Visual Arts Data Service. (VADS) provides a central resource of over 100,000 high quality digital images, which are copyright cleared and completely FREE for use in UK education and personal research. The images cover a broad range of visual arts subjects including: ceramics, furniture, glass, jewellery, textiles, architectural drawings, public monuments, religious buildings, urban design, product & packaging design, drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture and photography.

Structure: Intuition and Invention

Last weekend I spent two days at Bankfield Museum, a former 19C millowner’s mansion overlooking the famous Dean Clough Mill in the  town of Halifax in West Yorkshire. I was there to take part in a workshop given by textile artist Sue Lawty. I’ve already written about Sue on these pages back in November. If you haven’t read my blog on her York lecture then I do recommend you do so before embarking on this report. It will all make much more sense!

Dean Clough Mills @ Halifax, West Yorkshire

Although I have heard Sue speak about her work, this was my first opportunity to meet her. She is a bright-eyed, very energetic fifty-something whose regime of running and leading the occasional trek in Nepal seems a necessary part of being a very creative and inspirational artist . . . and teacher. Her workshop technique is impeccable: she is an accomplished facilitator. She talks as little as possible and what she says is a mix of hard factual information with observation, and a personal sharing of what her creative world is about and what it means to her. She is a wonderful listener, having first asked searching questions, but then it’s very much hands-off. She doesn’t pander to her students either. If it isn’t good, effective or just doesn’t work she’ll tell you in such a way that you’ll either realise what you are doing has to go in the bin, or (as in my case) spur me on to make an idea work.

Sue Lawty (with camera) and student

So let’s set the scene: there are 12 of us, all very experienced needlewomen, weavers. rug makers, knitters, spinners (and many all of these), and me – the only male (again), and the least experienced of course. Quite a number of the group are full or part-time students, others include a designer and several ‘totally passionate about textiles’ people. We start with a short introduction by Sue given in front of  ’Intersect’ a tapestry (not as you’d know it) commissioned by Bankfield for their permanent collection. The piece is shown beside two woven fragments, of Peruvian and Coptic origin, which have so influenced Sue Lawty’s work. I’d seen Intersect on a photograph and was quite unprepared for the mass of detail and subtle colouring which she had woven into this predominantly hemp-made tapestry. I make no apologies for showing my sketchbook entry for this short introduction (DO enlarge the image by clicking on it) because I’ve tried to precis some of the main points in her talk and include a favourite quotation she presented at the York lecture (which I couldn’t write down quick enough when she originally showed it). This text by a potter Claudi Casanovas is now on her blog (along with images of this Spanish potter’s work).

My sketchbook with 'Intersect'

 

Intersect with Peruvian and Coptic weaves

Upstairs in the Education Room we began our individual work with a piece of aluminum  foil. The task: to create small units of images in 2 or 3 D that would allow us to investigate ‘questions of rhythmic pattern, texture, repetition and interval’. I eventually produced a collection of gull-like shapes which I then ‘flocked’ by assembling them with a random throw. Sue had placed a long roll of black paper down the length of the room. This provided an ideal surface upon which to lay out our work for all to see. Now for the difficult bit – my attempt at explaining my rationale to Sue for the way I knew I wanted to work. This is the first time I’ve ventured to explain an abiding preoccupation: I want to bring together the tactile and analogue nature of a (woven) textile surface with digitally recorded and processed images, static and moving. In this workshop I intended to use digital photography and camera-based slideshows to provoke continuation towards an end result. The result being a material piece AND a digital piece, the latter  possibly incorporating stages of the creative journey, what the Greek philosophers called the poiesis. I got the feeling Sue was very dubious about all this, and, looking at my meagre work in situ, rightly so. It was the kindest of warnings, but a later exercise confirmed for me (by complete chance) that I couldn’t / shouldn’t abandon my intentions. But back to my gulls . . .

A flock of 'gulls'

My flocked gulls were thrown and then manipulated by repositioning the individual gulls sequentially, photographing each move, then assembling the photos on the slideshow feature on my camera. In this way I answered all the ‘questions’ we had been set to explore – rhythm, texture, repetition and interval. Only I’d done this with one set of units rather than the thirty or so I would have needed to achieve the same result in a physical, rather than virtual, space.

Straws in a Lindenmayer Sequence

For Exercise 2 we picked a piece of paper off the black paper sheet with a number written on it. This directed us to a table with 12 sets of material: willow canes, a pile of unusual yarns, leaves, a brush head, . . .  and for me – a box of neon-coloured drinking straws. Beside these materials we found every conceivable type of device for assembling our materials – except glue. This was banned. Although, as I found a roll of masking tape in this collection, I appropriated it later, much to Sue’s disappointment.

Neon 'Spin'

The extraordinary thing about my chance-selected material was that for some time now I’ve been considering working with neon colours on my loom. In fact I tracked down a supplier of neon yarns. The reason for this is because of my desire to signal the urban context of my weaving. My studio window looks out onto the central thoroughfare of Wakefield, clubs, pubs, banks, shops, bus stops and all. No green anywhere, just the ever-changing skies above the rooftops. So, in some ways, I was already prepared to work with straws of four neon colours: green, yellow, purple and orange.

Both the pieces I created used a natural language algorithm called the Lindenmayer System or L-system, an algorithm I regularly use in my musical work. I wrote a brief axiom that generated a sequence made of four colours and with that I could start assembling and inventing a surface of straws. Every stage of the process of making I photographed, significantly taking photos occasionally with a negative filter. This revealed a completely different set of neon colours: wonderful blues and violets. As my piece took shape I realised it could have the qualities of a mobile, a 3D piece I could ’spin’, and this became its title. Back home after the first day I put together a sequence of digital images and applied a music track of about 2 minutes in duration. Play this by clicking here.

'Spin'

TRIO - the materials

The second day of the workshop enabled me to do something completely different with my neon straws. First, I put together exactly the same number and colours of straws I had used previously. This time, instead of using the whole straw, I deconstructed it into its three separate parts: a long length, the concertina section, the drinking portion. I made a number of different assemblages. I did compass images of these collections (NESW), then I threaded over a thin piece of dowling a sequence of short straws lengths fastening each end of the dowling with a plug. This column of neon lengths I then suspended against a notice board and ’swung’ it – the title of the piece became ’swing’. I photographed each section of the column (about a metre in total length) and then swung the cane photographing many different angles of swing.

Cane shapes

Where these experiments all came together was in finding some really bendy willow cane. This I could fashion with discrete pressure to produce curly shapes. I then assembled three such shapes, photographed the result, then proceeded to thread my 3 collections of length-sized straw parts in Lindenmayer sequences onto the three canes. The result was intriguing if delicate and next time I do such a thing I must remember the ‘taking it home’ bit. I did get it home, but I had to reassemble some of the straw pieces that came away when I put it in my car. Hanging from a notice board in my studio it takes on a quite different aspect from being on the floor where it was constructed.

TRIO complete

Sue didn’t say very much about my labour of a whole day. But I knew it didn’t really observe (for her) many of those questions she hoped we’d explore and find answers for. For me, I felt I did tick those boxes, but it was difficult to demonstrate the digital outcomes there and then. Each piece I made has alongside it a digital partner which answers the questions and displays them in the context of the making process. I may have done myself a disservice by following my own inclinations, but I came away feeling I had taken an important step, and done so in the presence at least of an artist I so admire.

Further inspirations

Since the Sue Lawty workshop I wrote about at the beginning of the month, I’ve been very preoccupied with family and musical business. Although I did manage a workshop day at Bradford in the week prior to Easter, College was closed (for me anyway) from 2 April until the end of this week.

My Dobby Adventure Part 3

I’m about to put a full-stop on my adventures with the dobby loom. On my last workshop day I spent most of my available time improving this bespoke dobby pattern to get more variety and definition. I’ve ended up with a pair of 8 16-peg lags (X Y) serving 2 blocks of 8 threads (A B). For X I’ve retained my original design with the ‘arrow’ in A and a hopsack variant on the B portion. I’ve then inverted A (a kind of mirror image) with the remaining section (B) a variant on the plain weave ’skip a lag’ pattern, which produces these block-width floats with spaces between them.

My Chinese Characters

The blocks are more distinct now and I’ve also prepared the way for placing a pattern on the warp itself, which will be partially (and playfully) concealed by the weft. This is something the workshop technician has often mentioned as an extended technique, and now is definitely the time to try it. I’ve chosen a series of Chinese characters and painted these on the warp with a procain orange dye ‘fixed’ with Manutex, a cotton binder. Before painting, a specially sized wooden board is placed under the selected piece of warp  between the front beam and the reed.  As it takes about 2 hours to dry I left painting the warp until just before the workshop closed – so it’s ready to weave over next time I come in.

The Dobby Adventure Part 4

I now feel comfortable with the physical operation of the dobby loom and don’t get completely exhausted after a few hours weaving! To summarize: I’ve explored four different ‘conventional’ peg plans and three of my own. I’ve used two different dobby looms, the Louet and the George Wood. At home, I’ve worked with an Atwater Bronson lace 4-shaft block threading, a 4-colour warp of imitation chenille (polyester) and a wool/ cotton boucle yarn. I have to admit that I still find myself working out in my head why a particular lifting plan with this block threading produces the effect it does! But then I’ve reached the stage of going beyond the standard lifts. There’s more on this adventure later in the blog.

My Atwater-Bronson Project

School holidays mean residential music courses for my children. My 18 year old is having his first taste of the National Youth Choir (making a CD with Eric Whiteacre); the 15 year old is playing viola and percussion with the Cumbria Youth Orchestra. Delivering the latter was a great excuse for a day out in a part of the world I have recently come to love, and where I began my textile saga just a year ago. Although my son and I had to leave really early to make the 9.30am rehearsal in Cumbria (about 80 miles from home) it meant that I then had the whole day to myself.

Sketch of the Topiary at Levens Hall

First stop was Levens Hall. This largely 16C house is renown for its garden with a splendid topiary. I’ve known about this place for years as I’d seen it so often in the paintings of a former studio colleague David Wright, whose large canvases often featured Levens as a kind of dreamscape. I have to admit to finding the topiary claustrophobic, so spent several hours at the far end of garden sketching and painting against the boundary wall. Getting very cold finally made me explore the gardens – with a camera this time. I loved the strange corners and unexpected vistas. The topiary only made sense in counterpoint with views of the house. When I got home I made several charcoal and pastel drawings based on my photographs of this juxtaposition. You can explore my gallery of Levens Hall images here.

David Wright and 2 Garden Pictures

From Levens, next stop was the beautiful Quaker meetinghouse of Brigflatts, the subject of my rather ambitious music and weave project begun last August and now well on its way – completion later this year I hope. Well, part of the musical work is already complete, the piano ‘images’ receiving its premiere last month, and the wind octet has been sent off to the Festival Winds in Canada. The garden, the real focus of my visual interest, was, as ever, captivating yet such an understatement in design and colour.

Woven work by Laura Rosenzweig

From Brigflatts to Farfield Mill, where I first learnt to weave, and the subject of a blog last November when I spent an afternoon with Farfield’s weaving group. It is my first visit since that day, and there’s a lot of new work to view in the galleries. The woven work is dominated by Laura Rosenzweig’s Howgill Collection. This features predominantly Black-faced Leicester woollen throws woven on Farfield’s own Dobcross looms, beautifully dyed and finished in Galashiels. Alongside this collection there was a chance to see quite a retrospective of Laura’s work, and, for me, the first opportunity to look through her photographic record of 12 years past work, fascinating and inspiring by turn. New names also on show included a Cockermouth dobby-loom weaver Rachel Dutton – some fine silk scarves from her, and knitted work by Farfield artist Angela Bradley. There was a lively collection of small woven rugs and hangings made in Harris Tweed by Jane Jackson.

Sketchbooks by Anne Marie Foster

Later in the week my wife, youngest daughter and I returned to Cumbria, this time to Kendal to be proud parents at the youth orchestra concert. We meant to do all sorts of things during the day, but a late start and a long meal out meant only a little time in Kendal before the concert. While the girls did the shops, I went to the Brewery Arts Centre to see an exhibition by 7 women artists, (aka. The Sketchbook Group),  called Lines of Thought. Two artists particularly caught my attention: Anne Marie Foster and Shelley Rhodes. Anne’s work is mainly in watercolours and with monoprints in oil-based inks and chine colle. Predominantly abstract work, she also showed a collection of her sketchbooks. Shelley’s work is mixed media bringing together fabric, collage and embroidery. Her colours are muted, her designs quietly compelling and slightly temporary. You feel she might just appear and make radical changes to some of her work. She is leading a day on Mixed Media Sketchbook Techniques at the Brewery Arts Centre on 20 June. Shelley has exhibited with Farfield artist Jan Hicks, whose beautiful dyed yarns I have a small collection of, and who I should love to have the opportunity to study dyeing with one day.

New colours from a negative image

Back at my studio I’ve had two Saturday afternoons devoted to my Atwater Bronson project. Following my discovery at Sue Lawty’s workshop of the potential of my camera’s negative filter to show me concealed colours, I have completed a second swatch adding these extra ‘negative’  colours. I’ve also explored how many different patterns I can bring together with just a 4-shaft threading and lift plan. I’m quietly pleased with this, and plan to do just two more experimental pieces. No broken warp ends this time – my warp has stayed beautifully even in tension (quietly proud weaver here for once).

Now it is time to get seriously back to the demands of the College course. I have to spend some time studying finishing and dyeing – to make up for