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Water lily design, finished

I finished designing the water-lily napkins a few days ago. I’m very pleased with them:

handwoven water lily napkin design on four shafts (overshot)

For reference, here’s the original painting:

Monet painting, inspiration for the handwoven water lily napkins

I’m particularly happy because it’s a four shaft pattern, which means that more people are able to weave it. There’s a myth that in order to do complex, interesting work you have to have a more complex, expensive loom with lots and lots of shafts – this shows you can do it on a much simpler, four-shaft loom.

This is important because I intend to get these published in a magazine, so the design has to be weavable by their readers. I kept this in mind while designing. It will be easier to weave on six shafts than four, but it’s doable on four.

I then got interested in what you could do in plain weave (e.g. a on a rigid heddle loom). So I designed this water-lily alternate interpretation – place mats in plain weave. I’m quite happy with these as well: they’re not as pictorial as the first set of water-lilies, but I think they capture the feel and the overall motion of the painting. And MUCH quicker and simpler to weave.

I might make the design a little smaller, though, so it’s more practical to weave with thicker threads, which would be more suitable to rigid heddle weaving.

handwoven water lily place mat design in plain weave

At some point I might design and weave a full set of table linens – place mats, napkins, and table runner – in the more complex water-lily pattern. Not sure though – it would be a LOT of work, and I almost never entertain.

On to the next design!

I have been thinking about what else to put on Grace (the jacquard loom). I want to put on a warp that is guaranteed to be long enough for Unraveling, which probably means at least four yards (after subtracting loom waste). However, Unraveling itself is only two yards long, so that probably leaves quite a bit of leftover warp. What to do with it?

I’m thinking VELVET.

Velvet and I dated briefly about 8-10 years ago, when I took a velvet weaving workshop with Barbara Setsu-Pickett. I fell in love, but velvet played hard-to-get and eventually I gave up. It requires specialized equipment and a LOT of time, and I didn’t have either.

However, some very generous friends helped me build the necessary equipment, and I think I will now have the time to experiment with it. So my plan is to put on a long warp in black 60/2 silk. Once Unraveling is done, I can swap out the pink threads for velvet pile, and (potentially) weave polychrome figured velvet on the loom.

This sounds SO incredibly fun! Also complicated and time-consuming. I expect that getting to the point where I weave any finished pieces will take at least a year. But SO worth it when I do. And it will make a fun adventure. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot.

My other interest right now is, oddly, natural dyeing. I investigated natural dyeing a bit back in college – which is to say, over 30 years ago – but soon gave it up for synthetic dyes, which gave me a wider range of colors with much better reproducibility.

However, after doing Renewal, the scarf woven out of handspun silk, I got fascinated by the idea of combining ancient techniques with my thoroughly modern jacquard loom. This is unusual for me – usually I’m all about producing a great finished product. What materials you use and how you get there aren’t relevant to the finished piece, which stands by itself.

Lately I’ve gotten interested in the process, though, so I’m liking the idea of using natural dyes for at least some of my yarns.

Towards that, I’m taking a natural dye workshop with a Mexican weaver/dyer this week. I found her on AirBNB of all places – she was advertising a half-day “learn to do simple weaving” workshop, and I signed up for it because I thought it would be interesting to meet her. We hit it off, and eventually agreed that she’d teach me in a three-day class on natural dyeing using traditional Mexican techniques. It’s just me, so we’ll have plenty of time to talk about the technical aspects. It starts later this morning – I’m super excited and expect to learn a lot.

Marcelo (the knife-maker) and I have been talking about the Damascus steel knife set he’s making for me. He proposed using a Japanese technique, shou sugi ban, on pecan wood for the knife handles. With shou sugi ban, you basically char the wood and then rub away the char. It brings up the grain and (reputedly) also makes the wood more durable, though that’s been disputed.

On softwoods like pine, shou sugi ban produces dramatic results, with strong bands of light and dark, following the grain. On hardwoods such as pecan, the result is much more subtle – but subtle will go well with the patterning in Damascus steel.

Marcelo sent me a photo of a sample he created using shou sugi ban. The left photo shows the charred wood before and after sanding, and the second photo shows what the finished wood will look like.

I love it.

We’re also talking about other details – what to use for the rivets going through the handle (bronze, I think), and whether to inset a small gemstone in the center rivet (yes). Marcelo suggested chrysocolla, which is a blue-green semiprecious gemstone similar to turquoise or malachite, and I agreed. I can’t wait to see the samples.

Off to my natural dye workshop! More later.

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Water lilies

I’ve been in Mexico for a month and a half now. In that time, surprisingly, I’ve done almost no exploration of my surroundings. That’s because most of my voyaging has been internal – so Mexico is mostly serving as a place to cocoon. (I’d like to come back sometime when I’m actually interested in exploring!)

What’s changed?

Mostly, I’ve been listening to the silence. Helping my wife through her transition took a lot of energy and emotional space. I don’t blame her for that, but now that I’m not so intensively involved, I’m enjoying the silence of a house entirely to myself – of having “a room of her own,” as Virginia Woolf so famously put it. No cats, no spouse, no responsibilities to anyone else. That’s precious, and I’ve been enjoying it. I can feel myself decompressing.

The other major change is that I’ve committed to putting my creative life first. First thing in the morning, as soon as I get up, I’m spending at least an hour on my creative work. Early morning is my best time of day for me – most alert, most creative, most courageous – and “paying myself first” ensures that my creative work gets the time it needs. If it waits until everything else is done, it never happens – that’s what’s been happening the last ten years. Enough.

As a result, I’ve actually started creating again. That’s HUGE. Ideas and designs for new work are pouring out, and I expect to start weaving some really cool stuff once I get home. Probably in February – January will get eaten by moving and studio setup logistics.

But meanwhile, I am creating again.

Since the next step in Unraveling requires equipment I don’t have here, and I don’t want to launch another jacquard project to distract me from Unraveling, I’ve started designing projects for shaft looms.

I’m considering teaching a class at the Handweaving Academy about designing from a photo. That’s something lots of people would love to do, and it can be tricky, so I think it’s a worthy topic for a class.

So I’ve spent the last few days designing a piece inspired by this Monet painting:

I picked this one because I’m thinking of doing a series of photos with vastly different styles, to give examples of how to create different effects and moods. To start, I wanted a photo with subtle color blends and blurry edges.

I searched Handweaving.net’s draft collection and found an overshot draft that reminded me of flowers and rippling water (#61448, by Gerd Lindman Nilsson).

I set to work.

Because the original photo has a lot of blues, greens, and whites in it, I decided to make the background blue-green and the lilies mostly white. I had a lot of options for color – overshot consists of a ground cloth (tabby) plus a pattern weft. That meant that I could create stripes of color lengthwise (warp) and TWO different color patterns crosswise (pattern + tabby weft). Lots of potential (and also very complicated).

My first explorations produced this:

This would be a nightmare to weave, but I thought it captured the spirit of the lilies nicely. Each lily is slightly different, which I felt created a more flowing, painterly effect.

I decided I wanted to explore color combinations in greater depth, so I spent a half-day yesterday creating this monstrosity:

This is obviously not intended as a final design. What it does do, however, is set up all the color patterns that I might want to use, making it easier to experiment with colors later. I’ve set up color gradients in the warp and both wefts, each composed of different colors. So experimenting with color combinations becomes easy – I simply use Handweaving.net’s Draft Editor to replace the colors in each section, so it takes only a minute or two to swap in different colors.

After I finished creating this color template (which took several hours – it’s complicated!), I started fiddling with color replacements. By bedtime, I’d gotten to this design, which I like (and which would be much simpler to weave!).

This isn’t a finished design – I want to tone down the pink a LOT (the painting’s lilies are mostly white), reduce the saturation, darken the blue/green areas, make the colors cooler, and quite a few other tweaks. (I liked the colors in the first version better.) But overall, I like where I’m going.

(This version is also much easier to weave, which is important because I’m thinking of submitting it to a magazine – it needs to be within reach for most weavers!)

I’m envisioning a set of napkins, in 10/2 cotton with a doubled 10/2 cotton pattern weft. Using two strands of yarn, side by side, opens up the possibility of using two different colors together for even more subtle blends. It might also enable me to simplify the weaving without compromising the painterly feel.

Once I’m satisfied with the colors, I’ll have to go home and test the real-life yarn colors in the design. For now, I can fiddle with theoretical colors on the screen, to see what overall color combinations I like best. Then sample and finalize the design once I’m home.

I fly home in just under three weeks, so my sojourn is nearing it’s end. I’m good with that – I’ve enjoyed my trip, and the solitude, but I feel like I’m almost done cocooning. I’m ready to weave again.