Spinning a yarn

Here, for once, I'm planning ahead. Most of my weaving is done spontaneously, no planned design. So this is a departure. Little landscape, colors suggested, and there's roving in the colors I need.

In weaving terms, this drawing is called a cartoon, and it will be set up behind the warp as a guide. It's a golden rectangle, 5×8

Just have to spin it now. By the time I've got the new loom tensioner set up, I'll have enough yarn to work with.

At least, that's the plan.

The tapestry goes on, and the butterfly emerges

The tapestry is starting to take on meaning now.  Here's how it looks this morning.  The two insertions are just pinned in place for now, but I think they will stay. You'll recognize the lower one as one of those fringy sawblade weavings, painted.  Once the tapestry's off the loom, I'll take pix that will be a bit easier to read, with less background interference.

It's shaping up as a World Under a Tropical Sun piece.  There will be more weaving, but some of those open areas you see will remain open, and I think some of the woven parts will be pushed about a bit to express the ideas more clearly. This is a great stage to be at, where it starts to come together with a concept and rewards all the groping about in the dark earlier.  It does fall in conceptually with the Planet Suite, too, both in the ideas and in the materials I'm using.

And, since I have to have something portable to take with me to see me mates at the stitching guild, here's another stumpwork butterfly from the  butterfly habitat in progress, one of the more junior bflies here, not competing with the big beaded and goldworked ones. 

I'm just stitching on the wire which will enable it to pose on the final work, after I've cut it out around the stitching. It's a piece I stamped from the stamp I carved and showed you a while back.  First I ran a line of split stitching around the edges, and now I'm overcasting the wire with the same thread to create a firm wired margin. The fabric has a built-in sparkle, so little ornamentation will be needed.

Tomorrow: plans for a road trip with stitching friends to the Michener Museum, in Pennsylvania not far from here, to see antique quilts from the collection in York, UK, along with Kaffe Fassett's responding quilts.  Look for pix if they let me take them.

The Tapestry is growing apace

More work on the tapestry this morning, while I wait for my supplies of wire to arrive to continue with the planets.

Here we are, with the insert temporarily in place, and the design going on pretty well

 Closer up, with a cloth behind to let you see better

And stepping back so you can see the relative size of it to the surrounding furniture. Weaving includes the copper wire, llama yarn, perle cotton, boucle and merino roving.  The textures are nice when you encounter this in person, particularly between the sharpness of the fine copper wire and the cloudlike softness of the roving.  The next section will use the llama yarn, for a darker contrast to the light yarns at the bottom here.

Possibly one or more more inserts might happen, too.