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.

Unweaving and Weaving

Woven Friday: 5"
Total Woven To Date: 20"

On Friday I wove the warp back to where I was before I unwove. Today I can move on.

I'm glad I unwove. If nothing else, I feel better about myself as a weaver. Bonnie gave me a whole new perspective on the unweaving thing. She left a comment which I think deserves being up front on the blog for all to read. Here it is:

"The true joy and miracle of unweaving is....that we can. When I shared my weaving studio with a wood carver, he wistfully said one day 'Many's the time I wish I could uncarve'. My appreciation and gratitude for unweaving was born on that day,"

What is This?

Total Woven To Date: 15"
Unwoven Yesterday: 5"


5 inches of unwoven weft in all its glory--20/2 mercerized pearl cotton.

Unweaving

It happened again today. It's happened for the past few days. It happens shortly after I have begun my first weaving session of the day. I look at my yarns. I look at what I have just woven. At some point I have interchanged shuttles 2 and 3. It's never shuttles 1 and 4. It's never shuttles 1 and 2. It's never shuttles 3 and 4. It's always those two middle shuttles, 2 and 3. I discover that at some point, I have picked them up in reverse order; I have picked up shuttle 3 instead of shuttle 2. When I then lay the shuttles down after throwing them, they of course stay in reverse order. So of course I continue weaving with them in reverse order. Until I spot the error.

Today I had to weave back 24 shots. That's more than usual. Usually it's only 16 or 20 shots.

The place with the error really looks very little different from the rest. If I took a picture of it, I doubt that anyone could even spot the error. Should I really unweave it? Yes, no, yes, no. Oh jeezz, oh well.

I unweave.

When I unweave, I cut off the weft ends. I raise each shed and pull out the corresponding weft end. Then when the four are pull through, I cut those short. And so I continue. However, I am trying to preserve the brown ends, since I have so little of the brown left. So, instead of cutting it off, I throw it in reverse through its appropriate shed. After I have done that a second time, I then wind the loose weft yarn onto the pirn and continue.

The color order for the blocks never changes. The only thing that changes with each block is the starting point of the colors. I would think that by now I would have the color order memorized. But I don't. Perhaps there is too much else going on. Perhaps, because of the way I lay the shuttles down I think I don't need to worry about memorizing the order.

I could blame my bench. My bench is the kind that has an empty space on each side to keep things like shuttles and other tools. When I weave, there is room on my bench next to me for one shuttle. The other three go in that empty space. There is not room for them to lie flat, so I put them in at a slant with their noses pointing up. They stay in the right order. But in any case, it apparently is not all that difficult to grab the third shuttle (the second in that space) instead of the second shuttle (the first in that space).

All of this could happen just as easily if the shuttles were lying on a flat space next to me.

One more thing to hyperventilate about........

When I am done with the unweaving I always weave back to the point where I discovered the error. No matter how tired I am. No matter how sick and tired I am of the correcting. If I am still tired, I then stop weaving for awhile. If I am not, I just continue on. Today I am going next door to take care of the neighbor's cat.............