Taking off One of my Hats.

I don't know if its true of all creative people, but I'm sure this will resonate with a few. We are often multi talented. I sew, I knit, I crochet, I quilt, I garden, I decorated my own house and reupholstered some of my furniture. I bake bread and make jam. And at one point I thought I could weave.

My husband is a terrible enabler and after I bought a very small hand loom to make cording and belting, he scoured the internet and found me a loom. BOY did he find me a loom.

This is a 72 inch Leclerc Nilus.  A piece of furniture. An example of fine craftsmanship in solid maple. A very respectable 4 harness loom.

True to my nature I thought, " I can do this". It doesn't look that hard. I will admit there was a VERY STEEP learning curve. And this is where the stubbornness I was born with kicked in. I was determined to master this (using the term MASTER loosely).
And I did.

My first piece off the loom was made into (hold your breath here) PLACEMATS. Rather nice ones. I use them, I like them.......................................................................but I don't need any more.

Plain old basket weave was nice, but a little boring. So after finding and falling love with some very expensive silk yarn, I thought I'd make a piece of cloth. Full width, in an interesting pattern, a huck pattern. It too was nice.

There is a pattern here. These are " nice ". Not great. It didn't feel great and probably to a veteran weaver they aren't great, or even nice. That's when I realized I wasn't enjoying myself.
I had rearranged my life, my living room to include weaving and this piece of furniture haunted me every time I walked by it. It didn't call to me, it mocked me. It took me a whole season to realize I just didn't WANT to weave.

At first my husband didn't believe me. It wasn't until I started offering this loom to my friends and guild members, that he saw I was serious. I wanted my living room back. (It had ended up there because that was far as we could get it into the house without completely dismantling the whole thing.)

Believe it or not I couldn't give it away. The weaving movement has modernized so much and there are newer, smaller and more portable looms available. People simply don't have the room anymore. All I wanted in return, was to realize monies spent in fully outfitting the old girl. This is still a very active company in Quebec and parts are still readily available.

Then my niece came into the picture. She Knits. She Spins. And she lives in this great old stone house in eastern Ontario that just cried out for her to complete her WOMAN CAVE with a loom.

YES.

So this old girl is now on her way to Perth Ontario, where I expect it will be petted and appreciated more then it was here. I look forward to seeing her work on her blog.

Tales of an old Stone house   mymillhouse.blogspot.com

I don't regret a minute I tried to devote to this craft, but I realized I was just a little too old and creaky for this rather vigorous activity. My time I spend creating with fabric is just too precious to be splintered further than it already is by another demanding craft.

I wish her well. I know she will be much better than I.
(But that's what successive generations are for, Aren't they?)

Playing with the Paint

I think I'm hooked with this stuff, at least in the summer. To do anything other than simple painting I need the hot sun, and that's not been plentiful the last couple of weeks. And its brilliant, no respirators, not salt or other chemicals; very, very safe and easy cleanup.

My fresh order arrived with a whole bolt of pima cotton. ( I kind of feel obligated to make a blouse or something from it before I start painting 20 yds worth.) But I'm restricting myself to Fat Quarters. At least until I do something I want to repeat BIG time.

Lets start with my moping up cloths! Really!
After each painted piece is lifted from the plastic work surface it leaves behind bubbles of colour. I've been laying another piece over it to mop the remainder. Reds with blues and yellows with greens. These pieces are being built over time and are heat set between each appl. So this can go on until I decide its done. Definitely a one of a kind.

I wanted to work with blacks and blues and greens, in various shades of grey and colour intensities.

 

One of my NEW purchases was a small bottle of pearlescent opaque paint. It can be mixed into any colour. It dilutes it and lightens it but leaves behind a shimmer. I had a small amount, about a Tbsp. of pale green so I simple dribbled it over the addition of dark green on this previously set black piece. Being opaque it sits right on top.

 

I'm thinking SKY / WATER here. Over a watery blue backing I put a more intense blue and some purple. That was the new colour I mixed today. These start to look like pieces of Art rather than cloth to be cut up.

This was the only Fresh White cloth today. The purple diluted, full strength red and some dilute blue. The streaks are from folds and gravity.

The last one is the most exciting. Brown? Gold? Not sure, but a keeper.

This is the purple over a set yellow with red and then just a sprinkle of dry RIT crystals in yellow.
All are heat set, so permanent. A little bit of salt effect, but lots of character.

These intense colours are much more exciting to me than pastels. The trick will be not to muddy stuff.

Sockeye Salmon - Day 4 - Final

You may wonder why I chose a rather grotesque creature to work on. This rose from working on the grizzly standing in the river with no salmon in sight. Sigh! And besides, the colours of these fish are spectacular.  But he's finished now.

It was quite a leap to CUT my fabric and use it in this piece. I did repaint some portions as I went along and also used ink sticks for more precise shots of colour.
The water is a favourite technique using shades of blue with white and " snowflake " thread. Some of the background water movement is in colour and some in simple invisible thread. The placement of currents and waves was dictated by the material. That's where it got fun. Well, the whole thing was fun. Enjoy!

Salmon - Day 3 Thread painted

Thread painting, in this case, is really only adding the veins in the fins, the scales and the gills.
Now I can work on the background.

 

I did add some thin black paint to the belly and the tail. I removed the black organza to let more of the green show through.

It really didn't take much thought to decide which fabric I wanted to use. I was going to overlay with organza to muddy the background as if underwater. But then I decide to have my fish moving up the rapids above water. That necessitated waves and splashes.

 

I went with a technique I had used before, tracing a picture of water onto tearaway stabilizer. As it's translucent, it enabled me to position it over a "natural" item in my material.

 

 

 This was fastened with tight stitches, the excess cut away, and then the stabilizer removed.

This "splash" still needs a lot of colour, primarily white.

Building the Salmon

I spent a few hours on the internet yesterday, looking at photos of salmon. Again there are many species so I suppose mine will end up being a hybrid of the Sockeye, the brightest. They also appear to look the most ferocious. This was a lovely water colour but then, there are hundreds of photos.

I gave my fabrics a trial with a few shades of organza. That was a no brainer as it would provide the shimmer I wanted on the fish. Red was best over my orange fabric. Black over the orange worked for the belly fins and the tail.

After making a drawing, a copy and a reverse copy on the fusible web, I cut out the body and then carefully added the organza a tacked it all around to the fusible coating.

For the upper fins I used a pale grey. The head is the only portion without organza but that will be gussied up with thread. And I may change the organza colour on the tail......too dark.

So this guy is about 18 inches. I'm rather please with my fabric efforts.
(PS I just went out and ordered a bolt of white fabric and 4 litres of the primaries. My husband is such an enabler. It was he who pointed me to the product.)