Weaving II

Week 5 - a bit of a frustrating session; the grey circle from last week was uneven on one side - it needed a mix of counting passes and getting the shape right by eye whereas I was just doing it by eye and trying to hit the marks on the warp. This week I was supposed to start hatching, but instead I spent the time filling the top half of the circle with a bright orange, switching midway in a pass from one strand to a double strand to thicken it up and make it a bit quicker which made it go wonky, and then trying to straighten it all up. Got there in the end! But I felt like I was just filling in rather than learning anything new...

Week 6 - a fresh start after half term! Finally started hatching, which is using two different coloured yarns to make a shape. I wasn't very happy with the circle I did previously so I wanted to do a circle again and make it better! A much smaller one this time, but I'm really pleased with how it came out - using double strands of both the blue and the turquoise to get an even finish. Again it's not completely round, but I thought it was a good start; learning lessons from last time and remembered to count as well as using the guides I drew on the warp. I weaved the green from the left and stopped at the mark, the began a pass in the blue from the right to "hit the green on the nose". 

I then started on spotting, again in two contrasting colours, doing a full pass in the background colour and half a pass in the foreground, spot colour. I used a light yellow as the background and a purple-y grey (similar to the big circle) for the spots. I took the image above at the end of the lesson; the hatching is on the right and the spotting is on the left. 


Week 7 - I continued with spotting to bring it up to level with the hatching, before starting on eccentric weaving. It's hard to break out from the geometric way of working that I've learnt for the past 6 weeks so my attempts at curved *eccentric* weaving didn't really work very well! 

I later found out that was mainly because I kept tying off the thread rather than continuing along; so for the pink I started on at the end of the lesson, I was tying it off when it came to the edge (so would have tied it off where I'd stopped) rather than continuing down all the way to the right. Will try again next week and make it go all swerved and curvy. Only 3 weeks left! Time for me to get my own frame and weaving materials now I think. Close up of the last two weeks work below; spotting, hatching and (not very) eccentric weaving.