In today’s society, body image and self-esteem is an issue for so many people, especially younger girls. By using the tulle to cover the details and somewhat “fog the mirror”. We constantly see ourselves under a microscope where no one else looks this closely so I wanted to emulate how other people see us less harsh than ourselves.

A challenge I faced was definitely the lack of structure in the tulle. As the warp, I had tied each piece of tulle around the back of the mirror which caused each strip to be bunched together rather then spread out like the vertical weft. Although this wasn’t my intention, the spaces between each warp draws attention to the emphasized features, especially one’s eyes.

I added the phrase “YOU ARE…” at the top to prompt affirmation of individual’s about themselves. Rather focusing on what one’s reflection is not, or what my not be good enough, I hope to evoke love from whoever looks in the mirror .

In a non COVID affected class, I would have loved to have each of my peers to write a words and place it within the weaving. But given that I am at home, I decided to give the viewer a decision on how they wanted to approach the mirror. I put opposite adjectives on each side of the mirror in jagged manner so that the viewer’s eyes would be drawn back and forth.

I am still unsure of how I feel about these additions and since they are paper within the weaving, I am able to easily change them if a new idea arises.

Furthermore, while I was walking around taking pictures of my weaving, I noticed that from far away, the reflection in the mirror were very clear but as you moved closer, it became more and more hazy/foggy. I kind of enjoyed this effect since it forces on to take a step back and see different perspectives of the mirror. I’ve attached a video to try and capture this quality but it doesn’t quite have the same effect in real life.

Lastly, I wish I had other materials that provided more texture to my weaving that I could have also used. I think the weaving would be more interesting if I had some sort of lace or ribbon to use.

Since I am at home still, I was inspired to create something that reflected each of my family members. I noticed that the chairs naturally have a loom shape and dinner is a time when my family comes together to one table. I created unique weavings for each of the members at where each person sits and put them in a cohesive space.

On the top left, I created a weaving for my mother, using softer, knitted materials and a warm color palette to create a heart shape and show her kind and caring personality.

On the top right, I reflected my mix of styles by using a lot of textures (denim, cotton, wires) to display my usual denim uniform, information systems shirt and love for music.

On the bottom left, I created a weaving for my father with a mix of polos, formal shirts, and sweatshirts. The sweatshirt wraps around the formal clothes, demonstrating how my father’s professional side is encapsulated by his casual personality at home.

On the bottom right, I reflected my brother’s love for toys, sports, and youthful personality with LEGOs, a sports jersey, colorful items, and cotton clothing.

For the first weave, I tries to simply experiment with colors and textures to create something familiar to me. The tray is something I usually use for watercolor, a medium I have been using for over 5 years. The reddish pink fabric is from one of my old blankets, and the butterfly denim is the first fabric I bought for when I tried to sew in middle school. I think that the colors of the two fabrics complement each other very well and the roughness of the denim in contrast to the softness of the sheets, while harder to work with, created some nice juxtaposition.

My next work was based on the choose something of your favorite color for the scavenger hunt. Since I chose blue, I wanted to create something loosely based on a shoreline, incorporating more blue, white, and tan within the weave. The markers were hard to work with and I should have reinforced them with something stronger instead of simply tying them all together, but I really enjoyed the unpredictability of the threads that created a unique sense of movement.

This last piece was completely based on my unusual loom. I thought it would be very fun to create a 3D basket-like weave, so I used the head-scratcher tool and wrapped string. My favorite aspect of this is how I can flip the loom and the piece becomes completely changed: it goes from a cotton candy like object to a shelter for a little toy.

For the next pieces, I wanted to use my new weaving skills to add some cool decor to my apartment. I asked my roommate if I could use her record box and add a simple weaving to it for a pop of color. I also used a skull I recently 3D printed, and added some color through weaving as well. The skull piece turned out interesting to me because the weaving kind of looks like a bandage.

The first weaving I attempted was inspired by the idea of natural vs synthetic. As I started the process I wanted the synthetic/plastic materials to look like they were choking the plastic. One surprise was how many methods I had to try in order to use the natural items, that ended up being my biggest challenge. The biggest challenge I had was manipulating the natural items in order to weave it through, whether that was bending them beforehand, tying them together or folding them. I think I did get the look of nature not having room to flourish because of the presence of synthetic materials and I was also able to play around with the materials at the same time, fo example I used bottle caps to put the stems of leaves together and I used a chopstick wrapper to tie around a leaf.

Materials

1. pre-bloomed flowers
2. leaves
3. loose branches
4. plastic water jug
5. chopstick wrapper
6. plastic bags
7. dead/loose plat stems
8. dead plant
9. roots brown paper bag
10. weeds

The second weaving attempt was intended to be more traditional with the use of paper. There were some elements I tried to explore like using quotes regarding misogyny in Hip-Hop but unfortunately they did not make the final piece. The intended effect of this project was to emphasize the clash in hip hop, specifically rap, between artists. The rap industry has notoriously welcomed and celebrated vulgar and hyper-sexualized messages from male artists but then have also turned around to chastise female artists who have done the same. A challenge and a surprise was trying very hard to not be confused by the weavings. There are about 3 layers of weavings and I got lost a few times because it was more than just one weaving I was trying to do correctly. A discovery that I made was that I needed more materials for how ambitious I wanted to be. I believe the use of so much paper was making it very flat and one dimensional, that is why instead of using paper as a border I tries to crochet one that wasn’t uniform. And is also why I attempted to weave the outline of the female genitalia through the entire project upon. A success I had was getting some of the more vulgar words to stick out, however I wish I did more of bolding them and increasing the font size so that those words could be seen more.

Materials:

1. Paper
2. Yarn
3. Foam sheets

I initially struggled with deciding how to begin this deeper dive because I had a bunch of undeveloped exciting ideas running rampant after completing my smaller explorative pieces. I decided to take a walk to clear my head to try to flesh out some of my ideas, and I ended up picking flowers along the way. As I admired the colors and shapes of the flowers, the concept for my first weaving bloomed.

I decided to craft a loom out of branches using string to tie the frame. I knew that I wanted to use the different flowers I picked as the weft, so my next challenge was finding a suitable warp.

I came across a pile of dead fibrous husks that marked the remnants of a grassy bush, and I decided to use these as the warp because as a material they provided the right amount of rigidity for weaving delicate flowers. The sticks were light enough to secure to the loom with packing tape.

Conceptually, I loved the idea of weaving the living and dead plants together. They were complementary opposites. The warp is hard, brittle, and dead while the weft is soft, flexible, and colorful. There’s a duality in the materials, and I needed both to complete the weaving.

The warp ended up working extremely well, and I love how it acts as a skeleton providing support for the weaving. The lush and living weft fit snugly through the dry bone framework, but I did encounter challenges with the fragility of the flowers. I had to adapt to the different stem and leaf types and learn when to be gentle and when to be more forceful. The evolution of this piece was something unexpected. I took steps back and decided to add more layers of textures to create depth. The inchworm that I found on one of the purple flowers was also something unexpected!

**Side note: I’ve also decided to photograph this weaving daily to capture its gradual decay. I’m hoping it’s able to communicate an even deeper message when everything has turned dry and ghostly

Materials Used: flowers, branches, dead grass sticks, string, packing tape

Inspiration for my second piece came from wanting to combine my painting experience with the new weaving techniques I’ve been exploring. I wanted to create something unlike anything I’ve ever done before, and this piece really took me out of my comfort zone.

For my weft material, I painted a self-portrait on a scrap piece of canvas I found behind my desk. I used the backing of a frame left behind in my apartment as the loom. I struggled with deciding what to use as my warp material because I wasn’t quite sure what features I wanted to emphasize in the portrait. I initially wanted to use paintbrushes as the warp, but the size wasn’t right, and I didn’t have enough. I settled for string and wrapped the frame, but then I decided to rotate the canvas so that it was a more interesting diamond shape. Satisfied with this composition, I began the painting and deconstructing process.

I had never painted a self-portrait before, and I found it difficult. I was able to let go of my fears and hesitations and work through it, however, because I knew I was going to cut it into wefting strips. I was no longer afraid of “messing up.” Creating and then separating a representation of myself was a surprising and interesting process.

I was pleasantly surprised by the result because I never fully knew what to expect from the finished weaving. I didn’t really have a clear end goal for this project, but I’m really happy that I stepped out of my comfort zone to complete it. I’m excited to grow and further challenge myself as an artist.

Materials Used: string, canvas, acrylic paint, picture frame backing

Oh, I also baked a bonus weaving this week and wove the lattice of a pie!

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.

This first one is about noodles- the loom is an old plastic take out container that I grabbed out of our recycling pile. I chose baker’s twine as the warp, which I had trouble with trying to stay because of the slippery nature of the plastic container. So I made little incisions on the container for the warp to stay in, every 1/4″. For the weft, I used uncooked somen noodles, a string that was the same color, and uncooked linguine pasta. I wanted it to look like I used both uncooked and cooked noodles, but through string. I also tried to weave a more triangular shape instead of always weaving completely across.

This second weave is about using old unwanted materials. The loom is an old egg carton I grabbed from my house’s recycling pile, and I cut into it to keep the warp in place. The warp is fishing wire I had from an old project, and it is supposed to be reminiscent of plastic recycling. As for the warp, I used dried flowers, something that people pick as beautiful but in turn kills the flowers and they eventually wilt and dry, and you throw them out, as well as weeds I found outside, and off-white string. But I wanted to show how you can make something beautiful out of things whose functions you no longer have a need for.

For my last weave, I used a medical theme. The box itself is the container for my first aid kit, which usually holds bandages and ointments, I am using as the loom. I used red string as the warp, red usually being the color of emergency or first aid. For the weft, I pulled the ear loops off of a used disposable face mask, and then also cut it up into strips. In addition, I also used cotton swabs, which is used for aid.

In general, I tried to use a mix of soft and hard materials as warps in all of the weaves. In previous explorations, I noticed that hard materials leave a large spacing in between each warp, so I mixed in the soft materials between them to keep the gaps from being too big. I was pretty happy with how they turned out in the end, including the color schemes that came out of it!

For the deeper dive section of the Improvisational Weaving project, I decided that I wanted to continue experimenting with different materials and play with the effects of my weaving. I created a loom by taping six chopsticks together in the shape of a triangular prism. I had a lot of difficulty doing this and it didn’t turn out exactly how I pictured it but multiple factors played into that. For one, one pair of chopsticks was longer than the other two pairs, so the triangles couldn’t have equal angles. I also found it very difficult to tape the chopsticks together and some continued to slide up and down while I was weaving. I knew that I didn’t really have enough of any material in my room to weave with so I decided to use left over plastic bags to make plastic yarn, aka “plarn”. To do this, I cut the bag into strips to get thin rings, then I tied them together to have one very long ball of “plarn”. There were a few challenges I ran into using “plarn” for weaving. First, because the plastic is such a thin material, I found that the more I pulled it to increase the tension, the more it stretched and the thinner it became. This made the warp very loose and hard to keep in place. Second, I tried to warp in each plane separately and then move to the next plane, but towards the end, it was difficult to warp the material around the other sections. This made the warp very inconsistent in number of rows and distance between other rows. Finally, since the “plarn” is made from loops, it got a bit confusing trying to figure out which strands of warp to weave the weft through. I decided that I would experiment with this and did some areas where I went between the entire loop and some between the individual strands of the loop. Overall, I experimented most with the tightness of the weave, some sections were very tight and others were pretty loose. This made unique textures in the weave and left some areas more open and some more closed. The final result looked like a tent of sorts and the trash theme made me think of WALL-E