I’m teaching a Beginners Weave workshop with Inkle and Saori weaving at Adult Education in Taree on Thursday (10 September)  and wanted the participants to explore textile design in a quick, easy, taster sort of way. I thought about coloured pencils and paint but the restricted time of the workshop didn’t really suit this approach. So I opted for adhesive coloured board which is easy to find in the abundance of scrapbooking supplies.

Essentially I use cut strips of coloured card to represent stripes which are the basic building blocks of  all warp faced textile design such as those woven on an Inkle loom. These can be any colour or multiple gradings of the same colour or any width. It’s best to combine a number of different widths for visual interest.

The next basic building block is the horizontal bar. These bars alternate with 2 colours only i.e, black and white, and are created by threading one black, one white etc. These can be different widths and by doubling up on a colour in the middle of the bar you can interupt the bar, changing its look.