I Love Hue Too!
I think I’ve always been fairly sensitive to nuances of color, but lately I’ve been particularly tuned in to subtle variations of tonalities in my world. I’ve been teaching my Double Rainbow workshop on zoom nearly every week this year, so color is something that I’m thinking about and exploring all the time. I know that there are many websites out there these days that can help you work out color schemes on your computer,…
Teaching an Old Teacher New Tricks
At this time last year my teaching was off to a great start. I had just finished a series of workshops in Hawaii and was about to head off to another in Florida. I had a very full year ahead of me with another twenty workshops yet to come. In early March I attended a board meeting in DC and afterwards went on a quick trip to Virginia to teach another workshop. The day I…
Going Totally Tubular
What is it that compels me to start a new weaving project? Sometimes it is because there is something specific that I want to make for a specific reason. Sometimes I want to weave samples to illustrate a concept that I will be teaching about in a workshop. Sometimes just looking at all the colors of yarn in my studio makes me want to do something fun with them. And sometimes an idea enters my…
Weaving with Lunatics
I have a thing about complete sets of materials, especially when they involve color. I have sets of colored pencils and pastels that I’ve never even used because I want them to be perfect in their entirety. Back in the 80’s I worked at a weaving shop in Portland, Oregon. I would spend hours arranging new yarns that came in according to color on the shelves, and then I wouldn’t want anyone to buy them…
105 Tones of Grey
In my last blog post, 90 Shades of Grey, I talked about a warp that I put on my loom in a rotation of six neutral values from white through grays to black. Since I still had a couple yards of warp left on my loom after completing a sampler using all of the neutrals in the weft, I thought about what else might be interesting to try out on the remainder of the warp.…
90 Shades of Grey
Most of the weaving that I’ve done over the past several years has focused on exploring color rotations in doubleweave in a system that I call Double Rainbow. I've worked with color wheel hues in saturated colors, tints, tones and shades. I’ve expanded the traditional color wheel to work with up to twenty colors in one piece and I’ve created designs with up to eight blocks of doubleweave. I’ve experimented with different weights of yarns…
Double Rainbow Evolves, part 2
As I experimented with weaving in the Double Rainbow system in two blocks on 8 shafts and seeing how the combinatory possibilities for color and pattern were truly endless, I realized that I needed to find a system for encoding and notating information. Otherwise it would be like falling down a rabbit hole and never being able to find your way out again. This problem had me stymied for quite some time and I spent…
Double Rainbow Evolves, part 1
I experimented with Double Rainbow warps on four shafts for several months (see the previous blog post, Color in Space and Time), each time discovering more ways that the same warp setup could be woven. Since it is a doubleweave with each layer set the same as if it were a single layer, the total sett is twice as dense. This means that it can be woven as warp rep with a thick and thin…
Color in Space and Time
In June of 2011 I taught at the Contemporary Weavers of Texas conference, and afterwards went back to Houston for a couple days with my friend and weaver, Laura Viada. She told me that she had recently seen an amazing exhibit at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and she thought it was something that I would want to see as well. Was she ever right! The exhibit was a retrospective show of fifty-some years…