Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Designing in the Raddle

My talk about the Fudge Factor has come back to bite me. I am working on a Woven Words project for Paula (who sent me 10 cashmere sweaters). Her selected words are LAUGH OFTEN, LOVE MUCH, LIVE WELL. Since she wanted her weaving to be 18" wide, I knew that I would need 5" of ikat to make up the difference.

When I say ikat, I am using my Turned Weft Ikat technique but using commerical space dyed Bambu 12 doubled and sett at 24 epi.
I wound all of the words and the ikat sections separately and put them in the raddle and dropped the bar to the ground, so I could see the warp design (for the first time)

I have to say I was not thrilled with look at all, not the least of which the fact that the ikat sections didn't line up.

I decided to sleep on it, and when I woke up I had a plan. I objected to the 1" ikat stripe between each word, but felt that there should be something to separate LOVE and MUCH. I took out 20 of the 24 ends and created an ikat border. Then I pulled the crooked ikat stripes so they would line up.
The whole process took about a half hour, and made all the difference. I love it now!
Now to wind back. This will be tricky because the bouts have been split and moved around. Stay tuned for the next step.

7 comments:

Dianne said...

Glad you slept on it cause it looks great.

Cate Rose said...

Beautiful, Bonnie. Can't wait to see it finished!

Valerie said...

Ah sleep! So much magic happens in those somnolent hours.

Wonderful warp!

Connie Peterson said...

You do such lovely work! I have put your blog on my sidebar. Thanks for the inspiration.

Felizitas said...

Nice colours. I wish I had the time to do more dying!
Felizitas

poor said...

Love your ideas and work.It looks very beautiful...called Ikkat is it?the blend of the yarns is very very good.

Bonnie said...

Ikat refers to an ancient technique where the yarn is tie-dyed before it is woven. In this case, I used space-dyed commercial yarn to create the ikat-like effect. Technically, it is not ikat because the yarn was not tied.