Project 4 Finale

The final project from the Nancy Harvey DVD’s is complete.  I’m really glad that I stuck to my guns and completed all four projects from these two DVD’s.  There was a lot of repetition, but I picked up some useful skills too.  My skill and confidence weaving other, more organic shapes has improved.  I haven’t gotten very far in the book, but I think it will be great for reference when I’m working on a project.  Now that I’ve watched these DVD’s, I’m experiencing a sort of “Loom Envy”.  I feel the need for a floor loom, but that’s a subject for another time.

The upper part of this project has overlapping transparent shapes.  I decided to keep these shapes squares and a rectangle so I could focus on one technique.  I think the overlapped parts would look better if the weft bundles were composed of finer strands.  This would increase how many strands in each bundle and I think it might look more refined.  One thing that I was able to work on with this exercise is weaving shapes.  The strong vertical lines of the squares and rectangle helped to provide me with that “Aha” moment in turning my warp so that opposing wefts fit properly between warp threads.  The other technique I utilized is in the background.  I chose this area to try my hand with the  Hachure (Ah-shure) technique.  I like this blending technique and think I may find it useful on future projects.  I also added a highlight color at the top to see how it would look.  

After I reached the top of the weaving, I took some yarn for my hem and placed a row of Soumak knots, then wove a hem.  I finished with double half hitches on each warp thread all the way across with Coat’s and Clark’s buttonhole and craft thread.  These double half hitches keep the weft from un-weaving when it’s cut from the loom.  Once it’s off the loom I need to finish up the back of the weaving.  This consists of sewing the slits left from weaving shapes (where the squares come together) and I chose to run the weft ends through a few picks and cut short.  This is where I really appreciate Navajo weaving – no ends to deal with.  I did taper some of my ends and weave them in as I do with Navajo weaving, but not with the bundled wefts.  I may try that with my next weaving, I really detest dealing with all those ends.

In the near future I will make these four weavings into two pillows.  I’m really looking forward to that part of the project.  I love taking something I create and make something useful from it.  I plan to use the tubular weaving technique that I found on Laverne Waddington’s blog to seam two weavings together and use a pillow form.  It looks easy, but I’ve found that most things that look easy take a bit of practice.  As for my next weaving project – I felt the Navajo itch recently, so I may explore some design possibilities there.  One thought is to weave something big, something that would fit on a bed, maybe.  The other thought is to use some of these new-found tapestry weaving techniques.  I’ll need to decide – if it’s large, I’ll keep it simple, if it’s complex, I’ll keep it small.  Until I decide, I think I’ll work on a little spinning.  I just read the book “Spin Control”.  I checked this book out from the library in an electronic format.  It has me sitting behind my wheel spinning some spare bits of top left over from other projects.

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