I finished my near-final sketch for the piece “Bipolar Prison” this morning:
Next step is to convert it to an image that Arahweave (my jacquard weaving software) can process. This is decidedly nontrivial, since “black” in this image actually converts into twelve different weave structures, red/orange/yellow convert to seven weave structures, and blue/purple/green to another seven weave structures. To convert correctly, I have to separate all 26 weave structures from each other by making each a different color. I have been working at this all morning, and expect it will take another few days to work out.
Technical details about this piece:
- Triple weave (simultaneously weaving three layers of fabric) with interchanging layers – one shades of red, one shades of blue, one white
- Red and blue warps are each dyed in a mottled, blended pattern, to provide a variegated background
- Weft is black throughout all three layers
Today I will dye a sample warp by laying out a small bout of warp randomly, scrunching it together a bit, then dripping dye on it in random patterns. I had planned to ice dye it, but my samples were not encouraging, so I’m going to try just dripping dye instead.
I did get one nice T-shirt from my ice dyeing experiments:
Alas, the others were disappointing, so I will either overdye them or donate them to Goodwill.
My other project for this week is reviewing the text galleys for my book! I received them last Friday. My editor had only 32 comments that I need to address! And most of those are tweaking a word or a sentence – there’s nothing here that should take more than a few minutes to process. I’m very pleased that she considers my manuscript so”clean”.
Speaking of clean, today was going to be laundry day. But someone has already claimed the laundry basket. Perhaps tomorrow.
