Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth

Finally got a chance to visit Nick Cave's Soundsuits at the UCLA Fowler Museum this past weekend. These suits are full body collages of mostly from the fiber arts world which includes crocheted hats and doilies, colorful gap sweaters, and all the glory of sequenced applique. The most famous are the performing Soundsuit Invasions some of which are made with real dyed human hair. They are bold and exhilarating as they tower over you and then at the same time so innocent, playful and free spirited, strands flowing, as they jump around and dance in the videos.


Nick Cave's Soundsuit Invasion No. 1 in LA, courtesy Fowler Museum at UCLA from Fowler Museum on Vimeo.

"With this exhibition, I hope to provide a place for dreaming - a public incubator. I hope that people walking into the gallery will be transported into another world where they can find hope, inspiration, and empowerment. I hope they will find themselves in another universe and also find a few moments to imagine, reflect and feel nourished. I see the work - especially at this particular time - as a catalyst for change and I hope the people who see it will be fueled by their experience with it."

Cave did his Masters in Fiber Art at Cranbrook where he met Gerhardt Knodel, who he says "gave him the courage and ability to be fearless."

I hope to catch one of these invasions at the museum in May.

:: photo by James Prinz/UCLA

double weave blanket

Finished setting up the warp yesterday and finally started weaving a queen size blanket using a technique called double weave. Double weave means I can weave 2 layers at the same time making the width of the blanket twice that of the warp. My warp is 40" wide, but my final blanket will be 80" wide! In the second pic, the fold will be on the left side which means the vertical stripe on the right side, will end up on both the left and right of the blanket.

I had time to weave 5" of weft (the horizontal yarns), so I could see the double weave in action. It's pretty amazing. The last pic is a view in between the 2 layers that are forming. Exciting!

Evelyn Ackerman wallhangings

My favorite Evelyn Ackerman wallhangings at the Mingei. More here.

Green Pillows

My first shot using an 8 harness loom doing another shadow weave pattern. I love seeing the yarn colors together on the floor; I made 2 pillows each with a 31 end which made my warp a zaggy 90" long on the warping board; my weaving on the loom with 2 boat shuttles; peek into the studio; and then what one pillow will look like on the couch after I actually sew it :)!

yellow and tan yarns

One of the most exciting parts of weaving is choosing your yarns. Ahh, yellow, tan and silver... I'll be making a scarf with a basic shadow weave where one color will mimic/shadow the other. It's so easy to fall in love with color combos. Can never get enough of one pop color balanced out by neutrals.

Update: Tadah, the finished piece.. a simple shadow weave, softball cotton yarns, 15" wide x 72" long, woven on a 4 harness counter balance loom. I like to alternate the pattern with plain weave to see what effects I get with the threading. Took about 20-ish hours total. Works both as a shawl in the summer/scarf in the winter. Did not use the silver, but used another light tan.

Structo Artcraft loom

Can you tell I'm all about weaving lately? I just picked up this Structo Artcraft loom I recently won on eBay. It is a small 4 harness table loom for weaving no wider than 20". Everything works perfectly, I just need to get all the rust off and change the heddles - my weekend project. Hmm, so how do you get rust off??? May take longer to restore than expected. Regardless, I'm excited! Structo was the toy company who made these looms in the 1920's. It reminds me of the Gocco.

weaving: finished scarf

Quick pic of my finished scarf....

weaving: grey shawl

Setting up the loom for my next weaving project - a muted purple/grey shawl with a peachy flesh tone (very calvin klein), and a pop of white, black and green mixed yarn. Will also be adding silver and darker grey after deciding to do a shadow weave. That's a 120" warp for a nice long 80" shawl. Love the colors, but we will see....

Room Loom

This is Julia Sherman's second installation of the Room Loom. I missed the first one, but I was able to contribute to this one. I added the pretty light aqua blue color. The material was scrap fabric screen printed with black and white test prints. I love how the black and white got scrunched (or beat down in weaving terms) as the weft. The grey furry material to the right is dog hair. Julia's friend has 2 sheep dogs that just got shaved for the summer. She tried spinning it, but in the end, decided to just weave them in whole. The yellow and orange bunches, so brilliantly open up two sheds that we could weave into.
The installation is at at a great space called Workspace 2601 in Lincoln Heights.

Weaving a Pattern

So this is my very first time following a weaving pattern from a book. I've always been intimidated (or lazy) to even try because it looks like math! But it's really not that bad. I've been weaving at a studio in Highland Park called Pets with Fez. Baba, the instructor is a wealth of knowledge, not to mention entertaining! I wove the red pattern with a tabby in the last class...

and experimented with a few other patterns and techniques today. This will end up being a soft, cozy, long scarf. I know it's been in the 90's these past few days, but I can't wait to see what it looks like on, hopefully not too crazy looking. The stripe on one of my favorite skirts is the color inspiration. Ooo, I probably could've gone more yellow looking at it now.

Today, I also was reminded that weaving is truly one of those age old processes that takes time and lots of patience. It's quite the opposite of the instant gratification we get from our life with computers so I am grateful that with each project, I am gradually re-learning how to slow down.

Virginia Johnson at Beklina

Beklina is selling these summery tunics by Virginia Johnson. I want!

Art Textiles of the World - Scandinavia

Just ordered this book. You can find an overview of the artists here. A few of my favorites are Gunvor Nervold Antonsen, Hildur Bjarnadottir, Annika Ekdahl, Aino Kajaniemi, and Anna Lindal. Art Textiles of the World is a great series. Also noticed several volumes at my public library.

Weaving Performance Part 2

The weaving performance art piece by Julia Sherman was excellent. Thursday afternoon of the opening, I arrive to a beautiful site - 6 backstrap looms tied to thick vertical rope mounted using a pulley system that is then held down by a huge bag of what seemed like little mini boulders. Julia has wood stools for us to sit on and we start weaving at 2pm. There are about 9 of us who alternate in the afternoon shift. As we start, the plan is to weave three rows on our own neutral color yarn through and then run a bright colored common yarn through. We were to repeat this until we reached the top forming a teepee shape that I eventually learned would become the cone of power. The above pic is us at the beginning, me at the far right thinking awesome and that there's a lot of work to do!

This is a pic of Julia above. Julia's body of work rocks. And so are all her friends who documented these amazing photos. They also filmed a time lapse video which I can't wait to see.

Throughout the afternoon we adjust the number of rows, the thickness of the common thread, the way we will roll up the looms as rows are finished. Carolyn, our brilliant weaving teacher trouble shoots. Really easy going afternoon, weaving, learning about each other, laughing, troubleshooting and weaving for the handful of afternoon gallery visitors wandering through. That's me below looking way too serious.

By 5 o'clock more weavers arrive. We are little bit behind, but the serious weaving begins. At 7p we hit major problem. The cross, that part that allows us to separate one shed from another, of one of the looms has broken. Mine had broken earlier in the day, but we were able to fix it before it got bad. There were a lot of us, so I took a short break to check out some of the other gallery openings only to come back to a frenzy of renegade weaving because another loom's cross had broken. The rest of the pics below are from my phone. This is the frenzy...
Our plan was to finish at 9pm in time to unroll our weavings for the crowd and raise the cone of power. Neither Julia nor Carolyn was able to repair the cross so the decision was made to use 8 yarn bunches to make up for time and then to weave like crazy. As a crop of on lookers watched patiently, the weavers at the stools wove as fast as they could, while 3-4 of us made thick warps and then wove from the top down. It was all about improvising brilliantly, so Carolyn started adding these amazing bunches of tassels and hanging balls of yarn that she and others commented was a nod to the 70's. We all started weaving in bold warps of color. It was a mad rush and then promptly at 9 o'clock we all somehow finished in sync. Adam, Julia's right hand, pulled the stools away, unraveled the looms, anchored the bottoms with larger rocks, and the cone was raised! Success.

Really pretty piece. The pic below was taken right before leaving the gallery.

Besides the coolness of this project, I loved that I was actually able to put my weaving skills to good use and I found out that art with people as part of the medium takes a piece of work beyond the piece of work. Congrats Julia!

Weaving Performance by Julia Sherman

I will be participating in a weaving performance piece on Thursday night put together by artist Julia Sherman. It'll be my first time in a performance piece! We will be 7 people weaving in a circle to form a cylindrical form that I think will close on the top.

We were asked to learn to weave on a backsrtap loom, a very traditional type of loom that's been around for centuries. This loom is anchored at the top by anything stable (a nail on the wall or back in the day, a tree) and then at the bottom by a strap or belt wrapped around your lower hips. Two sheds are alternately opened up by a flat thick stick wider than the width of the warp through which the warp is shuttled through. Julia dyed her own yarns and built 6 of these looms for the performance.

Here we were yesterday in Julia's studio practicing on the backstrap looms.

It all takes place at Phyllis Stein Art downtown on Thursday, January 9 around 7pm. Can't wait!

Update: Correction, it's the 8th, not the 9th and here is the official announcement. Thanks Sabine!

Event: Secret Narratives and Cone of Power
    "Reception and performance installation"
What: Performance
Host: Phyllis Stein
Start Time: Thursday, January 8 at 2:00pm
End Time: Thursday, January 8 at 10:00pm
Where: Phyllis Stein Art

Weaving starts at 2pm, but main opening will be in the evening :)

my first weaving

I've been so busy finishing things up before the holidays! I finished the triangle on my weaving at home using my spork to beat the weft down. And then finally, after two 8-week sessions, finished my weaving in class. Here it is on the table. This was the first time I was seeing it off the loom. Wow, crazy. I was creating the design organically, using whatever yarns Barnsdall had on their shelves - great colors from the 70's. We decided it resembled a tall building. I'll have to clean up the loose ends and hang it in a very special place!! My first weaving!!
I twisted the ends. I love that look.

Sumi Ink Club

Fabulous Smockshop and Sumi Ink Club collaboration.

Barnsdall Weaving Class

I started a weaving class at Barnsdall Art Park earlier this summer and after much time setting up the warp, have finally started weaving!!The white yarns are just filler for those gaps in at the beginning of the warp. Setting up the warp took about 3 classes which involved winding the warp yarn onto a warp frame, tying it onto the loom, then the tedious task of separating the yarns into the heddles and the reed. This is the plain weave. You can really see the teal colored warp through the brown colored weft. The warp yarn I used, is a varigated, meaning it's not perfectly even yarn, but thinner and thicker in some places.I decided to use the free to use yarns Barnsdall has and not to plan so much. I love all these unwanted muted, colors probably from the 70's. I am practicing creating organically. There is so much control designing on the computer, that you forget how nice it can sometimes be to have parameters.This is how far I got in about 3 hours, not quite a foot. It is about 12" wide. Starting from the bottom, you can see the alternating plain weave and basket weave, which the yellow/green solid area creates a twill effect. Also played around with vertical stripes, horizontal stripes and checkerboard when I added the cram color. You can see how some areas are more packed than others. Packing is pounding the weave down, a little bit violent, but will often hide the warp with thinner yarns and techniques like the basket weave.

The reality is that weaving is a third world skill that you will make no money at because machines can seriously do this thing in a second. So, our wonderful instructor Carolyn encourages us to do something you couldn't buy in stores, experiment and be creative.

Next week, I will continue this sampler with a big zig zag!!

Hyperbolic Crochet Coral

The coral form I made using the method of hyperbolic crochet. This one was a single, single, double.