Playing with Light: Now You See It; Now You Don’t

Playing with warp wise and weft wise orientation

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Introduction:
I began this project maybe 1 ½ years ago. Had the inspiration, almost finished it. Then it got buried on my worktable. I had just gotten my 12-shaft dobby from my dear friend, Jan Langdon, before she died of ALS. I wanted to use all the shafts to make a 12-shaft satin. Then I wanted to gradually in steps go from weft face satin to warp face. That would be 1/11 (1shaft up and 11 down=warp face on one side and weft face on the other) to 2/10, to 3/9, to 4/8, etc. ending with 11/1 (11 shafts up and 1 down). It was interesting but didn’t turn out to be attractive. I’d been playing with dyed silks, cutting squares and playing with how the light affected them whether they were oriented with the warp direction up or turned 90 degrees. So I decided to cut up my fabric into squares and see what I could do.

Depending on how you look at this, the border is darker or lighter. I put the warp faced squares on the border with the warp going horizontally. All the middle squares were oriented with warp wise going vertically.

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Here the same piece when I walked to the other side of it to take the picture.

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These were on white warp working sequentially from weft face to warp face. I started with canvases I bought at an art supply store. They are 16” x 20”. I covered them with a gray linen that I had. I do love the surface of a nice linen.

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I couldn’t bear to throw out the scraps! For a long time I’ve toyed with the idea of making a mosaic out of small pieces.

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Now my dilemma: what shall I do with the leftover squares?

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Before cutting anything, I ironed this double stick adhesive on the back. Then I cut the strips using a rotary cutter, and finally cut the strips into squares. To adhere them to the backing, you pull off the paper backing to expose the adhesive and iron the pieces down.

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