Wk 4

Aspen Kimlicko (Ollie)

I wanted to use a thicker yarn with this project because I wanted to hide the coils of wire in my work. My plan was to integrate a coil into a swatch using the overshot technique, then make a new swatch and integrate a new coil with inlay. I tried a part of each swatch with just the techniques, to practice and get a feel for it before trying to integrate the coils.

Overshot

Only passing the yarn under a few of the weft ends, I pushed the yarn through the coil on one side, then made a row of tabby. I then realized that this brought my yarn back to the same side I had just gone through the coil from, and that wouldn't work well if I wanted the coil to lay flat. I ended up having to add another row of tabby so that the yarn would be on the opposite side and I could pass it through the coil from both ends. This pulled it flat. At this point, it became very difficult to pass more of the thick blue yarn through the small coil. I was already using a needle instead of the shuttle, and I didn't want to break any of the wire. I wound one lead of wire around the yarn to pass it underneath most of the weft ends, then did the same to the other side after more tabby.

I'm not sure if I understood overshot correctly, but the probelm I ran into a lot was that doing one row of tabby then another of something else made it so that the tabby always went the same direction, which made symmetry hard.

I then did some rows of mixing basket weave with tabby. This turned out more interesting, since some of the tabby showed through when the basket weave was passing under the weft ends, and then was hidden completely when the basket weave passed over. I really liked the texture that this created. I don't think this would have happened as clearly with a thinner yarn, but since the tabby alternated between hidden and visible, it seemed like I was alternating between the two on the same row.

Inlay

I was inspired by the swatch book that was passed around in class the first week, which included a christmas tree. I wanted to make something simple that visually incorporated the coil instead of trying to hide it. I imagined a pyramid with a star shining over it, and a magnetic flipping bead would be like the star twinkling. To protect the leads, I passed them under and back out at the edge of each side.

I was able to go over and through the coil several times using inlay, but as the blue yarn kept adding layers above the coil, I struggled to keep the inlay down around the coil. I'm not sure why one suide of the coil is covered more than the other. I would like for this to be more symmetrical, but I need more practice to be familiar with how inlay ends up laying with the main yarn.

I definitely preferred inlay for this project. I don't think I really understood how to integrate the coil into the weave using overshot, and I felt like I had more control over the look of the weaving when I was using inlay. I do like how the simple overshot pattern I did without the coil ended up, since it shows both the tabby and the thicker basket weave. All in all, inlay feels more freeing for incorporating components into the weave, while overshot could be used to create textural patterns. If I want to include different colors, I'll also probably choose inlay. I can see a lot of potential with it.

Overall, I don't think I did a great job of incorporating the coils in my weaving. They look messy and I didn't really know how to keep the hair-thin wire ends from getting lost in the yarn. I wasn't really clear on the exact definitions of overshot and inlay, so I felt like I was breaking the rules if I tried anything that wasn't explicitly what I understood the techniques to be.

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