Saturday, February 14, 2009

The rest of the story and photos of tea towels

The rest of the story first, and in a nutshell, I did get the plastic bag rug done, but it is UGLY. I mean, majorly ugly. I get to relearn again that if I use ugly materials, I get ugly product. The bags are orange with some forest green in the design. Ugly.

This was last weekend, and I was running out of time. I used the leftover section warp I still had on the loom, rethreaded it for my size, and made another piece, this time using recycled fabric. All the fabric I use in my rugs is recycled. This is some fabric from a local futon factory cutting floor. The piece turned out nicely, all papers, photos, etc. are in, and I'm done with that! When the website is up for the show, I'll post a link here.

As promised last month, here is a photo of the rose path tea towels.


Now that I have my art show entry done, I am warping the Hammett up for some more, you guessed it! Rag Rugs! I have some nice colors to work with, and it will be fun to make some spring-y combinations. Rugs will be my main focus for the next 6 months.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

Know when to start over

That would be at the beginning, or near it. I ordered twine to use for warp on this art project, which is going to be a plastic bag rug. The tying twine looked big when I got it in, but I waited to make a decision when I actually got to the stage of warping. Guess what? I'm there. I wound some of it last night, and it's way too big. I don't want these rugs to be at all warp-faced. I just went to the lumber store and got nylon twine - bigger than 8/4, but not nearly as big as the tying twine. So, I have a whole box of tying twine. I should be good for: garden twine, twine to make trellises for climbing flowers, etc. Who knows, maybe I'll find a weaving related use for it! I could make several hundred macrame flower hangers!

I did get the 35 yards of warp off - or near enough. As does sometimes happen with section warps, when I got down to the end, I found one section that was short. It's on the outside of the beam, though. That's a little plus. So I cut that section off. I'll tie this twine warp onto the remaining sections, and after the art project is finished, I'll probably go ahead and weave the last rug, runner, or whatever decides to come out of the loom. Right now I'm under a deadline for the art project, so that's first priority.

I got 22 rugs out of that warp so far. Since I'm in a time crunch, I've just stacked them up and will hem them all later. I must say, they are just gorgeous, and somehow the fact that they are all stacked up makes them more attractive. There's something of a harvest feel to it.

I ran through a lot of my Pendleton selvedge doing "the stack." I have more ordered and look forward to seeing what Santa brought - after this art project is done.