I turned in my final a week or so again for the textile design class, and yes I ironed my final! How many people can say that? Anyways, I've had issues with the format of the class, but in retrospect I learned a lot and am really excited about that. The final exam was to make four fabrics in a collection following a mood board. I put together a New Zealand Rainforest mood board and here are my fabrics. The color is a bit off; the lower right is much greener. The two on the right are monoprints; the upper right is stamped with a linoleum block that I carved. The lower right is Elmer's blue gel glue resist with some black dye crayon added after to give it some depth. The upper right is painted stripes which didn't turn out that well; I added some black lines (string glued to a dowel, then rolled) which seems to smooth things out. The stripe looks a lot better in smaller bits. Each pieces is approximately 1'x2'; I'm going to try to make a table runner from them after taking a better photo for my class book.
On the weaving front, I finished the Dutch Flag napkins, and gifted them to their final home last night. They loved them. Here they are right off the loom. Did I mention I'm a novice weaver? The selvedges were AWFUL so I turned them under 1/4 inch and hemmed; that problem was solved. The last two definitely showed some bowing toward the edges which was clearly a tension issue... And they're all slightly different sized. Still, what they lack in technical expertise, they make up for in exuberance.
And here they are all stacked up and ready to be wrapped up. Let me just give a call out to the textile designer who created the pattern, Erica De Ruiter; excellent stripe design, fun napkins!!!
What's next? I need a little more structure, so last week I put together a sheet of weekly goals. I'm not going to accomplish all of them since I do get distracted by shiny objects; also, as I'll be doing a bike tour in the near future, I figure I really ought to spend some time on the bike, eh? I did hit 3 of the 8 goals (it was never going to be 8/8): I finished the napkins, unpacked the school gear and stashed in the studio, and decided on a design and wound the warp for DH's summer scarf.
