ATW Blends

I have selected a few of the ends from the ATW which show how they blend colours and yarns.  Most of them are a combination of both wool and cotton.  The 2 mauve blends on the left are from the Alice Bayke tapestry.  The  next picture of one of them has 4 wool strands and 10 threads of stranded cotton, 6 white and 4 mauve; I think it was used in the lace part of her dress. I don't use as many threads when I blend.  For my large tapestry I am using 5 strands in my weft, mostly  4 strands of wool and 2 of cotton; I find the cotton lightens the effect.

Most of the wool I used for Tim's Tapestry was ends; saved myself both money and time as I already had the bag of ends  and who am I to argue with experts in blending colours.

Colour

I finally took some advice and sorted my wool into a proper palette and sorted my cottons at the same
time. At the ATW they use a lot of cotton and linen and I occasionally buy bags of left overs to use and to get an idea of what they do. 

Here are some of the bobbins  wound ready for use with a collection of cottons.  There is my last ball of Marta's hand - dyed wool which I am using with the orange/red colours to replicate the ground.  It gives a nice occasional fleck. I have also begun a colour strip which should, in theory, help minimize pulling out because the colours don't work.

You can see the effect of the hand dyed wool;  I like it because it is subtle.

Visiting Tim

Well I have finally made a little progress with my tapestry and I am  calling it Visiting Tim as it is a visual representation of our trip earlier this year to see Tim who lives in the Kimberelys.

The beginning was easy; soon however I ran into difficulties with the boabs and  colour.  I tried several times to get a representation with which I was happy.

Too stiff

I tried white as their trunks are a light colour then I added yellow.

This is starting to look better.

 

 

 

 

I consulted my tutor and a neighbour who  mentors me when I ask and both said the same that I needed to include some of the  surrounding colour so the trees blend in. I did this and am moderately pleased with the result.

If only it was easy.  The process so far has highlighted 2 things. The first is the benefits of leashes and the second is my lack of experience with mixing colours.  My mentor asked me if I had my colour palette chosen and although I had chosen many colours I might use, I had not chosen a specific range.  That took time and has made things easier. The other work  tool I have decided to adopt is to have bobbins wound ready to use like they do at ATW.  I have also decided not to waste time pulling weaving out which has been a feature of my weaving in the past; sometimes I have pulled out as much as I have woven. 

The sky 's looking good.

Work.

One thing about this course at SWTAFE is the amount of work involved.  I think the designers of the course must have known my old great - aunt Bridget who was full of sayings; one of her favourites was, "the devil makes work for idle hands".  He certainly misses out on me as I am never idle. Since doing the designs for our major assignment this year, the Large Tapestry, there have been 2 other tapestry assignments as well as 2 design assignments.  The tapestry ass. were  a commission and the other working with themes.  The commission took me forever as I over thought the subject matter I chose which was  a tapestry for a chapel based on the history of a particular order of Sisters.  We were required to weave a sample of the design and mine is 15 cm square.

 
The next assignment was about working with themes and as I had done a drawing of the black and white tree trunks that line the driveway into a vineyard in NE Vic I decided to do tree trunks.  Why? because it was nearly August and I hadn't started the Large Tapestry yet and I was slightly panicked.  We had to do 4 drawings and choose one of these to weave yet another sample.  The drawing I chose was one of a tree in Adelaide near Captain Light's lookout whose branches bear the scars of people's stupidity in the names and marks that have been cut into it.

 

If you look carefully at the right hand side of the sample you can where I have made a monumental error.  I have never done this before in my weaving life.  The good news is that yesterday I actually started my large tapestry and have done a little of it.  I will blog about this soon.  I have worked out it will take me 200  to 250 hours to weave.  I had better get started.

Violets and Potatoes

Winter in Melbourne has been very cold, wet and grey and I know why people go travelling north.
However, if there is no Winter, there is no Spring and my husband says we need the rain for the flowers (the same one who makes money trees). I wandered out into the backyard last week when we had a nice sunny period and made some discoveries.  The violets under the plum tree are blooming away and I picked a bunch and took them inside.  Violets remind me of my grandmother and when my sister got married, we carried posies of violets which inhindsight were amazing.

The colour purple

I noticed that most of the peas and snow peas are up; I will fill in the holes when we get some sun.  The coriander and the self - sown dill are starting to move and the broad beans are doing well.  We are lucky with the dill as it grows wild.  I usually have a huge crop of self sown parsley too but it seems to be having a holiday this year; maybe it will appear when it warms up a little.  The cumquat tree is on strike as I have not had a crop for the last two seasons probably because I fed it; never again.  However the big suprise was the self sown potatoes.  We must have left a few potatoes in the round last year and they sprouted so I left them be. The frost damaged the plants so we dug them up and got quite a few Nicolas (my favourite potato) and some Royal Blue ones.  What a winter feast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

More purple.

Tapestry Exhibition

Today the RMIT online tapestry weavers group hosted the showing of the AuNZ Tapestry Challenge at the Spinners and Weavers Guild in Carlton. AuNZ Tapestry Weavers group hosts a challenge each year and this year the task was titled Circles and Squares.  The size of the tapestries is to be no bigger than 20 cm square. It is not a competition and all entries are accepted. Some of us put the exhibition up during the week and we were blown away with the tapestries.  They are beautiful and so diverse.  The quality of the weaving was amazing and they are so colourful. I will upload the flyer which has 4 tapestries from people who are members of both online groups.  I would love to show others but that would infringe intellectual property.

Shifu

A while back I saw that Beautiful silks in Fitzroy were having a Natural Dye Symposium and that one of the workshops was called Shifu and making miniature books. As I very inerested in things miniature, I enrolled without having investigated what Shifu is. Shifu involves cutting very fine paper, lokta, into strips like a paper lantern, then cutting it to have a continuous strip then spinning this to make a paper thread with which you weave to make Shifu.

A ball of spun paper

My first attempt.

As you can see , my first  attempt is not very even due to the fact that paper under strain breaks and I broke several warps.  However for a first attempt I thought it not too bad.  There were 9 in the class and I am very glad I did it as 2 of the other participants were also tutors at the Symposium. The tutor was Velma Bolyard and this was her first trip to Australia from  the USA and the students came from the eastern states of Australia and NZ.  We also made miniature book structures including one called a flag book which when you use different cououred papers is eally interesting.

Diligent  workers.

It was a very intense class and most people would baulk at the thought of spinning paper (it takes hours).
Velma had some gorgeous shifu books and one day (?) I hope to have 1 too. I have put  a link to her blog in my links.