Bloom 2013

In this age of high speed and convenience, the rhythmic act of weaving speaks to my soul.  When I sit before the loom I choose to surrender to process, relishing textures of coarse wool, smooth cotton and glossy silk as inch by inch they pass through my fingertips into the warp. Emotions and concepts begin to surface and collide, connect or slip past each other in my mind.  I imagine these strands of subconscious are travelling alongside the threads as I twine, coax and beat them into place.  Tapestry commands discipline and constant deliberation; It challenges me to have faith in my instincts and give it Time.

Bloom is my celebration of the Time it took.

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I am overjoyed to announce that "Bloom" was one of 35 entries selected by the jury to travel with Dimensions 2013.  What an intensive learning experience!  I have my next warp ready to string onto the loom, and the new cartoon is already blown up to scale.  

Thank you to everyone who shared in this adventure with me especially my loving husband and family, my ever optimistic friends and the awesome ladies of the Saskatchewan Spinners and Weavers Guild. 

Happy creating everyone!

Sincerely,

♥

JQ

Tapestry Update!

Hello Hello!

Here is a shot of the rose tapestry at 138 Hours! You can click on the photos to get a larger view!


I got to wind the warp down a teensy bit further. That's always exciting! But my hips sure are bothering me. I am feeling a little deflated. I just hope I manage to get this one finished before I need to take a few months off and heal. But! Do you see the white area on the upper right hand side of the cartoon? That's totally the background! Eeee!


At this point I have so SO SO many butterflies and bobbins attached to the tapestry I can barely think straight and don't get me started on keeping things untangled. But until I start to close up the top of the rose I will have to keep moving across the entire piece, working up an inch at a time or so of each section. C'est la vie. Pun absolutely intended. :P


I can't wait to start in the center of the rose. The colours will be deeper and there will be some rich burgundy in with all that purple.

"Rest not. Life is sweeping by; go and dare before you die. Something mighty and sublime, leave behind to conquer time."

---Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I finished weaving the first Celtic knot guitar strap. This one has a home already plus I have 2 more requests!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ PINK! ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

I just threaded this bad girl up this morning. Looking sharp! This one is destined to pair up with a pretty wicked bubblegum pink electric guitar. HOT.

Thanks for popping in! Hope everyone had a nice weekend!
♥
JQ

The Wheel Deal

Yesterday my husband found a listing for this Louet S10 spinning wheel on Kijiji and it was such a fabulous deal we couldn't say no! It's in really great condition and has seven spools and a rack that attaches to the bottom of the wheel so I can easily ply as many as four singles. :)



I just found out from my mother in law that there will be some wool fleece coming my way which is SO AWESOME! I will have to decided if it will be good for wet felting, because otherwise it will get spun on this bad boy!

A lovely friend gave me this amazing handwoven rug with an Asian dragon silhouette. Also it is TOTALLY in my wedding colours and thus matches a handwoven hand dyed/screened blanket that two of my college girlfriends made for me. I plan to hand stitch a little sleeve at the top so I can hang it on my wall instead of putting it on the floor. I just don't know if I can walk on it. :P


The coolest thing about the rug is that is is reversible! I adore it!


I have been busy weaving up scarves on my four harness jack loom in the basement. A-It is so much cooler down there and B-I need to start building up some stock for the Annual Sale in November.

This scarf in 100% wool, made with a peach and sage green space dyed wool, and a few stripes of peach and rust stuff I have on cones.


This scarf was a real learning experience for me. It is difficult to see but I wove a stripe of darker green above and below the horizontal orange stripes and that yarn didn't shrink at all when I wet the scarf out to finish it. So I had to cut it out and replace that with the paler green weft and re-wet it and hope for the best. Shown below is the scarf where the yarn has been replaced in the left side but not yet on the right. It looked a lot worse in reality, but if you click on it you can see the puckering that occurred when that section of weft did not shrink with the rest.


Below are close ups of the two sides. Now I got a much better result once the weft was replaced, but because I was sewing it in by hand the tension was different and so I did experience a bit of a pucker at the outside edge when the yarn I replaced shrunk, but over all it's much better than what I had before.


The other thing that happened was kind of a happy accident. The stripes of rust and peach were of a different wool than the rest of the warp, and it shrunk more. So it pulled up the ends of the scarf into a scallop. NEAT. I left a very long fringe, plying two warp threads together all the way across. (Sarah, I absolutely used that little doohickey you gave me. It worked like a charm and my fingers thank you). Below is the puckered scarf before I wove in the new weft.


And this scarf was a real quickie using some dishcloth cotton I had dyed. One side was pale brown, space dyed with navy, and the other side is peach. I used a peach acrylic faux-hair for weft. Not only is the scarf soft and fuzzy, but since it doesn't have any animal fiber in it it might appeal to a vegan, unless they are concerned about the dyes.


The peach faux-hair crosses the areas of pale brown in the navy warp and gives the scarf a mottled look.


And this is the Rose Tapestry at 114 hours:


I had warp threads break on me! So where you see the white cord wrapped in figure eights around t-pins that is a busted warp thread than I had to replace. I seriously have nightmares about this kind of thing and it was a bit trying when they started to fray, especially because it is supposed to be a high quality rug warp and I paid a hefty sum for it. GAR.


Anyways in the long run it should be no big deal. I think it was just the idea that freaked me out (angst to the max) in the beginning. It's a pain in the bottom but not The End of Days. :P

And hey, speaking of pains in the bottom I have learned something new. The lady who gave me the rug told me that the pain I have been experiencing deep in my hips is likely Weaver's Bottom. I laughed but she was dead serious, so I looked it up:

Weaver's bottom: Inflammation of the bursa that separates the gluteus maximus muscle of the buttocks from the underlying bony prominence of the bone that we sit on, the ischial tuberosity. Weaver's bottom is a form of bursitis that is usually caused by prolonged sitting on hard surfaces that press against the bones of the bottom or mid-buttocks. In proper medical parlance, Weaver's bottom is called ischial bursitis.

Thanks MedicineNet. com!

Thanks for popping by!

♥
JQ

The Rose Tapestry at 64 Hours

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.
--Georgia O'Keeffe


This is 64 hours. Total weave time includes everything I do for the tapestry once the warp is strung, tensioned and twined. That took me about a week of evenings.


It's probably about 60% weaving, 20% yarn prep (dying, skeining and winding butterflies/bobbins), and 20% visualizing. That last one actually happens the whole time I am weaving and prepping yarn as well. I do pause for contemplation. I sit with my work and survey it; I imagine it unfurling. I roll colours in my hands, twining them together to get an idea of how they will mingle. How I weave each section is more important to me than how fast I can do it, so I never feel guilty about taking time to think. If I spend 6 hours weaving a section and then decide it really doesn't work I have to un weave it.


I'll be moving to the left side to complete the green petal or at least weave it as high as I need in order to weave the dark squiggly section just to the right of it. Once those two pieces are done I'll be able to start on the petal that is unfurling above it all. Another small section to the right is ready to be woven so if I get bored of green I might skip over there and weave the section of orange/yellow with black lines.


And this little guy is the product of another delightful workshop I was able to participate in through my local spinners and weavers guild. There's a bit of pop culture reference here. Can anyone guess?


He's made with wool fleece and special tools called felting needles. I REALLY had fun making him. Actually I'm feeling as little distracted by it! I just want to buy up a bunch of coloured fleeces and needle felt my own army of cute.


Thanks for stopping by!
♥
JQ

The Rose Tapestry at 50 Hours

Hello!

I just wanted to leave a little update of pictures of the rose tapestry (I am no longer calling it Leviathan. I would like to reserve that as an inspirational word, so that I may choose to base more work around in the future). For now I will just refer to it as the rose tapestry until I have found a suitable title.


I wanted to continue the scale effect at the top of the left hand petal, but I wanted it to follow the angle of the petal, so I wove the diamonds a bit differently from those on the right. The texture created from the slits between scales, and the silk soumac knots connecting everything worked out really neat! I'm also enjoying that coral, orange and minty green action. It's really coming to life!


I am getting ready to tackle the turquoise and lime green petal, so I had to take a break from weaving to do more dye work today. I ran out of green! That little ball at the top right is what I had left after the first two yellow/green petals. It's a size 30 cotton crochet thread. I definitely needed more than that to finish. So I made all these colours!


Here are a few more close ups of the tapestry. If you want to take a closer look just click on the pic!


I'm weaving each section of colour with a bobbin or yarn butterfly that almost always consists of 3 colours together. This way I get to play with a lot more variations of colour, and it gives a stippled effect. It also makes blending/gradation a lot easier.


I started a sketchbook strictly for Leviathan inspired work (I think I'd like to do 8 of them). It will include everything from images,textures and colour combinations that stir me to word maps, poetry and song lyrics, quotes, essays etc. I will try to post images of the pages along with the tapestry progress. I know this will not only help me to log ideas/inspiration for future use, but also to write my artist statement in the end.

I hope everyone had a nice Easter weekend!
Thank you for stopping by,
♥
JQ