09/18/2023
This is our first assignment and my first time (like most everyone else, I’m guessing) using the rigid heddle loom!! I’m looking forward to trying some new techniques that I noticed some others experimented with in the first weekly, as well as investigating some of the questions posed in this weekly’s prompt. I’d like to push myself to incorporate some more “unconventional” materials (aka not yarn or yarn-adjacent material) and try to divorce myself from the mindset that what I create should/needs to look like what you’d think of when you think of a woven fabric. Tabby weave holds infinite possibilities, due to it’s simplicity, reliability, durability, so I want to really start thinking about what “experimental” can mean in the context of “experimental textiles”! 🙂 I feel like I experimented a lot with changing colors during [1: make a book loom (tutorial)](https://sasmicpau.notion.site/1-make-a-book-loom-tutorial-1b0d1ab2407b469ea6cc1cd838ccc621), so, while this is a different loom, I want to focus my energy elsewhere. The 3 things I’m planning on exploring are:
I didn’t get the chance to try inlay during the last weekly, but I saw some of my classmates trying it (and other styles of embroidery) out on their samples, so I wanted to give it a go. (First, I skimmed through this video on traveling inlay to get an idea of how to do it.) I decided to keep the background simple in color and weave so that I could see the patterns that I was creating, especially since I knew I wanted to utilize multiple colors. I chose 4 colors of the same type of lightweight yarn because I was hoping to achieve the look of something sewn/embroidered. It quickly grew a little tedious (I think mostly because, once again, I didn’t have a plan), so after an inch of making random squiggles that laid flat within the fabric, I wanted to see what texture I could create if the inlay material didn’t lie flat. To do this, I pulled the yarn out of the shed and over the front of a handful of warp threads before sending it to the back of the weaving to create little loops/arches/rainbows of various heights. I also had some spare stranded wire lying around that looked relatively similar in gauge to the thinner yarn I was using, and thought I might practice inlay with that to see how the more rigid quality of it would affect the result. In some cases (rounding edges), I was able to manipulate the wire fairly easily into the shape I wanted, but in other cases, there was more resistance, so I let the wire do its own thing, which resulted in some interesting loops!
I wanted to experiment with some laceweight (silk mohair) yarn that I had, but I didn’t want to make my life miserable by having to weave hundreds of rows just for a few inches of fabric…so I tried to create a more open weave by placing the weft more intentionally, leaving room between each pick. This was a little finicky because this particular yarn is so slippery but also sticks to itself, so it required a delicate hand. I tried out different spacing between the picks, ranging from relatively wide to leaving no space at all. There was a lot of unintentional shifting happening within the already woven picks, which I tried to correct at first, but then surrendered to it — I liked the organic look it produced. Towards the end, I wove a few picks very tightly together and found that, because the yarn was held so loosely within the warp, I was able to slide it around quite freely, shifting that chunk of weft into a new position.
