Sunday, April 22, 2018

New Mexico Mountainscape

When I have more time to pursue weaving just for fun, I swear I'm going to do some tapestry weaving. I like the idea of weaving pictures. In the meantime, I've found a way to weave little landscapes every now and then on my inkle loom. 
Here's my latest, entitled "New Mexico Mountainscape".
It was created for a show sponsored by the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Council in early April.
The show was cleverly called "Earth, Wind and Fiber".    It was amazing!

Click on any of the photos to enlarge them and see more detail. 






For the sky, I used my go-to yarn, Omega Sinfonia and a little bit of thick and thin "cotton flake" in darker blue to give a bit of texture to the clouds.
The green of the mountains is Reynolds Saucy, a now discontinued yarn which I still have a small stash of. It's a bit thicker than the background yarn which makes the mountains look more solid.
Behind the mountains is some hand-painted Sinfonia. See below for details about that.
The rocky foreground at the bottom of the band is made of some lovely variegated bamboo. To get a rocky texture, I used two strands as one and knotted them together at random intervals.

The yellow/green background yarn was the product of a warp-painting class which I took from a friend, Robin Pascal. You can see her lovely painted yarns HERE.
In my stashed lurked this pale orange Sinfonia, not a color I like much or could ever find a way to use. This was the perfect opportunity to make it into something else.
My original idea was to warp the loom, tie it off, paint the warp, put it  back on and just weave it as it was. Taking the warp off the loom and putting it back on was successful! Yay!
But, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the resulting band. So, instead, I just decided to wind it off the loom into a ball and some of it became background for the mountains.




In class, Robin had us painting the yarn with brushes. I even tried dyeing a loose skein without winding it into a larger loop first. Shown at front right. It sorta worked. The green ball at front left was wound into a loop, painted with several colors which ended up running into one another making a smooth and pretty green. 

See these posts for more landscapes which I've woven in the past:
Taos Mountain and the Rio Grande Gorge
Sandia Mountains

From the windows of my house, I can see the Sandia Mountains. Everywhere I travel in New Mexico, one or more ranges of mountains are in view. For this I am grateful!

2 comments:

  1. I love to see your art and reading about the process is icing on the cake. Beautiful landscape! I miss you....

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