a weaver under the influence

It rained for four years eleven months and two days.....
Just like in the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

But unlike the effect of the rain in the characters in the novel i am busy and moving. Albeit the BLAH humor. So many consecutive rainy days and not even my hot pink Hello Kitty wanna be Wellies make neither me nor other people chuckle.
The current weaving reflects the colors that have been surrounding me. A tex 100 soft spun light gray wool. Some very random shots of logwood dyed mauvish gray silk tram for sparkle. The actual idea behind is that as the piece will be fulled and felted the silk will slightly kink out. At least in the mind's eye as you can never really tell/sample fulling for sure.i intend exploring loom controlled felting with resist paste. Hope that by the time i finish the weaving the rain will have gone away. If not the piece will be drying forever-no dryer here. Remember i live in sunny Spain. HA!

As a side note i cannot even start to count the ways i love pshopping. The photo above was shot in the worst light conditions with an energy saving light bulb and natural light AWOL .i got the most horrible yellow cast and i hate bad photos in general and of textiles in particular. After so much energy and soul poured into a work then comes a crummy photo and kills the piece.

i added layers by duplicating and corrected the levels by configuring the white and gray with the dropper in each layer and merged them. Then came the tour de force- copy layer, flood fill color light lilac opacity 37% merge mode normal. And flatten.
i got rid of all the horrible color overcast and was able to render the colors as they actually are. At least on my screen. i love correcting lousy photos!

As a closing remark i want to thank all the kind comments received re my previous post.
They got me back to the loom pronto.

neki desu


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a mild disappointment

That's what my cotton loom controlled shibori shawl turned out to be . The ai came out just o.k.
There was no way to pump it up to deep indigo, so i had to content myself with what i got.
The other issue was the white loosing its pristine color to become dirty wash water as you all can see in the photo.This is strange as indigo works with oxidation and the white was gathered tight so as not to be exposed to the color. i try to fool myself saying that it is an optical illusion, but it just doesn't cut it.
However the kakishibu dyed borders look fine with the blue patterning.
And albeit shrinking a bit the cotton fabric, nice and airy, has a nice hand .

Hmm... maybe another dweller in the bottom drawer taking a time cure?

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more finds

More shibori from the bottom drawer.This one is Japanese madder, あかね。First and last time i got such a nice rich color. As you can tell it was dyed more than once.


This one was dyed with mx dyes,as i had not gathered the courage yet to try indigo. It was in the old days. But i do like the olive green side bands with dark blue combination.

i'm recycling work because i'm very busy with an on line course from Fiber-in-form It's a ton of fun, lots of hard playing. If you have a chance run and enroll for the next one.
Also following the on line study group for Find your own visual language book by Jane Dunnewold, Claire Benn and Lesley Morgan. We are working our way through the exercises and the group is very supportive and with a very positive spirit.

You most likely won't see it, but macafee is driving me bonkers with their site protector. It blocks most of the images and all you see is their name. Great for surfing blogs :(

Have tried to block it but no way. Even my own photos, as the first one here, get blocked because they seem suspicious to the thing.
Does anyone know how to override this?

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A la recherche

Lately i feel as if i'm trapped in one of the pages of Germantes' Way of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

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a room of one's own

October TIF is about work spaces. No other person has put it so well as Virginia Woolf.

...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction...

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music is playing inside my head

...but the music keeps playing and won't let the world get me down.

Apologies to Carol King.




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in memoriam

Peter Collingwood

A great loss for the textile community.


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peer recognition

As i see it peer recognition cuts it. Better than being juried into a show. Much better than getting a good critique by a curator.
Peers by definition are in your league, they work with the same materials, have inside knowledge of the processes, cannot be fooled with the outcome because they can discern whether it was fruit of work and thoughtful process or just baloney (think, but not exclusively, Damien Hirst here).


This introduction serves as an excuse to thank Sandra Rude for giving me the i love your blog award. So for me being given an award by a peer, in this case 2 as Shirley Treasure also passed it to me a couple of weeks ago, means something very special.
i'd like to celebrate with you all by sharing a list of blogs from all walks of blogland which i consider inspirational and worth visiting.

rang-the colours of life for the photos and mood
japan craft journal lots of sews, fiber projects and things Japanese in the background :)
indexed thoughts on everything put in a graphic way
fashion-incubator ideas, ideas and check the resources page, better than going to college.
tricia mc kellar wow artwork pushing boundaries
the textile blog textile education fix
creativity journey textile resources, grants and opportunities
masala chai online because there's art beyond our boundaries

Enjoy.

neki desu

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little window down the hall

Believe me when i say this is an exercise in discipline. i am such a color person and working with monochromatic white is a challenge. But so far i am enjoying it.
This one is a nappy liner with zapped puff paint squiggles and heavy free motion embroidery.
The window looks inside to a small piece of white and silver lace covered with tulle so as not to let the bugs in :)

Turning a corner, the quick and short indigo vat had to be brought inside as the temperature is around 20ºC during the day. The vat is not exhausted and heating it is giving me darker color than what i got in the summer working outside in the sun.　Ai-san is very finicky.
If all goes as planned the vat will be exhausted by the end of the week. Until next year.
また来年！

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jackie dress

Remember this post?
Now see what i made from the fabric. It is such a comfortable little number it's almost worn out. The perfect summer dress, dressed up or down, cool and somewhat stylish if i may say LOL!
An interesting thing happened though. i was using a pattern generating program and did not make a sloper with my measurements, i wanted to get on with the sewing, and not spend time on the sloper.
i have always been misses 10 but, as i've put on some weight i figured i could swing it with size 12.

But, lo and behold sizes have changed. They are bigger, no, humongous!! Even size 10 was enormous, and i mean the proportions too. With the armholes almost reaching below my bust, i needed a fix, pronto. And we are not talking drugs here.
My proportions were impossible to change so i went back to my old Vogue patterns and cut and pasted a pattern together to make the dress. It ended up being a sleeveless interpretation of this.

i'm still puzzled by the sizing . i haven't done any sewing in a while and i would have thought that the change would lean towards smaller sizes, not bigger. This has proved wrong . i may extrapolate that people are getting bigger or as it is said in politically incorrect Spain, fatter.

Ok, but what about the proportions?
Have you noticed a change in sizing and proportions? How are you coping with it? Advice requested here.

neki desu


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