WEAVING SKETCHES

Posted by Peg in South Carolina 

I recently read about Susan Jarmain on Nigel’s blog.  Go here to read the entire post.

Susan is a Canadian weaver who uses silk as her fiber and ikat as one of her techniques. What caught my attention was the fact that she uses a very small portable loom to make what Nigel refers to as mini-mockups of her larger pieces.

The loom is unbelievably simple.  It is nothing but a piece of foam board with pins angled in at top and bottom from which to wind the warp.  She needle-weaves the weft. Nigel describes these mock-ups as pretty accurate.  Nigel has an image of her setup on the blog post I linked to above.

Go to Susan’s website to see some of her work.

I am fascinated. But I simply cannot imagine plotting out a large piece using this kind of small scale loom. Even doing this in black and white or black, white and gray.  Yet artists do that very thing.  How would I do it?  Perhaps I just have to try it to find out.

POSTSCRIPT

I  have been thinking for quite some time about the possibility of combining ikat and crackle.  Go to this post written in 2007 for how I was thinking then:  Leaving the Comfort Zone   No, I have not yet left the comfort zone…….

“Weaving Sketches” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on January 26, 2010. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.