Hand Woven Delights

The best thing about weaving is creating a cloth from nothing, watching your design come to life with that final thread. With hand weaving you truely get that satisfaction of a creator. Unlike jaquard weaving you are able to produce heavy textured fabric, and have no limit on the types of yarns that you can experiment with.

Here I have produced a doulbe cloth dobbie woven sample. I like how both sides are very different in look however the design is the identical.

This is one of my favourites designs. I love the yarn that I used in this sample as it gives the fabric so much texture. I also love how simple but effective the design is, I believe the fabric is extremely luxurious.

Lets get Manipulating

Once I have designed, woven or printed my designs I love to manipulate the fabrics, to create textures. Using a mixture of felting, cutting and stitching I was able to create interesting fabric pieces that were both contemporary and luxurious.

This is one of my favourite designs. By just using a simple method of cutting and felting the fabric I wasable to come up with a very intersting and tactile piece.

To create a luxurious fabric I hand felted wool bonded the fibres with felting needles and then machine stitched on top of the felt. I believe that this has given the fabric more depth and increased the strength of the colour in the design.

Again using the method of felting and cutting I have been able to give an interesting texture to the cloth. Having cut the cloth gives it movement and the ability to stretch releving colours from under the pattern.

Jaquard Designs

I was extremly lucky as I had access to used a Jaquard machine at my university. It allowed me to design to a larger scale than a Dobbie will allow. The Jaquard also enabled me to experiment more with design ideas, this left my portfolio bulging with many differnt ideas.
Here are a few........

Wool was my main yarn for this project as I spent alot of time experimenting with felting fabrics. It gives the fabrics solid colour, and a good quality for upholstery. It also lead on to further experimentation with textures......

Weaving with Feathers

Feature pieces are a big thing with interiors. Having show cushions, throws to decorate and add colour to the room are important specially now in the time of resession, as now we are staying in our homes and reviving what we have; feature pieces make big statements to acent the room, and give that homely feel.

So as part of my final year I decided to make fabrics that could be used as feature pieces. With these I used feathers, as they are luxurious, rich and unusual. Inbetween the feathers I wove pleates to fill out the fabric, giving depth and warmth to the design.