One of the joys of weaving with found objects is collecting
materials with only a vague idea about how I might use them. I’ve been collecting brass keys for years,
knowing that someday I would need them for a composition. This week the veil of uncertainty lifted and
I started weaving. The background for a
piece will feature a bird cage with the door open and a bird peering out toward
freedom. The background will be woven
with brass colored yarns with keys integrated into the yarn. I didn’t want the warp to distract from the
keys, but I didn’t find anything that was quite right when I dug through my
warp materials. I then rummaged through
my box of gold yarns, and lo and behold I found gold lame´. A good warp must be strong, so a good test is
to pull on the material and see if it breaks—and one strand broke easily. So tried two, then three strands of lame´,
but it wasn’t until four strands held up to my fury and I knew how to warp my
loom. I love empirical learning! I laid out my keys, dug through my dark
yellow yarns and started to weave. It’s
a little like doing a puzzle to incorporate materials into the background. I want the objects to appear randomly placed,
but of course the weaving is very structured.
I’m constantly doubling back to get materials back into frame. I love how it looks so far, and I’m very appreciative
of input I’ve gotten from Chris Miller on this piece as the design for the
composition has evolved. Thanks Chris,
your creativity is a wonderful influence on me!
Of course one weaving isn’t sufficient to fill my days, so I’ve
been working on several pieces in parallel where the compositions have evolved
from my original thinking. I’m working
on a migration series, with the idea that fish also migrate. I zeroed in on featuring some kind of a
salmonoid undulating over a rocky river bottom with slimy greens and earthy
clay brown river bottom. The problem
with just placing the fish over the rocks is that it wouldn’t read ‘water’. My thought was to feature lily pads to define
the water surface level and make the fish look more natural floating over the
bottom. The salmon no longer made sense,
since lily pads are found in still, warm waters. I thought of a print that Jacob created that won
a Scholastic Gold Key award last year that featured koi. I’m partial to the orange and black mottled
varieties, and a little research taught me that koi migrate significant distances
to find flooded meadows or stagnant waters to spawn. Perfect!
This coming week, as Jacob is kickboxing, teaching, or training in
Taekwondo I’ll be needle felting his koi.
Last week I was rummaging through the freezer to find
something for dinner and I stumbled onto a bag of frozen dandelion heads. Of course I didn’t recognize it, thinking it
was probably some long forgotten project of the boys when I realized it was
mine. Ten years ago or so there was a
bumper crop of dandelions in Bryan Park, so we collected and froze them for the
moment when I had the chance to dye with them.
Good news, that time appeared this week.
With great confidence and little fanfare I plunked the whole bag into a
dye pot filled with water and sent it through a cycle of boiling, steeping,
cooling and filtering. I added two
tablespoons of alum, tossed in around eight ounces of fleece and brought it
back to a boil for an hour. After
cooling overnight I pulled out the fleece to find a color in the yellow range,
but it’s a little browner than the lemony yellows that I’m accustomed to
getting when dyeing with dandelions. I
still have some of the yellow to compare it with so I can test my memory. No matter what, I know it will be useful for
something.
The sad news of the week?
No pie. I had my last slice of
blueberry pie on Friday morning. I
survived the weekend nibbling on cranberry pumpkin muffins I made, but I’m not
sure they will carry me through to Monday.
Jim…?
Until next week,
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