weaving

testing some woven eyes for my bees. these have a matte black circular warp threaded into cut fabric (calico in the first test), and shiny black stranded thread for the circular weft, travelling across and around the eye. I used the shiny thread to simulate the shinyness of a bee's eyes, and woven circles to remind of the multiple cells / lenses of the bees' eyes.

I learnt this technique from jude hill on her wonderful "considering weave" class / project

the first one didn't work out as i'd threaded both ways instead of one way only.

but the next sample worked out as I had hoped (seen in my mind) so i was happy about this.

first attempt at weaving in cloth. there's quite a few 'mistakes' where I flip flopped (let's call it "flipped a bit" in engineering terms) but it adds to the charm and makes it unique (& if it were a gene, then now there's a new mutation?)

I like the looser weave when I first started too - I almost kept it like that but decided to finish it to see what it'd look like. I did manage to pull the fabric and create a hole in the corner though. I tried to get variable spaced warps but then this slowed the weaving down a lot as I made more mistakes and had to work out where I was more often. I used different thickness & colour threads to create some more variation.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aliak_com/sets/72157645331553742 has more pics

I'm going to have to try more of these - it was great fun. this is inspired by jude hill's "considering weave" class