DVD Project 4

I started to work on the project from my second tapestry weaving DVD.  It’s the fourth and final project from Nancy Harvey’s DVD set.  I plan to order her book next, which I will likely work a sampler from or create one of my own from bits and pieces in the book.  For this project, I created my draft and cartoon mostly from scratch.  I had to consider the amount of warp I had left to work with and include the techniques I wanted to work on.  Thankfully, I was able to sketch out a nice draft and create a full-size cartoon from which to work.  I have some shipping paper left from a package, which I ironed out flat, and it seems to be working quite well.

The bottom of this project starts out with some large leaves.  The technique I’m practicing is called Hatching, and I have room to try it several ways.  For the first leaf, I’ve decided to make the hatching completely random, which Nancy recommends.  In the back of my mind, I think, I’m not that good at random (with the possible exception of thoughts).  This single thought is indicative of the way my mind works, analytically.  As such, the lower part of the leaf is my sad attempt to make my hatches random.  I hated it, I wanted to un-weave it and reweave it.  However, I decided to leave it to serve as a reminder that – even in random patterns, there must still be order.  My hands and mind have a need to follow some order even when it may appear random.  The rest of the leaf looks completely random to me, but there is much more order than she demonstrated in the DVD. 

I would like to do the leaves in a nice deep green on one side and weave the other side with different shades of green bundled together.  I thought this would give the leaf more depth and shading, but I don’t have yarn in the color choices I would like.  Thus, I used yellow.  It doesn’t lend realism to the leaf as I would like, but I do like the color blending I’m achieving with my weft bundles.  It reminds me of a ginger leaf.  Although for ginger Leafs, I would do better with the technique called “Floating Bars”.  I have some Floating Bars in the next section of my weaving.  The other techniques I’ll work on are Floating Bars, Hachures, and transparent super-imposed shapes.  Once I’m done, I will make a couple of these into a pillow 🙂 

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