In this bundle of exercises, I found a surprisingly relaxing experience. I liked all aspects - matching the colours of my thread collection to my chosen image (which I think came out quite well), weaving little strips out of paper, and going back to a craze from my early teens involving many, many plastic cords. At the time, I remember it having many different names, but the one that stuck with me was 'Scoubidou', which I understand was it's original French name. I was pleasantly surprised by how easily it came back to me, though I wanted to include more strands - Googling about, I came across this page:
Palma and Margarita braids each of which use an amazing 24 strands. As a part of traditional south American weaving, these braids are apparently used to keep the frames taut. Making plenty of different braids was good fun, and looking into different weaving patterns to construct in paper was actually very educational. Looking at patterned cloth before, I wasn't sure how to count the threads, or to work out which ones rose and fell at which parts of the pattern. Although tapestry weaving, and how to create a smooth surface with so many overlapping colours still seems a long way off for me, I can understand some basic weaves much more easily, and recognise them on sight. I also imagine you could combine the two - braiding and weaving - to make some very tough, colourful cloth. Especially if you very the materials, and include, say, some of the PVC scoubidou threads, or some metallic effect yarn, maybe even some fine wire. I think, though, in that case it might be difficult to create something regular - unless you used a proper weaving frame, and wrapped your threads very tightly indeed around the wire when braiding to stop it from poking out at the end of a row. Then again, perhaps just wrapping wire to weave with would be an interesting experiment, as long as it stays in place.
As regards the colour matching exercise, I chose two images to attempt to match the colours from - one was The Ideal City (Urbino version), the famous 1470 painting of unknown authorship, the restricted colour palette of which would, I thought, encourage me to use the threads in a traditional way, trying my best to hide the shift between colours by blending them as subtly as possible. The second was Our English Coasts by Holman Hunt, the colours of which are some of the finest in painting - the red-brown clay soil, the tones of the sky meeting the sea, and my favourite part, the pink ears of the sheep with the sun behind. I thought it'd be good to keep them all together, and stuck them into my sketchbook, together with the little windings of thread, my coloured pencil blocks, and the labels for each part of the painting. It makes you realise both the limitations of the form and the doggedness of the weavers - a painter can mix two colours he has seamlessly together - and must do so often. A weaver needs a whole new tube of paint every time - combining strands of thread and continuing to weave won't give the right impression of blending up close.
The picture used above is one of my last experiments - trying to weave flat braids together into cloth. It was actually quite successful, but very time-consuming indeed. Picking a colour from each bunch of 8, when it reached the edge of another braid, I would swap the threads over, creating a join. This happened naturally fairly often, but if I were to do it again, I would make the joins twice as frequent, perhaps by colour-coding them along the width of the weave, just to save confusion.
So altogether, it's been a good refresher on some of the basics, and a good introduction to the mechanics of weaving.
