Word Play

I have always enjoyed playing around with words. Palindromes, anagrams, crossword puzzles, codes. I can remember that as a kid, when I was riding in the car with my family, I would look at words on signs and billboards and see how they would read backwards, and see what other words I could make by rearranging their letters. In junior high my best friend and I invented a code so that we could write notes to each other that no one else would be able to decipher. I think that in another life I might have made a good cryptographer.

Every Sunday morning we get the New York Times, and after scanning the front page, or even before, I go straight to the puzzle section of the NYT magazine. Three pages of puzzles! The one I go to first is called the Spelling Bee, and I start right in seeing what words I can get out of it, and keep working on it throughout the week. It’s a special bonus when I can find fiber-related words. This one has llama! Loom doesn’t count because words have to have five or more letters, and it also doesn’t use the A in the center, which is one of the requirements.

Have you ever noticed that the word ‘textile’ is composed of a combination of the words ‘text’ and ‘tile’? I’ve been thinking about this for awhile. How do the words ‘text’ and ‘textile’ relate to each other? I did a bit of googling on this and found this wonderful quote from a book called The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst -

“An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver. The scribes made this old and audible abstraction into a new and visible fact. After long practice, their work took on such an even, flexible texture that they called the written page a textus, which means cloth.”

Nice!

How about the word ‘tile’? Well, I couldn’t find anything that tied the words ‘tile’ and ‘textile’ together. But I think about tiles in terms of tessellations and symmetry patterns, something that I work with a lot in geometric design. So I wondered if I could create a tile with the word ‘text’ and then weave a textile that is a tiling of the word ‘text’ in doubleweave pickup?

I worked out a square tile on graph paper with the letters T, E, X and T going around it in a rotation, and added in a little twist by having only a quarter of the letter X in each tile, so that it would take a 2x2 repeat of the tile to complete the letter X.

I usually work with lots of colors in my weaving, but I wanted this to mimic newsprint, so I set up a warp in 10/2 perle cotton, one layer beige and one layer black. I wove a sample piece using the same 10/2 cotton as my weft and found that with all the interlacements of the two layers in doubleweave pickup the letters elongated too much in the warpways direction. I tried it again using 20/2 cotton as the weft and was able to get the letters to square.

Once I had that worked out, I wove one version of the 2x2 tile using a horizontal and vertical mirror, or reflection -

Then using the same base tile, I changed the symmetry into a four-fold rotation, with the tile pivoting around the center point -

After I cut the two pieces from the loom I added a tiny red French knot in the center of each, both for a little visual interest and also so that the pieces could be black and white and red (read) all over. Each piece is mounted onto a beige textured matting and then set into a black frame. The titles of the pieces are ‘text •tile - reflection’ and ‘text •tile - rotation’.

Great fun!