How to Make Cloth

As manufacturing becomes more sophisticated we lose that link between everyday items and how they were made.  There is barely a trace of the farm in food that is precooked, prepared, preportioned and packaged.  Clothing is not just manufactured for fashion.  It can be engineered to have special properties, whether that is heat retention, moisture control or even anti-bacterial effects.  The materials that went into the cloth and its structure are unrecognizable to a lot of us

How sad it would be to loose touch with the basic crafts that underly so much for what we have today.  So, plant a garden and harvest your own tomatoes or spin some yarn and make cloth.

      

plain weave rag rug

Making cloth is not just a utilitarian occupation.  It is also a form of expression whether that is making your mark on the cloth you weave or using weaving to tell a story.   

Basic weaving is simply interlacing horizontal and vertical threads to form a sheet that holds together.  The magic is in what you choose to use as threads and how you choose to interlace them.

plain weave mug rugs

The beginner's plain weave mug rugs all started with the same plain warp but they differ depending on what the weaver chose to use as weft and how they chose to weave each piece.

The fundamental principles of weaving on a loom are the same no matter how sophisticated the loom may be.  So the first step in understanding how cloth is made is to learning how dress and operate a simple loom.

students busy at their looms

Once you are the master (or mistress) of the loom then the sky is the limit.  You can play with colour, texture, and pattern.  You can make a piece of art or an artful tea towel.

Artful tea towels

If you think you would like to try your hand at weaving then we give beginner lessons in our studio in Qualicum Beach.  The next set of lessons takes place May 3 to 5th.  Class size is limited and classes book up quickly.  

For more information check Workshops on our web site  https://qwsg.ca/workshops/

Felted Pictures

 

Wendy's Monarch

If you think the season for felting slippers is past and you have a basket full of coloured fleece maybe you would like to try your hand at painting with wool.

You can blend coloured fibres as you might blend paints to create subtle colour variations, as in the background of Wendy's Monarch.  The background is a wet felted base.  But you can also create detail like the lines on the butterflies wings with a bit of needle felting.

Maggie's landscape

Maggie has used a similar technique to produce this lovely landscape with some embellished poppies in the foreground.

prefelts

The child's blanket shown below began with a lightly wet felted base layer.  Then images were created as "prefelts", very lightly felted pieces that just hold together.  Then the prefelts are laid onto the partly felted base and the combination is carefully felted as one.  The trick is not to over process either the base or the prefelts.

 You can apply this same technique to nuno felting.  Nuno felting introduces a thin open weave material to stabilize the wool felt so that you can create a thin but stable cloth for making garments.  The wool fibres penetrate the silk so it is completely covered by the felted wool.

Pauline's vest

Darrell's embellished garden

In the photo above Darrell has added another element with embellishment to create the flowers in the foreground.  She has also made use of the raw wool fibres that tend to be curly and whispy to create clouds in the background.

Felting Workshop

If any of this interests you, Darrell is giving a workshop that will teach you the basics of wet felting and set you on your way to painting with wool.  You will come home with your own version of a flower garden. Darrell is doing two sessions, Friday April 19th or Saturday April 20th so you have two choices.  For more details go to our web site Qualicum Weavers and Spinners