loom controlled shibori-show and tell

Here you can see the process involved in the dyeing part of loom controlled shibori.
Some of the messages i got prompted me to show the dyeing part more clearly than what i had explained in the previous posts. The weaving here was very straightforward plain weave on 24 shafts and the supplemental weft was a twill.
The photo tute is pretty self explanatory and i will just add a few things :

• the fabric is silk and was dyed using Procion dyes and acetic acid
• stamping was made using pigments and Golden GAC900 and soft gel medium semi gloss; fabric hand did not change significantly
• as pigments do not dye they can be used to create an extra layer of color
• some more stamping was done using thickened Procion dyes

Something unusual happened here as the cotton supplemental thread took the dye very well.
Taking the slow cloth approach and instead of cutting the knots on both selvages i undid the knots and slowly pulled out the thread. i was gratified with an ikat like perle cotton thread that will be good as weft in another project. Two for the same effort. This is called energy saving and maximizing your resources :)


neki desu

Blade Runner, Memories and TIF

One of my all time favorite movies is Blade Runner and i believe, paraphrasing here, almost anything in life can relate to it. Take our case in question this month's TIF topic, memories.
The replicants, who are robots in a world divided into humans and replicants, are so human that they miss having personal memories. There is something very human in keeping memories, and sharing them. And in a very touching gesture they steal photos from humans in order to construct their own memories.
There's also a beautiful invocation by Roy Batty, the most perfect replicant about memories that is actually his death poem, as in ritual sepukku.

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die." (Roy)

i hope to have enticed you to look for the movie and watch it. i usually do not go for sci-fi, but this one goes beyond that label. It is a cult movie. And it's a treat to see a young Harrison Ford :)

As for me i kept working some more along the boxed memories metaphor using knitted wire. Don't know if it happens to you but once i get going with the concept i can't stop, had a couple more half finished projects for last month. However, i'm doing a lot of loom work now so i'm done for this month's TIF.

i was looking here for simplicity and i think i can't simplify more than this piece.
Game over.

neki desu

loom controlled shibori memories for TIF

i remember being five or six sitting in my grandmother's living room waiting in anticipation for uncle Erasmus to arrive from one of his trips. Can you believe his name? He was my grandmother's brother and my great grandfather had named the kids Erasmus, Virgil and Homer. They missed a Dante. It was a girl, my grandma.
He was a great traveler and had all those stories to tell , so the family would gather around him and listen spellbound. Distant places, different rites, other languages i think he imbued the wander lust in me.
i also remember when i was around nine or ten my parents gave me the book Around the World in 2,000 pictures. Being an only child at that time, i would spend days and days examining the black and white photos and dreaming of being there. There were two that, heavens know why, called my attention most of all and made them very special to me.

One was of human towers, men standing on each other's shoulders forming single pillars. There was another variety that was pillar within pillar, the base being like a hurdle to support all that weight.
The other was a picture of the strangest building that i had ever seen. It was a stone boat like structure with a turret docked in the water . i wanted to know why would someone build a boat in stone, yet put it in the water. At that time i didn't know, but that was an oxymoron.

i remember watching Rome Adventure with Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette and dying to get her hairdo and go to Rome.Troy Donahue, o.k. if i got him, but what i really wanted was to go to Rome and walk those streets and see those colors.

Fast forward to the seventies when i lived in Rome. i remember those colors and the discovery of light, changing light during the day and over the seasons. Coming from the tropics where light is always the same, blinding, it was a revelation.

Many moons later i came to Barcelona for weaving reasons and was surprised to find the human towers were part of the Catalan folklore. i began to have a floating feeling, that of having closed a circle. And i stayed here.
And yet more moons afterwards one day while walking along the Tejo in Lisbon i saw the fascinating odd structure of my childhood. The Tower of Belem! i had to explain my husband what was all that excitement about lest he think that i was suffering from heat stroke.


All those memories neatly packed in boxes.

neki desu