Happy New Year and New Art to All!

I spent New Year's Day, once I got my eyes operating, doing weavings using the sawblade which seems to have become a vital tool in the studio.

The idea was to make a couple of inserts for the big weaving, but it got away from me, and I think I may have one freestanding small weaving, using cotton perle thread and boucle yarn

 and one, using llama yarn and fun fur, which will be part of the butterfly habitat one, part of a tree with hanging foliage.  Here I'm showing it before 

 and after painting

 

If you wonder how this stuff came from a sawblade loom, what I did was warp it completely across the back as well as the front. 

This means that when the weaving is complete, you cut the warp threads from the middle of the back, and end with a huge and lovely sweep of fringe for your finished piece. This is different from warping just around the teeth, when you end with short warp ends to knot and tie off.  Different style.

You can arrange the fringe like a sunburst, if that suits your purpose, and fix them with either stitching, or weaving into a bigger piece.  For these, I wanted them trailing, though.

You can do this with a cardboard loom, too, if you want to weave a seamless bag -- just continue the weft thread across the front, turn and continue across the back.  Since cardboard bends, it's not hard to remove the loom at the end of the piece.

Next I'll try to make a couple of inserts for the big weaving, wait, this sounds familiar. I remembered to update the year on my copyright notice, my New Year's Resolution already done!  No need to get carried away planning major life changes.

Circular weaving segment of bigger work, done

Sawblade weaving now off the loom and on the wall, for the moment until it finds a home in a bigger piece.  I still have to work on the copper areas, after the paint I used to disguise the white warp ends, matching the fuzzy yarn area, has safely dried

I did include wire in the outer area, and as you see, it holds up well with a single pushpin in place, doesn't droop down.  If you wonder how I got it off the blade, since neither the blade nor the warp would flex, I cut the first half circle of the loops and tied them back, then was able to slide the whole thing off the rest of the blade.  This has been a good deal!

One observer sees it as a mandala, which I admit hadn't occurred to me.  But fine anyway!  and I now see the copper insert as a kind of head and shoulders. This shape seems to recur in my work nowadays, seems to have replaced the Yorkshire hills line. 

In the course of working with this one, I've been retraining so as to use my left arm less, since that's the overworked and sore one, so this has been good practice at being aware as I work instead of realizing later that I was frozen into one set of repetitious movements, not so good.

So this is where we are for now.