WARP AND WEFT PAINTING RAISED TO A NEW LEVEL

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

I have, thanks to the Weave Tech list, discovered a new-to-me weaver with an intriguing technique.  Her name is Fuyuko Matsubara.  She is Japanese but now lives in the United States.  To learn more about her, read this piece.  Go here to see an example of one of her pieces.

To oversimplify vastly, this is, at least in part, what she does.  She weaves two pieces of cloth in white.  She cuts them off the loom and paints the two of them with MX dyes.  The designs she paints on the two pieces are identical.  The colors, however, are different.

When done with the painting, she washes the painted fabrics and  then unweaves the two cloths and puts the warp back on the loom.
 
For the first warp, she weaves with the weft from the second piece of cloth.  For the second warp, she weaves with the weft from the first piece of cloth.  And this weaving with the now colored yarns is done in a structure different from the one she used when weaving the white cloth.  From what I could see, it looks like she uses a jacquard loom for the final weaving.

As she herself admits, this is a very tedious way to make cloth.  What she does, requires extraordinarily kinds of calculations.  What she does is far more complex than what I would even dream of attempting.

BUT

The process, on a small and much less complex scale, really intrigues me.

ON THE OTHER HAND

Why can’t I just push myself into exploring a bit of weft ikat?

“Warp and Weft Painting Raised to a New Level” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on July 6, 2010. ©2010 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.