The Others...

Here are the rest of the final projects from the Woven Rug. Textiles are difficult to photograph so some of the nuances of the work is lost. There was a nice variety of practical floor pieces and more artistic wall hangings. Most people stayed way from the pile technique which is understandable since it is the most time intensive. Click on the images if you need a closer look.

"Those two/too people are in love"

My rug is done and I am happy with it. When I registered for the class it was not my first choice but I was still strangely excited about it. The idea of sitting in front of a loom and just sending yarns back and forth seemed like a relaxing prospect when compared with carting heavy steel up and down stairs and back and forth between buildings. And for the first three hours of weaving it is relaxing...and then the back aches begin. Despite the aches, I fell in love with weaving. My furniture designs have really set aside issues of color and pattern in favor of texture and form and it was challenging to address a different set of concerns.

The design of my rug is based on two of my favorite books The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon and The Case of the Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle. The colors and style of the rug are taken (with a few tweaks) from the jacket cover of the prior. The embroidered figures are an alphabet based on a Sherlock Holmes' short story and they spell out "Those two people are in love," a line from Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning work.



The rug is somewhere between eight and nine feet long by two feet wide. The end borders are a two-colored rib weave and the main body of the rug is a satin weave. The dancing men were embroidered onto the rug after it was removed from the loom.

A note on the title: Like all things handmade there are various imperfections throughout the rug. While stitching the men, I accidentally added a single arm to one of the figures turning the word "two" into "too". Funny, huh!

Extra Credit

While developing ideas for my final project, I wanted to try weaving a scarf. I set up the warp with enough length for three attempts but decided to call it quits at two. The warp string I was using was a textured raw silk in a neutral color. I considered adding some additional colors into the warp but didn't want to have to deal with the same vertical color pattern in each of the scarves. In the end, the warp gave me considerable trouble as it was fragile and easily tangled.

You can see in this close-up shot that a few of the warp strands have broken. In the end, I didn't mind the effect but it was a little tiresome dealing with it in the moment.

The scarves are quite structural and not as soft as I was anticipating. I have been told that washing them in a mild soap will loosen the fibers a bit. However, in the meantime I have grown to like their strength in terms of appearance. Athough, you have to have a long neck for them to even really be bearable to wear. I have also considered adding buttons in certain places to emphasize their weight but that requires time and I have been spending it in other ways the past couple weeks.

Photo Shoot

Yesterday evening we had a photo shoot for emo.table. As a group, we wanted to submit it to a competition and needed some good photos documenting how it works. It went surprisingly quickly given the tricky nature of the light. Here are some of the pics.