62-150A: Introduction to Textile Media
Section A of Media Synthesis & Analysis – Fall 2020
I chose to do a tapestry of Bilbo Baggins’ house from The Lord of The Rings because of the very homey feel that particular setting has, which made me think that creating a tapestry of it would be appropriate since a tapestry is an old form of art as well as something that can be done in the home. This took me about 5 hours to do.
Here is the picture reference.
Here is my work so far. I used several interlocked wefts to create the stairs and surrounding greenery.
The piece I chose was the “Madonna” cape and gown by Riccardo Tisci, which he made for a statue of the Madonna for a local church in Puglia, Italy. The couture cape is made from silk crafted in the Como area of Italy, and the overall piece includes golden embroidery, which took 3000 hours to stitch, as well as 500 svarovski crytals hand-sewn into the cloth. I chose this piece because it immediately caught my attention when I saw it in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC in 2018, as part of an exhibit featuring Christianity-inspired couture pieces. It has incredible attention to detail as well as vivid colors that stand out and give off a sense of regality.
For this week’s assignment, I focused on experimenting with different wefting materials, as well as creating a theme around those wefted materials on a larger piece: a broken chair.
Below is the chair I used. Under the seat of the chair, the horizontal middle bars are dislodged from the right bar, leaving a gap.
I decided to create a weaving that not only filled in the space between the two middle bars, but also filled in the space between the dislodged middle bars and the right bar. Thus, with my weaving, I ended up “fixing” the chair. I used twine for warping, and below are pictures of the warped twine in the 2 spaces before I wefted using multiple materials.
After warping, I decided to select my wefting materials around a single theme: memories. Out of all possible wefting materials I had, I selected the ones that represented particular memories in my life, both big and small. The materials representing significant memories were a ribbon from a dress I wore to school on my birthday in 9th grade and some paper strips cut out of a paper bag that I’d gotten when I shopped at the gift store during my last visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. The materials representing less important memories were a green belt from a skirt that I wore during my first trip to the grocery store after Coronavirus hit, as well as some floss from my last visit to the dentist. I selected these memorable materials because I wanted to use my weavings to transform the old, broken chair into something that was more personal and had a human touch. Below are images of the final result:
This week’s assignment was more challenging than last week’s assignment because I had to be much more creative with the materials I used for wefting (last week I just used cloth, twine, and thread). Additionally, I was not only creating one warped loom, but creating two warped looms intersecting with one another over a large surface, and I was having to warp over a surface with uneven heights as well (the bars went from skinny to thick to skinny again), so I had to get creative with how I warped. I ended up dividing the horizontal space between the bars into three warped sections and the vertical space was kept as one warped section.
When working on the three weavings, I decided to utilize the tissue box, pen-holder, twine, and thread I had originally discovered in my scavenger hunt. In addition, along with a few other warping and wefting materials, I later discovered a miniature statue of a figure with a raised arm and a lowered arm, so I wanted to see if I could exploit the space between the arms to create a loom.
The easiest weaving to create was the tissue box cloth weaving. I first tried experimenting with wefting with a taped-together paper towel strip, however, given how tight the strings were on the loom, I discovered that it was not ideal to do so as the taped-sections kept getting caught as I was sliding the strip through the strings. I then decided to use a large strip of cloth as it was consistently thin at all points, making it very easy to slide through the strings. I’d used twine for the warping as well. This weaving took about an hour to do, including the experimentation, and below is the final result.
A slightly harder weaving to create was the pen-holder weaving. When looking at the pen-holder, I had the idea to warp it using elastic hair ties, which I stretched taut over the hole of the pencil holder. As for wefting, I knew I had to use an extremely thin material, as the hole was very small, so I chose white thread, and used a needle to push the thread through the warp elastics. This was tricky because the thread was so fine that I had to pay extra attention to make sure I wasn’t making a mistake with wefting, and I had to pull a large amount of thread through the ends of the loom because I wasn’t sure how much I’d ultimately need, making it easy to tangle the thread. Below is the final result after 20-30 minutes.
Finally, the most difficult weaving, and the most interesting one, was my statue weaving. I spent about 45 minutes figuring out how to warp across the arms of the statue, and I’d first attempted to cover just the left shoulder portion. However, since I wanted to use the hair tie elastics for warping because of the tautness they brought to the loom, the elastics kept sliding off when I tried wrapping them around just the bent arm. In addition, I discovered that thread wasn’t an ideal wefting material for this loom because there was so much space between the elastics, and I would need too much thread to cover a relatively large space, making it easy to make a mistake. After much trial and error, I discovered that I should stretch the elastics over the right portion of the statue and pinpointed individual places where I knew they wouldn’t slip, and I used twine for wefting. Below is my finished result.
Overall, I discovered that the ‘ideal’ thickness for a weft material and warp material are relative to the size of the “hole” or space in the loom, and that the weft material should be equivalent to or thinner than the thickness of the warp material so that it can more easily be wefted and errors can be spotted easier. I also discovered twine to be a versatile item for both warping and wefting, and I discovered I enjoy working with finer materials on smaller weavings, rather than with thicker or larger materials on a larger loom.