Woven Textile Designer, Handweaver
Woven Textile Designer and Educator Laura Thomas has been running a Weaving Activity in the MakerShack at Cheltenham Science Festival and I’ve popped in a few times to lend another pair of weaving hands. The MakerShack has on average 1000 visitors each day, to have a go at a wide offering of both ‘techno’ and traditional making crafts. Children and Adults who had never woven before, were weaving their own mini masterpieces within minutes on little weaving frames.
Promotional images from Vanessa Arbuthnott on launching this addition to her collection in Spring 2019.
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The curator at the Devon Guild has done a wonderful job in displaying my pieces within the gallery space, complimenting the work of the other designer makers around me.
For ‘Get Fresh’ I wanted to show these two contrasting collections to reflect the diversity of my designs. Most of my patterns can be woven large or small in scale and be transferable from a rug design to a light soft furnishing fabric.
Although aesthetically quite different, both are designed through extensive sampling on the loom, then woven by hand, in British Wool from breeds not used widely (due to colour or properties of the wool or because they are designated as rare). I avoid using petrochemical dyes by extracting colour from nature or just using ‘non-white’ wool in browns, shades of grey and black.
The subtle patterning is created using just two alternating tones of grey in both warp and weft; simply put, where a pale weft weaves over a dark warp, a horizontal pale line results and a pale weft weaving under a dark warp results in a vertical pale line.
The cushions bear the names of places in Cumbria; the hardy Herdwick breed of sheep are native to it’s fells. I stayed in Newton Rigg on an Agricultural student exchange on my first visit to the Lake District many years ago.
I started experimenting with extracting colour, primarily yellows and oranges, from Dahlias towards the end of their flowering season. With the first frost this locally sourced fresh raw material ended.
An alternative colour-way using dried natural dyestuffs was developed. An individual dyestuff rarely yielded the precise pinks of the Tibetan monks robes so I used two or more dye-baths to obtain better colour matching.
I experimented with natural dyestuffs that generally give reds/pinks/purples such as Madder Root, Brazilwood and Logwood, ‘modifying’ each dyebath to get what I wanted. By adjusting the acidity/alkalinity of the water, the maximum heat applied to extract the dye and other factors, I turned warm reds into cool reds, blue-purples to red-purples and these red-purples into cerise pink by grating chalk into a Brazilwood dyebath.
Colour was blended across the width of the warp, alternating one of cerise pink with smaller amounts of the other pink/purple tones. Both this warp and the yellow/orange warp was just 2m long; sufficient to weave just two of these unique rugs.
Loving the ceremonial head-wear of the Tibetan monks, I just had to incorporate a little of the Dahlia dyed yellow and orange into this pink/purple design.
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JOY is the title of this new work, created specifically for Get Fresh 2019; an exhibition organised by The Devon Guild of Craftsmen showcasing the work of emerging craft practitioners.
Working with the wool from rare breed and commercially farmed British sheep, I have used dyes made from Dahlia’s and other plants and woven these joyful unique pieces by hand.
The colour reference for this work came from images in a book by His Holiness the Dalai Lama; The Art of Living.
Colour was extracted from fresh Dahlia flowers and used to dye hand-spun wool from the White-faced Dartmoor sheep. As well as yellow, orange and red flowers, I experimented with white, purple and almost black petals, most yielding yellows and oranges with a surprising bright green from a cerise pink flower.
With a single flower only dyeing 10g of wool, I designed a warp of 320 threads to accommodate the the vast number of small skeins each in a unique tone of yellow or orange. Two Meditation rugs 20″x 28″ were woven by hand on my vintage wooden 4-shaft counterbalance floor loom, from this warp.
As red Dahlias did not yield a red dye, madder root and brazilwood were used to dye the Welsh Cross bred and Dorset wools used in the weft patterning.
The patterning was inspired by patterns in The Art of Living and the 6-bar patterns from the I-Ching Hexograms; 6 solid horizontal bars representing Earth Energy.
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I have been selected to exhibit my woven textiles at Get Fresh, the Devon Guild of Craftsmen‘s biennial showcase for emerging Designer / Makers in the South-West.
The show opens on Saturday 19th January 2019 and runs through to 10th March.
Should you wish to join me at the “Opening Party” on the evening of Friday 18th January please contact me here.
In August I was invited to work with the inspiring day patients, volunteers and staff at the Sue Ryder Leckhampton Day Hospice on this multi-discipline creative art project. The pieces created will be exhibited for the first time on Saturday 8th September, at their Autumn Fayre.
I wound warps onto tiny frame looms, into which the participants wove plant dyed wool, fragments of textiles from home and paper strips printed with words from their poetry. The discovery of a ‘treasure trove’ of glittery threads, ribbons and beads proved too tempting, so these were incorporated into several of the little woven pieces.
