Archive for June, 2010

Pics to Picks Confidence & Time

You may have noticed how most of my posts are up on the same day! This is because of extreme lack of time and lack of confidence. I’ve found this in others post’s too, which is a comfort.

Anyway, how do you design from an image when loom weaving has so many restraints and restrictions to imagery and placement. It’s these limitations that are part the creative aspect in this challenge. The designs going on in our heads are mixed with our technical knowlege of what is possible on our looms without setting out to create a full imagery in tapestry weave.

So I’d like to quote a couple of paragraphs from the great American writer – Annie Dillard in her book ‘The Writing Life’. Writing about writing she offers this as a comfort to others discouraged by their writing or thinking they just haven’t got it.  Her brilliant style of writing strikes at my very core. Let me know what you think…

It takes years to write a book – between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has writen a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out such books?

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labour. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

Hope this makes you feel braver, as it did me.

Pics to Picks – Print to Loom

Well here is the images of my bamboo experimentation with more to come. I’ve started with the sampling on the warp and will probably go with the fine bamboo weft which has a silky handle and soft ribbing effect. I don’t seem to be able to weave white successfully. I know it’s needed and we can’t do without it on the web and in our blank journal books but it’s an unfulfilling colour for me – it has an uncomfortable yearning about it. So into the dyebath all these will go. I’m looking into stencilling with dye or stencil resist if there is such a thing.

Enjoying Images

Although I’ve decided to go with the bamboo image for my Pic to Picks weave challenge I’m still fiddling with all the other images that Meg gave me. The more I look, the more I see.Notice the blue image in the corner of this image. It was very interesting because it was on a curve and I was able to draw several various versions of this. I’m not sure how these will be used in my work but they are filling up my journal pages nicely.