A rainy Saturday
And the first tomato from my garden….yes, I did eat it on my homemade bread with pesto from the basil in the garden, topped with parmesan….it was a very comforting lunch.
Here is the progress made on my boundweave wall hanging. Aside from the tree, which is not my design anyway, I am not happy with my images. Drat! That second figure is supposed to a coleus plant. Are you laughing? (I’m not.) And the next figure is a lady slipper. I think others may wonder if it’s some kind of bug, or a really bad rendition of a person standing on her head. Dear Bob says these are things that mean something to us, so I shouldn’t worry what other people see in them. I’m trying to convince myself of that!
This is a lady slipper, this is a lady slipper, this is a lady slipper…..I still don’t believe it….
Some boundweave hints: many years ago when I did a Christmas wall hanging on 4 shafts, I remember reading about how the weft will slant up or down according to the direction of the treadling, because it is a twill afterall.
So, if you wanted eyes or hair (or in the case above, the lower petals on the orchid) to slant in a particular direction, you have to consider that in your treadling.
So the tree and the coleus were woven by treadling from left to right across my tie up. But the petals on the orchid did not look right done that way, so I switched to treadling ‘backward,’ or right to left. I could have changed direction in the middle of the orchid so that the individual picks up the upper petals would have slanted upwards. My experience with the coleus plant was that treadling either direction didn’t quite give me what I wanted, so I decided not to change direction. The source of this information is Clotilde Barrett’s book Boundweave, Chapter 7, page 60.
The other thing that I’ve found very helpful this time around is graph paper. On the previous project I used square graph paper and had to figure out how many rotations of the treadling sequence it took to make my weaving square. Now I discovered on Weavolution that Karen in the Woods is using a flattened type of graph paper, where the height of each space is shorter than the length, making squat rectangles instead of squares. I went looking for graph paper like that. I found it at incompetech.com (clever name). Click on ‘Grid/Graph Paper.’ I chose this one, and it is pretty close to being on square per pick. And by ‘pick’ I mean a full rotation of the treadling series, which you’ll understand if you’ve done boundweave.
I hope my next few figures are better. I’m going to start weaving a loom now, and it’s not my design either, so I feel it’s bound (could I have picked a different word here?) to turn out better. I’m not feeling overly confident about any of my designs, and yet 20 years ago when I did my last boundweave project, all the designs were mine and I think those figures turned out very well.
Elves and Reindeer
Santa
Santa Lucia
Onward…..
