Good Quote

I read this in Crafts magazine and thought it was a good description of weaving!
'weaving is a complicated business of preparation and technique -like playing a very skilled game of noughts and crosses, only your back hurts and you might eventually need glasses'

Overshot in a different way!

This is a close up of a quick warp I did between my paid work.
Its an overshot design which I've been interested in since working in Tanzania as you only need four shafts to creatate the pattern.
In this piece, which is a close up of a wall hanging, I've used different pink silks to pick out the overshot pattern in different places in the fabric.
I like it as overshot is quite an old fashioned way of working and just picking out parts of it makes it seem like an old fabric thats worn out, something you would find in a museum.

Weaving again

I'm back on the loom doing some paid work, which is great to see how the loom functions in its new home. All seems to be going well and I have some interesting weights that I bought from Oxfam. You need weights to keep the tension in the warp and I didn't have any so I scoured Oxfam where I volunteer on a Thursday afternoon and they had some pink tie round your leg weights so they are now dangling off the back of the loom! With the added advantage that when I'm not using them I can do some weight lifting, all for £2.99 not bad!

steel wire

This is an interesting one and something I definatly want to experiment with further, the use of metal wire. Here I've use a very fine steel wire to weave pleats which can be manipulated in to different shapes. As these have to be washed to shrink the wool the wire takes on a wave shape from the washing machine which is how I've left this one.

More from the jelly fish collection

wool

I've been taking a lot of photos recently of my work for various application forms so I thought I'd post a few so you can see a bit more of my portfolio. This is one of my jelly fish inspired pieces which I did for my degree show. Its wool, monofiliment and silk. At the moment as I think I've already said I'm using these pieces for inspiration for my next project and I think I may have just tracked down a similar wool so I can finally do all the things I wanted to do based on the jelly fish project.