The workshop is over, and it went really well! The students had a lot of fun, they felt the material was valuable, and I got a lot of great feedback, so it’s all good. We started by simply playing with materials – I brought paints, beads, embroidery floss, and tons of fancy yarns to get them started. I asked each of them to keep an “Explorer’s Log” describing what they tried, what they liked, what they didn’t, and what ideas for finished projects cropped up as they were playing with it. From there we went into generating ideas, making mood boards, and generating designs from ideas. That finished Day One.

On Day Two, I asked them to put together a more considered design from the ten designs they’d brainstormed the day before. Then we talked about what makes a well-designed piece of cloth – function, appearance, and construction. Each person showed off a design, and talked about what aspects of the design  they still needed to investigate. I gave my perspective on sampling, namely, that samples are meant to answer design questions, and your goal in designing samples for a project should be to answer your question as absolutely cheaply as possible – in time, materials, and mental energy. And then the students proceeded to weave samples to answer some of their design questions – or, in some cases, simply to continue exploring the ideas they’d been working on.

While there are some things I intend to change about the pace and timing of the workshop, and maybe one or two content changes, I think it went well, on the whole, and I’m very happy with it.

Here (with permission, of course) are photos of some of my students’ work:

I’m teaching this workshop again next weekend (in Carmel), and hope to have some more examples ready by then. The students also thought it would be really interesting if I included an example of my own design process, so I’ll be toting along Autumn Splendor and a couple of the muslins and samples I made for it. Haven’t yet decided whether to put that at the beginning or the end of the workshop, but am leaning towards putting it at the end. It’s a nice way of summing up the workshop, and giving the students food for thought as they go home.

So I’ve taught my first workshop! It was a lot of fun, and I think I gave my students some useful material, so I’m quite content. Looking forward to the next one, next weekend!

Tomorrow I teach my first workshop! It’s about the design process. The students will go from exploratory play to generating ideas to generating designs from their ideas, roughly following the sequence of the book I’m writing. Then we’ll get into refining designs, identifying open design questions, and sampling to answer the design questions. At the end of it, my students will hopefully have a workable design in their hands, and – more important – some process tools to help them the next time they design something. In all likelihood they won’t want to use the entire process all the time (I don’t either), but hopefully they can find some useful tools in the box.

This is my first time teaching anything in twenty years, and I don’t think I’ve ever taught a class solo before, so this will be really challenging. Doubly challenging is the fact that I’m not teaching technique; I’m trying to teach students how to think independently about design. Teaching a technique would be a lot easier. As it is, I really sweated bullets over getting the exercises and sequence right, and I’m still not sure whether the amount of time I gave for the exercises is correct. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow!

Anyway, I’m doing the project-manager equivalent of biting my nails – which is to say that I’m compulsively organizing and planning.  You know, making checklists, reviewing lesson plans, digging through my stash and packing up anything and everything that might be useful at the workshop, etc. I think at this point I’m pretty well-organized and well-equipped. I hope, anyway!

I am also about 2/3 threaded for my Phoenix Rising sample! I hope to get it fully threaded and sleyed this weekend – I have Monday as a holiday, so plan to spend it writing blog posts for Creating Craft and setting up the warp. With luck, I just might do some weaving next week!

Off to bed! I didn’t get enough sleep last night, thanks to the enthusiastic ministrations of a hungry cat (was it really necessary to walk back and forth on my head for twenty minutes at 4:30 am??), so best to get to bed early. Tomorrow is coming soon!

Here’s the beginning of my rigid heddle sampler:

Here I was playing with materials (unspun wool roving), textures (furry vs. fuzzy vs. smooth), and a little bit with color (orange/purple and yellow/purple).

Like much of my work, the purpose of this sample isn’t to be a finished work, but an exploration of materials and ideas – taking a concept and playing with it, developing it into something that can be used in a later piece. What I plan to ask students to do is to select some materials and just play with them – not trying to make a finished piece, not worrying about whether it will work or not. Just playing with ideas and what-ifs.

At the end of the exploration period, I’ll ask the students to write down thoughts about their explorations – what they liked, what didn’t, how they could improve the parts that they didn’t like, and how they might use some of the things they explored in actual pieces.

For this example, my notes went something like this:

What I explored:

• Using unspun roving as a supplementary weft
• Furry, fuzzy, and smooth textures in a single piece
• Color combinations – orange/purple/white and yellow/purple/white

How to reproduce it:

• Rigid heddle loom, 8 -dent reed
• Kona Superwash yarn, natural, for warp and weft, ~1000 ypp
• Tufts of unspun roving embedded under three warp threads, with the furry ends sticking out.  Roving is inserted every second pick, and beaten in along with the primary weft. (One pick primary weft + roving, one pick primary weft.)

What I liked:

• Furry texture is delightful to the fingers and to the eye – looks like soft clouds
• Fuzzy (trimmed) texture looks like pile rug but probably a lot faster to make
• Contrast in textures adds interest to the piece – it’s not just flat
• Orange and purple colors really pop each other – beautiful energy in the piece

What I didn’t like:

• The bottom sample is probably impossible to wash without losing the fuzzy effect. It would also  felt immediately if subjected to abrasion. Thus, it’s only suitable for a wall hanging or some other art piece that will not be handled roughly or washed. The top sample may be similarly delicate – might be worth an experiment to see.
• Not very durable construction
• Fuzzy texture blurs details of design
• That orange and with that purple is a little too garish
• Yellow and purple doesn’t work at all – looks awful, in fact.

Ideas this brings up:

• use roving as fur in the depiction of an animal, or as fog in a landscape
• a piece with lots of textural contrast
• a wall hanging, simple geometric shapes with bright colors – showing off the differences in textures between the various lengths of “pile”.
• a piece with fairly large scale, so the fuzziness doesn’t obscure all the details.
• use roving “fur” to emphasize design details by adding contrast in texture

The idea of the exercise is to take time to play, and see where that takes you – so often we get focused on a specific project, and forget to explore!