Finished “Bipolar Prison”!

I finished padding and lining “Bipolar Prison” yesterday! Here it is:

I really like the way the padding emphasizes the bars and the face. The only thing that I’m not totally happy about is the wonkiness of the edges all around. I’m going to try steam-blocking it sometime this week, to see if I can make it more rectangular.

The colored warps came out even more beautifully than I had hoped. It’s hard to get a good sense for the color and texture in the full photo, so here’s a closeup of a small area:

The colors in each small area are unified enough to look “solid” at a distance, but close up, they become streaks of many related colors. That’s because I used three yarns, each with a different fiber content, in each warp. The silk, mercerized cotton, and unmercerized cotton all “took” the dye differently, adding variety to what might otherwise have been a solid blob of color.

The warps also have rich texture to them – physical as well as visual. The three yarns are all different sizes, and are threaded randomly in groups of four, adding a bit of textural interest. I also added some subtle squiggles in the background (“behind” the chain-link fencing) to break up the solid patches of color into something more visually interesting.

The one thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to mount it for hanging. While the padding is perfect for the design, it also distorts the outer edge of the piece, drawing it into unsightly puckers. This would seem to be a good reason to frame it – that way, it could be stretched into a rectangle and pinned in place. But framing is expensive, bulky to store, and expensive to ship. Since I’m planning to send this piece to shows, I’d much rather be able to roll it up and ship it.

So if you have suggestions for how to finish and hang this piece to get a rectangular edge, please leave a comment and let me know!

Finally, some people have been inquiring about Fritz and Tigress. They are perfectly fine, healthy, going-on-three-year-old cats. However, as adult cats, they’re now spending much of their time lazing about, so the pawparazzi have had fewer interesting opportunities to shoot. (Although, there was the “incident” in the bathtub, wherein our two loyal cats gallantly defended us from a giant cockroach that had sneaked in from outside. I had been planning to take a shower, but decided to wait until the local big game hunters were done disemboweling their mighty prey.)

So here are Fritz and Tigress, engaged in their favorite Olympic sport: synchronized sleeping.