Weave Samples: Unit X

I struggled with my initial weave due to my warp. Initially, I had cotton surrounding my monofilament warp, which soon turned into a disaster when it couldn’t handle the pressure of the weft. This resulted in breakages. As I continued, leaving extra weft to create a fringed edge was essential in order to stop it from snapping, which stemmed to my weaves looking very messy. I managed to get into my weaving as soon as I decided to take the cotton off, making it much more manageable and allowing it to look neater and more professional.

 

One problem that I now faced was the sliding of yarns on the monofilament warp, something which unfortunately couldn’t be helped. I resolved this in the best way I could by manually condensing the yarns. My weaves turned out much like my embroidery samples, containing the same cords and yarns so that I could truly start to build a similarity for my ‘edges’ collection.

 

I really love this sample as I have managed to use the weakness in the warp to my advantage. Where the weft is slipping on the monofilament, I have manipulated this into some of the shapes seen within my drawings, taken my photographs. Adding the extra strands of mixed yarns into the cotton weft accentuated the merging of colour, which was my main concentration.

 

 

 

In terms of finishing my weave, I have decided to keep it as one long strand as I love the blocks of colour clashes throughout, and the techniques I've used really compliment each other. In the image above, you can see that I've added part of my embroidery sample to the top edge to finish it off. This is highly relatable to the work of Luisa Cevese for Wallace and Sewell, where cut-offs have been used to form a new part for something else (in her case, bags, bibs and belts).

 

I feel that overall, I have managed this project reasonably well. I have overcome problems logically, and used some of the weaknesses to my advantage to push forward with my ideas. I feel that my time management could have been better, as I felt rushed towards the end of the project- but this was purely down to all my work coming together to look like a collection. In future, I will know to think about this beforehand, so I can plan my final ideas better. An aspect that I have loved is the use of colour, something that has not highly featured in my work throughout the whole year.