Stretching Yourself!

I've got another student working with me, Darren Kelly from Stoke on Trent.  He's at the University there and is studying Craft.  A few weeks ago he sent me his CV, some images and asked if he could have a summer work placement.  I took one look at his work and rang him immediately, as his work is wonderful, clean and colourful, which is just the style I like.   To cut a long story short he came last Tuesday for his first day.

I had suggested that he worked on a screen to showcase my linen transparent fabric and he arrived with a sketchbook with several ideas and he'd take a lot of time over them, including the detail of how they would be finished.  He is really keen on detail, which elevates a piece of work from the ordinary to the bespoke.

For my part, I want to stretch myself, and as a lot of you know I love colour, so I've chosen cream/beige as my colour scheme and, I don't know why, but the female nude as my inspiration!  Here's one of my initial sketches:

I'm thinking of paring down the design and using Theo Moorman, cream on cream.  But have lots of design work to go before I start on the swatches!

Have you stretched yourself recently?

Alison

Design for Creative Spinners

Hi everyone,

I have some exciting new! Jane Deane and I have been accepted to tutor a course at the 2009 Summer School for Weavers, Spinners and Dyers at Lincoln.

Our course is Design for Creative Spinners and we will be taking you through the design process using sketchbooks and easy design tips for those who don't think they can paint or draw! This will be followed by looking at fancy yarn techniques appropriate to your design work and on the last two day you will be making your designer yarns and sampling with knitting or weave!

We are really excited about this opportunity and look forward to meeting some new friends and maybe some old friends, too!

Done the wraps!

Well, I've managed to do some wraps. The images aren't brilliant, but I managed to get some nice effects.

On the left is my "mood board" with some of the wraps pinned to it.

The wrap on the right is in wool and cotton and seem to have captured the dull palette from the last post quite nicely. I might get some nice differential shrinkage with this!

The wrapping on the left has captured the coral colour from the vivid palette, which I liked, and again is in wool and a little cotton. But I have gone a little blue/grey rather than the green/brown in the Colour Palette Generator vivid palette.


These wrapping are too fussy for my liking so I might not pursue them.

In my sketchbook I have done several colour studies and lots of written notes, and have added the computer colour picks too. What's on my "mood board" are duplicates of the computer work that is in my sketchbook.

Jane Deane and I will be doing a Sketchbook Workshop with the Online Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers in February.

Back Blogging at Last!!

Oh dear, I have had so many "life" things to deal with, not least a leak from our immersion heater, that I've not had time to do much work. I am supposed to be putting a couple of portfolio's together, one for my apparel textiles and one for interior textiles.

Finally sat down today to work on the Donnington Le Heath picture I posted way back in January!
I have got a number of pictures and sketches in my sketch book and have done a few wrappings, but decided to run the picture through Colour Palette Generator and got some nice colours. The beauty of the CPG is how it narrows down the colours. When looking at colour on your own, there is a tendency to choose too many colours which can makes a weave look too busy.

Color Palette Generator

Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.

URL of image:

dull #445533 #998877 #ffffff #bbaa99 #887766

vibrant #556611 #bb9966 #ffffff #eecc99 #aa9944

These colours are lovely, I particularly like the coral colour in the vibrant palette.

I think it would be a good idea to isolate a section of the building:

this is the section and it's interesting to see what colours the CPG has generated!

dull #998877 #aaaa99 #eeddcc #ddbbaa #777766

vibrant #bbaa66 #ccccaa #ffffdd #ffddaa #888866

I love the dull palate again, I think it's the greys and pinks, but I also love the coral in the vibrant palette. I can't make my mind up which palette I prefer, so I will have to have a play with my yarns and do some wrappings, the actual yarn will give me a better feel.

So off to do some wrappings and have a think about what kind of weave to use!

See you later, have a lovely Christmas.

Caroline's help with Colour Palettes

Hi all,

here are the colours that were generated by the URL that Caroline recommended (see the comment after the last post). Sadly no lilac, but good never the less. It is really worth a look at and a play with! I particularly like the fact that it give you a choice as to "dull" or "vibrant". This should suit all preferences.

Color Palette Generator

Enter the URL of an image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.

URL of image: http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

dull #556655 #334433 #eeeeee #99bbbb #778877

vibrant #448855 #115522 #ffffff #99ccee #66aa77

It's funny that the closest to the lilac is in the "dull" palette!

I also tried the "colour hunter"
This gave similar colours, both are worth trying. Thanks Caroline.

Computer Design Again! 2

Well, I've managed to paste a layer of my chosen weave over the simulated painted warp! I am so excited about this and am going to try it with my New York Skyline exercise.

I had to play around with different tools to Linda's, as she used Photo Filter and I used Photoplus, but I got there in the end. It really has got endless possibilities which are really quite exciting.

Having looked at the design on this post, I think I need to lighten the weft, it's nice, but not quite the right colour.

Many thanks to Linda for showing me the idea.

Computer Design Again!

At the beginning of August Linda, from the Online Guild, posted an interesting post about transfering a weave to a stripe sequence design.

It has taken me quite a while to read through the details and work out how to do it, but I have managed the first part, which is creating the stripes using my Photoplus programme.




This is the picture I was given by a student in my class, which I have used as a starting point. We are using it in class to do some Creative Spinning.



Using the colour pick tool, I selected some of the colours and then using the paintbrush tool I painted the colours onto a new page.

What a surprise when I found the lilac colour in the reflected sky at the bottom of the picture!







I followed Linda's instructions on making a new page, 800 x 2400 pixels to represent the size of a scarf. In this I made rectangles which I filled with some of the chosen colours.

This is quite a pleasing task to do. What would be good is to use one of the programmes effects to put texture into the dark green areas and the pale blue areas. I will try that next.





I then repeated the exercise, but this time I made the stripes vertical. Again I would like to make the green and pale blue into texture by using one of the effects.

Finally I repeated this exercise and added a gradient fill.

All I have to do now is to add a layer to this with the weave on it. I have almost got there, but my weave pattern is to pale to be seen clearly enough.

However, I really like this gradient design and could see it in a lovely silk scarf, dip dyed or painted in sections to get the gradients.

I also want to try this exercise with the New York Skyline exercise. I have almost finished weaving the 10 metre length in wool. I have just to order more of the "Rusticana" colour, marled brown, and weave the last 2 metres!

Not much to say really, but!

I've been quite busy really, so not had much time to post, I had intended to post at least once a week, but I'm afraid I haven't managed that!

I have been teaching on a Monday evening and had to prepare for that, as well as preparing for 5 days of teaching design to spinners for Skylark Holidays.

Add to that preparing to take my dyes to Woolfest at the end of the month and preparing for a weaving course for Skylark Holidays at the beginning of July, too! I wish you could add a couple of hours into your day when they were needed, sometimes 24 aren't enough!!

We had the proof of the book back from the publishers, last week. It really is going to be stunning. For those of you who don't know, my friend, Jane Deane, and I have written a book called "Creative Spinning" for Gaia, part of the Octopus Publishing group. We were asked way back at the end of last September if we could write an inspirational "coffee table" book and were given 6 weeks to produce 30 projects and 15,000 words. Well that was really a tall order so we asked for an extension and they gave us an extra 2 weeks! Needless to say we managed it and the book went off to the technical editor, who did a fantastic job because we were then told it had been sold to an American publisher and they wanted a "how to" section, but still only 15,000 words!

I have to say that the photographs are stunning and the illustrations are really clear. I just hope that it is well received, I can't tell you how stressful it is to have such a tight brief and deadline, my neck and shoulders are still suffering 7 months later!

By the way, the book is one of a series of 4; Creative Spinning, Creative Weaving, Creative Natural Dyeing and Creative Felting.

More soon.

New York Skyline Update

I have been quite busy recently and have not had much time to post on this blog, but one of the things I have been working on was some swatches for the Computer Design Study Group design exercise I posted about earlier this year.

The studies I did on the computer were bases on a section of the New York Skyline, as seen on the right.

I particularly liked the small grey block effects of the window in the top to middle section. I also liked the relationship of the colours, the greys and browns with a little of the blue and turquoise (copper roof!). Another thing that struck me were the vertical oblongs.

With the computer I used a number of effects:- mosaic, wave, stained glass and combinations of these.

The mosaic effect gave me more of the block and vertical block feeling and concentrated the colours, which really brought home the colour proportion exercise we did earlier. I decided to "lump" some of the colours together, so that I ended with just 4 main colours:- sky blue, turquoise, a marl grey and a marl brown.

Lumping the colours together gave me proportions of 48% "Rustica" (marled brown with has the red browns, in as well as the dark and lighter browns), 24% "Silver" (marled grey), 13% "Fauna" (turquoise) and 5% "Sapphire" (sky blue). These yarns were purchased from J C Rennie (Smiths of Peterhead). They are a machine knitting yarn, but weave beautifully.

I warped my rigid heddle loom at 14 epi in a log cabin effect of blocks of 1 Rustica and 1 Sapphire x 4, 1 Fauna and 1 Rustica x 4, 1 Rustica and 1 Fauna x 4, (I Silver and 1 Rustica x 4, 1 Rustica and 1 Fauna x 4) x 2.

My first swatch (on the right) was woven as threaded.

Swatch 2 (above) was woven with 1 Rustica and 1 Sapphire x 4, 1 Fauna and 1 Rustica x 4, 1 Rustica and 1 Fauna x 4 and 1 Silver and 1 Rustica x 20. I wanted to try to capture the larger vertical blocks with this swatch.Swatch 3 (above) was woven with 1 Rustica and 1 Sapphire x 4, 1 Fauna and 1 Rustica x 4, 1 Rustica and 1 Fauna x 4 and (1 Silver and 1 Rustica x 4 and 1 Rustica and 1 Silver x 2) x 3. I wanted to try to capture the small blocks (the windows in the original) with this swatch.



Swatch 4 (above) was woven with 1 Silver and 1 Rustica x 4 and 1 Rustica and 1 Silver x 2 repeated the length of the swatch. I felt that the small repeat of 1 Rustica and 1 Silver x 2 was too small.


Swatch 5 (above) was woven with 1 Silver and 1 Rustica x 8 and 1 Rustica and 1 Silver x 4 repeated the length of the swatch and I feel this gives a much better representation of the square blocks and vertical blocks.

I have begun to develop this, using the waves and mosaic and wave computer manipulations. More to come!