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.