Only a little later but the Nasties are blooming

bobbns
I am having such a great summer. I am 5 days later then I should be in writing my blog. But, I have a great excuse-For once it wasn’t my problem or procrastination. My husband Spencer had a rather sudden  burning desire to go see his brother Mike in Great Falls. So we did! Didn’t bother me in the least. I love talking to Maggie(sister-in-law)Lolo pass and 4th of July pass, the emptiness and wildness.  So we went for a long weekend.
I Love Great Falls
in the summer, because it reminds me of my childhood summers in College Place. But, not so much in the winter. I am fascinated by the turn of the century brick buildings, wide streets and old houses, Art Deco Fair buildings and weird finned swimming buffaloes AND, of course, we went to the State Fair. I was able to keep to my goal of learning how to use the camera effectively on my i-phone. Still keep cutting off heads with it. So, I have some great pictures to work into tapestries-if I ever finish the piece I am working on.  


Being on the edge of nowhere
and looking out towards the dry grass and wheat  lands. The sky really is bigger and brighter there. Oops, also saw a forest fire near Rogers Pass.  Summer has it’s own particular smells.  I hate it in the winter- cold AND SNOW--come to think about it I didn’t much like  College Place in the winter-either.  It’s a trip we used to make in a day-each way-now we make it in 2 days. We brought home Walla Walla Sweets for onion soup and Gramma’s Lakota  pot au feu that goes on for days, blackberries for cobbler and fry bread with honey. And Antique metal work frills for the remodel that I hope to be done with by the last of September

Unfortunately, reality eventually has to bite. Reality meant that I lost 5 days of weaving and will loose another 4 days to what was to be my reward for finishing  “..and HE...” 4 days of intermediate level  silversmithing classes with Don Norris, but I am not such a glutton for punishment that I’ll deny myself the pleasure of the classes just because I missed a deadline. I’ll  just work a few more hours everyday weaving-“right,” she said sarcastically to whom ever would listen. 
So I’ll need to add another 5 days to my schedule. I think after I finish the lettering I’ll be about 90% of the way finished.  Which means I am still not finished with “…And HE…” This is the piece that I was going to do 5 feet wide 6.5 feet tall on my large Shannock. The design seems to have gone on forever.  It set on the loom for 3-4 years until I had an epiphany about needing to weave it in sewing thread and no wool. It lead to me selling my large Shannock. It just needs to be done!! I keep asking myself if I could have broken the design into smaller pieces or a series of small format pieces. Second guessing doesn’t seem to help it go any quicker.  I don’t think it could have been. It’s definitely not a decorative piece. It tells a story. It has a narrative. Something I need to say to myself.  There was a time that I though I could have broken the piece in half and still had a beautiful floral piece, but it would have lost all/ most of it’s impact, power and meaning. This quote keeps running through my head and journal and today it showed up on face book.-“Until you make the unconscious conscious it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”Carl Jung It keeps be stubbornly not wanting to give up on it.
So what’s new in the piece. I have started the scroll and am using linen thread to give it a different texture then the sewing and embroidery threads. I have started the gold  soumack arabesque on the right side of the scroll. Gold threads can be a tad difficult to deal with especially those done in the style of aurum filatum. The weft bundles wear very easily, because it is generally a paper or gold foil wrapped around a core of line cotton or polyester. It seems to be best not to us a bobbin tip or beat down to hard on the weft soumack  twiner because it takes very little to wear through and unspin the gold. I am using 6-8 inch lengths of weft.  I am also knotting the weft every 3-4 inches with an overhand knot to help keep it under control when doing the soumack twists. The letters are much easier. They are vertical soumack done in the smaller perle cotton-The up rights are one warp wide.

The arabesque is a form of artistic decoration consisting of "surface decorations based on rhythmic linear patterns of scrolling and interlacing foliage, tendrils" or plain lines,[1] often combined with other elements.- def. liberated from Wikipedia

Ridging in tapestry.
There are two different types of ridging in tapestry-one good and one not so good...
1. The ridge structure is actually a rib structure that is created by changing the shed and weaving multiple passes one on top of another. The valleys between the higher part of the rib is caused when the weft passes to the back of the warp. The rib or hill is created when the weft passes in front. The rib and valley structure run up the length of the warps. Rib structure and size is controlled by the size of warp, the size of the weft and the distance between two warps.Please note in this example the rib structure is woven at both 10epi and 5 epi by doubling up the warps to change the rib structure.
Generally tapestry is considered to be an unbalanced weave structure more weft shows then warp. In a perfect world the warp size equals the distance between two warps and  warps equals the size of the weft bundles-sort of. There are reasons you might wish to unbalance one of the elements.  To give an example-If you are weaving at 10 epi you can generally use a 12/6 or a 12/9 cotton seine twine with a bundle of 4 needlepoint yarns or paternayan.,5-6 Norwegian Elv yarns or Australian 20/2 wool. 12/6 will generally accept more passes in an inch allowing for more turns or hatches or hachures then 12/9. Because a 12/6 is smaller and there is slightly more weft in an inch of weaving the tapestry is more drapable. The 12/9 because it is larger and thicker will take fewer passes and be stiffer. The hand of the fabric is less drapable. You could work 2 warps together as one to change the weft and warp structure for texture or to allow a larger weft bundle with many more elements in the weft bundle. The hand of the fabric will be softer the when it is woven at 10 epi.  Another reason to unbalance the weft bundle is suppose you are working in a very detailed area you may need more passes in a given a space for detail or may need to have more hatches or hachures in a given area. Note eyelashes, chin and collar for very small hatches that were less then half the weft bundle in order to double up the amount of hatches in a given area. By making the weft bundle smaller you can get more passes of the weft bundle in a given area.
The rib structure can be and often is  flattened by pressing with a damp cloth. I prefer to not mess with the rib structure because in doing so you mess with the natural properties if inter-inflection and reflection of the light and colour that is inherent in the wools and fibers used to create tapestry that give a sort of inner glow as the light is captured in the hairy properties of the weft and the rib structure of the tapestry.So this type of ridging or rib structure is a good thing.
The second type of ridging or organ pipes is caused by adding to much weft in a pass or half pass
Notice the organ pipes in the grey background.on the  right. I now know that all I would have had to do to get rid of the pipes would have been to use less weft in the  bubble and tighten my warp so the piece would have woven without the wefts shifting. Often times tapestry weavers will have a tendency to add more weft or a larger weft bubble going in a specific direction creating pipes. If you know you do this you can always watch that particular half pass closer and correct as you go.


Hopefully, by looking closely you  can see that there are 2 distinct areas of pipes on this piece. The first set is just basically organ pipes caused from using too much weft in the sleeve or cape above the hand. This could have easily been cured by using less weft in my bubble.
In the upper right hand corner is a type of organ pipe that is caused by weaving to close to the top bar that had been warped in a figure 8 pattern. As the warps or shed warps became further apart it took more weft to cover the warps because they were pulled further apart by the shed.
There is a fairly easy solution that I didn’t understand when I wove this piece. Completely loosen the warp, twine from side right above the fell line. use a fork pick the twining up and move it to the top of the loom right under the cross bar. You could also pick  a shed and  place a stick or batten  in the closed shed under the twining and push the twining up to the top bar of the loom-effectively keeping the shed closed. Retighten the warp and weave the tapestry to the top. On a small loom you may need to needle weave the last passes. A small aside- This piece pulled in because I tried to weave it from side to side with one bobbin. If I had broken up the area into several smaller areas and wove them in the same colour using hatches or lazy lines the tapestry would not have woven in. Adding bobbins in a plain colour area shoves the woven areas out ass the turns place more weft in a smaller area rather then pulling in.
Illustrations and pictures are copyrighted images from the book Tapestry 101 and were created by Pat Spark.

Guess that’s all for now. Hopefully in 2 weeks I can say and he is finished.
Cheers,
kathe
PS. These are wild Hollyhocks and usually stand 6-7 feet tall, but have decided to creep along the edge of my new herb garden, Who would have guessed.

Summer time and the living is great, but only if this works-3 part

 

More Soumack!

Most all of the soumack outlining in the feathers is structural Soumack which means it is done along a fell line even if it is an eccentric fell line.

The Roman numerals in the clock face is vertical soumack that floats passes and is only controlled by where ever the next warp is that I let the soumack jump to. This type of soumack doesn’t have to go vertically. Itcan go diagonally, horizontally or vertically. It can zig zag back and forth over a solid area of weaving. Not the example of the back and forth in the pale green area next to the dark soumack line which is a structural soumack.

The quills of the 3 women’s feathers are structural soumack that has had the soumack twiners graded in different sizes-less or more to create the shaping and thickness of the quills. Under these feathers is another area of soumack—the outline of the puzzle piece that is under the bottom feather. This outline is both structural and vertical.

In the horizontal direction the line is structural soumack running along the fell line and then turns and moves vertically over several over several passes to become vertical soumack. To a certain extinct the width and thickness of the line can be controlled by the amount of passes that the vertical soumack passes over between encircling the warps.

hopefully this will post this time?

Summer time and the living is great2-maybe if I can just get things to work!!

So what happens when you want your lines to fall between 2 warps?-

weft twinning

A few of the very small dark turquoise lines in the feathers are weft twining. The first diagram is twining along a fell line. So Twining can have the same categories as soumack-structural twining And vertical twining over passes. Most of the same rules and conditions apply to weft twining as apply to soumack. Where Soumack is always controlled by a warp, twining is always between the warps.Twining has a few super powers that you can’t do with soumack.

It can be two colour. Makes great dots and lines depending on how many passes you fly over between twist. It can also be used for creating cool textures and cool herringbone patterns in conjunction with tapestry. It’s texture like soumack is controlled by the size of the weft bundle or twiner.

There is a form of tapestry and twining done by Bedouin weavers called sahah’s which is a twined flat woven Bedouin tapestry. If I remember right I first read about it in a book called the Hand of the Weaver by…I need to find the book again, but it is definitely described in Joy Totah Hilden’s book on Bedouin Weaving of Saudi Arabia and it’s neighbors. The twining can have extremely elaborate patterning that works well with tapestry technique and twining patterns-both structural and floating types.The schematic drawings are from My book Lines in Tapestry and were done by Pat Spark.

New favourite tool

Okay, Okay there is nothing new about brassy bob’s. This is a box of 5.5 brassy bobs that I love. They look like little sardines. BUT, I have a new favourite. It’s a 4 inch brassy bob that fits perfectly in the palm of my hand. I have never used to hold thread. I use it as a tool for moving soumack and twining around when I am working. It’s like have a 6th finger that doesn’t get hangnails and the finger nail never wears or breaks. The other tools are a 5.5 inch brassy bob and a 5.5 Swedish bobbin that I do, but weft on.

Time to get on with life.

Need to Find Chene. He seems to have gone into hiding. Sara is shredding today and he doesn’t like the sound.

The world is full of surprises! Who would have guessed that purple potatoes have purple blooms instead of the normal White. Or that a dog that stayed calm during fireworks and explosions across the street of a van would panic at the sound of a paper shredder and hide.

Enough for now! Have to go save the Chene from the dastardly stationery paper shredder that won’t run away from him.

kathe

Summer Time and the living is great-part 1

It’s been two weeks since my last post. I am enjoying my summer time. No deadlines unless they are mine. Doesn’t mean I don’t have a lot to do just that I am doing them in my own way in my own time, my own schedule, my own hours. Even spent one day out while Spencer went fishing. Tucked in my little tiny Lani mirrix, warped and wove beside a stream for a whole afternoon. The Lani says it’s a dedicated bead loom-gr, but to me it’s a perfect take along tapestry loom-that and a book and I am deliriously happy. It’s the beginning of another portrait of Chene. Looks huge, but the weaving is only a little less then 5 inches wide-maybe 7 inches tall. I adapted the loom by doing a continuous warp and then tied one of the warping bars that I don’t use between the sheds so I can weave faster. With one open shed I only need to pick one shed. I also had made small bars to go through the spring to stabilize the warps and hold them in place-just like the larger mirrix have. The whole loom fits in a very small book bag that’s about the size of a sheet of paper. I have no idea when I’ll finish it. Doesn’t matter! It’s meant to travel with me and be my entertainment when I travel or kill time while Spencer fishes.(Sort of a puzzle because he always throws them back. I don’t eat or cook fish.) This tapestry cartoon is a photo I took last Christmas of Chene when I was trying to tempt him into a walk in the rain on the beach. In a way it reminds me of the sly virgin in the Unicorn tapestries. He’s laying on a purple pillow that has edges of a tapestry(fake-Jacquard) loveseat.

Spencer helping with FFP so I get to weave more hours and he doesn’t feel guilty leaving to go fishing while I work. When he is not working on his EBay business or garage selling to find inventory. We spend a couple of days a week hitting sales. In another life I might have been a great picker. The sales were really good to me this week. I found 3 beautifully twined rugs(American Craft style) and a beautiful middle eastern storage bag that is both pile, flat weave and tapestry. The pile is so soft it’s fun to lay and sit on. It has a fringe on one side and you can see the back where it is folded back. The confusion in the photo comes from the kelim it is laying on. It’s colouring looks very dark, but actually has some turquoise in the pattern. I think it’s been wrapped and stored for a long time and I wonder if it will lighten as it is exposed to light making the pattern more distinct.

And, where I am at now-2/3 almost 3/4 of the way finished.

Before the turn--After the turn-back of the loom

The hardest part of this last 2 weeks has been worrying about turning “And He…” around the beams of the mirrix and not throwing the fell line and selvedges into unevenness. It’s really big and not as comfortable or as easy to turn as a smaller tapestry-21 inches wide. I found that If I wove fairly even across the fell line, inserted a Navajo batten with the sharp edge against the fell line, loosened the tension all the way, and used the batten as a two sided handle I could gently force the warps through the spring and the tapestry down and around to the back.(Very long run on sentence, but true) On the back of the loom the last picture of the 3 you can see weights hanging to hold the warps that I accidently cut with a spring loaded snips. The snips have been banished from the studio.

The order of things has been changed from the original post because the way I first had it wouldn’t publish to my blog. You’ll find more about Soumack after weft twining.

test

Most all of the soumack outlining in the feathers is structural Soumack which means it is done along a fell line even if it is an eccentric fell line.

The Roman numerals in the clock face is vertical soumack that floats passes and is only controlled by where ever the next warp is that I let the soumack jump to. This type of soumack doesn’t have to go vertically. It can go diagonally, horizontally or vertically. It can zig zag back and forth over a solid area of weaving. Not the example of the back and forth in the pale green area next to the dark soumack line which is a structural soumack.

The quills of the 3 women’s feathers are structural soumack that has had the soumack twiners graded in different sizes-less or more to create the shaping and thickness of the quills. Under these feathers is another area of soumack—the outline of the puzzle piece that is under the bottom feather. This outline is both structural and vertical.

In the horizontal direction the line is structural soumack running along the fell line and then turns and moves vertically over several over several passes to become vertical soumack. To a certain extinct the width and thickness of the line can be controlled by the amount of passes that the vertical soumack passes over between encircling the warps.

This and That-Of Comic Books and Soumack

 Lately, I seem to be continualy surprising myself. In the last 2 weeks I have been on a Family trip to the  Bay area, managed to  weave more then I thought I would be able to, attended a Marc Adam’s Symposium-that I am still digesting, and managed to run through 5 major museums with Grandsons in tow+ Alcatraz-managed to sun burn my neck and back through 4 layers of T-shirt, scarf and heavy sports bra. Loved every second of it. My favourite place was the oh-so, tacky,unbelievable, so ethnocentric, confounding, laughable, mindboggling wax museum on Fisherman's Wharf. I thought I would never stop laughing and just being amazed about how these people were portrayed and sitting in front of Da Vinci’s last supper discussing it with Troy.

One evening in Alameda we went to see the Avengers with the Grandkids. Loved the renovated Alameda theater and all of the Art Deco frills that have been restored. It was designed by Timothy Ludwig Pflueger and built in 1932. I found that I have grown a little rusty on my comic book trivia. Spencer, of Alcatraz    course, knows everything possible to know about Spiderman. Major mistake on my part- Gotham City is Batman not Spiderman. Spiderman is NYC and DC not Marvel. I spent one evening on my I- pad researching old comic book hero's and heroines as a refresher.                Alameda Theater

Another Life time Ago:

The trivial amount of research brought back a lot of old thoughts and corundum's about my childhood. I wasn’t allowed to read fiction or see comic books. I later discovered the Public Library and realized that when I was home no one checked up on what I was reading and/or if the school and/or church approved or disapproved.

The Black Widow-from Wikipedia and Stan Lee, Don Rico; Tales of Suspense #52.First costume (and bouffant hairdo). From The Avengers #36 (Jan. 1967), art by Don Heck; Marvel Comics. By the time I pretty much grew up and went to WWC Natalya Romanov had the most incredible wardrobe imaginable-drawn, sewn and designed by me. Also borrowed from Wikipedia,1962;Journey into Mystery; marvel comics;created by Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Jack Kirby

I wasn’t allowed to read comic books when I was growing up-religious thing- again. BUT, my father had a hidden collection of comic books on the top shelf of the linen closet. I could just reach it if I stood on top of the space heater and didn’t tip the box too far so that it spilled into the bath tub. Those comic books fueled my love for animation and art that eventually lead to tapestry and the stylization that of my designs that I so love... I always wondered if he knew because I dropped a couple in the bath tub and put    

 Dad and Spike    them away wet.

                                                                      long road to nowhere and back

It was odd being nailed for reading Ivanhoe and Kenilworth by Scott and having to stay after school cleaning bathrooms as a penalty for reading the wrong book. I was in the 4th grade at the time.  When I did get  caught  it was heavily suggested to my parents that they should monitor my behaviour a little closer and come up with a fitting punishment.Usually more house work-not for reading-but the fact I shamed my parents by being called into the principals office.

I can still remember at a revival one of the Ministers suggesting that I would never reach heaven  at the second coming until I gave up my reading habits in front of 500 or 600 persons at the meeting. I had been caught under the stairwell reading an illicit book while hiding out from the revival meeting I was forced to attend as a school assignment by Mrs. Harrington and Mrs. Maclean-4th and 5th grade.  Mrs. Winters(English teacher-academy) did catch on  many years later and encouraged by  choosing to ignore it all.

      Thor-the comic book guy-fueled my interest in mythology another forbidden interest when I was growing up. The comic books  led me to research other things and a particular drawing style. Yea, probably not the best source, but My father gave me an Encyclopedia Britannica-Collegiate when I was in the second grade to help me with my home work. I blessed the door to door salesman a thousand/ million times  when I was growing up. Not only did I have the info to thumb through, but he showed me how to use an index. Totally low tech!

Serious stuff now-Tapestry Tech...

I think this section I am weaving best illustrates what  soumack is all about in pictorial tapestry-at least for me.

Soumack is basically done in 3 forms.

1. There is is what I call structural soumack, which is done along a fell line and becomes part of the weaving or the weaving itself. Best examples are Middle Eastern rugs and bags rugs.  Which is the patterned stripe in this picture. It actually becomes part of the main structure of the tapestry and is woven over by ensuing passes of plain weave or tapestry.Note in my sample above it is being done along the quill and shaft of the feather and around almost all of the petals of the flowers. The fell line is actually moving up at an angle that will support the lines of soumack that will create the quill and the shaft.

      To construct these lines I could have used an eccentric weft, but this would have created to problems I wanted to avoid. It would have increased the length of the float between two warps and perhaps looked loopy and created odd bulges  along the shaft  of the feather as the distance between warps became greater as the angle of the fell line increased as the angle of the fell line became greater. I REALLY NEEDD TO DIND SOME PICTURES OF THIS PROBLEM BEFORE I TEACH THIS CLASS AGAIN(#reminder to self). The second option would  have used many short burst of eccentric weaving along the fell line and  would still/could have a truncated bump or a very small slit between each new pass as it turned interrupting the smoothness of the line I was trying to weave.. Again increasing the chance of a loopy bumpy  look as the passes traveled up the fell line.

The biggest problem to deal with is that inherent in the eccentric weave structure is the problem of tension control and the chance of pull in on a steep angle somewhere in the tapestry as it is beaten down. It is almost impossible when doing several eccentric passes to use enough weft to both cover the warps and not create pull in problems as you continue to the weave the tapestry. The bubble has to be horrendously large and looks really terrible as you weave it in order to compensate when beaten against in future passes. The problems would most like become apparent many passes up from the original lines of eccentric weaving as areas of warp are pulled closer together. and the sides could pull in drastically  closest to the end of the eccentric pass. You would then need to un weave and try again or choose another technique-anyway or accept the problem.

By using structural soumack I can make the line look smoother then a woven line unless I split the weft which also would be too eccentric as it covers the hills and valleys of the turns along the fell line. I still need to carefully watch for pull in, but it is much more apparent and easier to correct then eccentric weaving. Where I place it it stays and one turn usually only controls the distance between 2 wraps of soumack. I can apply pressure to unsmooth places along the soumack and/or smooth the angle. Because of the nature of structural soumack. It doesn’t cause problems further up the weaving. Each twist of the soumack locks the line of soumack into place. The other great thing about this type of soumack is it creates  neutral shed and is a neutral shed.No problem with unruly wefts ending in the wrong shed and needing to be changed.

The other advantage is by controlling the size of the soumack weft bundle I can control the thickness of the line. In the brown and white soumack lines I am using 6 weft threads to create the major out lines of the shaft. The inside of the shaft or white is a pointed thinning line that thickens as it rises up the fell line. So in order to get the transition from smaller to larger, I started out with 2 threads of white in the pointed end then switched to 4  and then 6. in the first white layer of soumack. As I twine up the shaft with my initial 2 threads I can the soumack over the next layers of soumack by increasing the thickness with the over lay of the 2 soumack wefts on top of the larger bundles of soumack weft.

2.The second type of soumack is what I call a floating soumack or a vertical soumack. It rides on the surface of the tapestry floating over the tapestry wefts. The vertical grids in the lace on is this type of soumack. It is only controlled by the warps. Floating vertical soumack was used in the puzzle pieces and heart beat lines in red. In Too Little Too Late structural soumack was used on to create straight lines along many of the shapes. You can make the floating line thicker or thinner in look by going over one weft passes or fewer weft passes. SO, it is controlled by the warp and the length of the float to the next warp. It’s great for drawing very fine  lines and outlines on the surface of a tapestry. The one thing one needs to watch is that vertical soumack is either right handed or left handed depending on the directions of the turn.  What one needs to watch when using this form of Soumack is the size of the weft bundle. I purposely used larger weft bundles in the detail of Pax Chene to create texture and the soft look of the chenille bedspread. Generally to make the surface feel flat to the touch and so it doesn’t make a shadow is half of the weft bundle.

3.The third type of soumack is called long jump soumack. I have seen it in Turkish textiles the jumps between warps can be an inch or more and it is done very closely together across the fell line and creates a brocaded effect and a satiny look. Will discuss this next time as I start doing my handouts for a brocading class I am teaching-maybe-for a workshop that is still trying to decide which workshop they wish me to teach.

 

 

Chene is growing testy and bored and needs a walk!

Take care!

kathe