Weaving with mesh bags

I have been saving up my mesh (orange and onion) bags.  These are often very plasticky but sometimes more flexible.  Either way I wanted to use them and as they have holes in  I naturally tried weaving into them.  I found this very difficult - manageable, but the effect wasn't worth the awkwardness.  Uninteresting.  (They could be fastened to a frame to make it easier).  So I turned the idea around and thought, what if I tried to weave with the bags instead?  So I ripped them into strips of varying widths - they rip neatly along a straight line so next time I will try rough cutting to get a ragged edge.  Then I used a piece of tapestry canvas from the Op Shop to weave these strips into.  One strip at a time looked very sparse - even though I was leaving it loose on top - so I doubled up the strips which gave it a much fuller look.  The overall look was quite ragged looking which I liked very much.  It is a bit hard to see in the photo because the mesh of the bags is thin.  But I like the visual texture (the actual feel is a bit yukky because it is a plasticky type of bag) and worth keeping in mind for some of the 3D stuff I want to start working on.

Weaving with mesh bags, on tapestry canvas

©Christine Linton

While I was thinking about experimental weaving I did some "searches" and found this wonderful piece but with no name:  click here.
Also some other contemporary experimental weaving:  click here.
Once you start searching, there's plenty around, such as Megan Walsh-Cheek, who recently had a terrific exhibition of her weaving up at Hahndorf.

Weaving and woven vessels exhibition - wow!

This week I went to an exhibition by Megan Walsh-Cheek, who has been working on some wonderful experimental weaving.  Unfortunately most of my photos didn't come out well, but Megan has kindly given me permission to show her work here, and one of my favourites did photograph well:

weaving from Megan Walsh-Cheek

What I liked so much was not just the variety of materials she used, such as fabric and lace strips, as well as yarns and threads, plus sticks of various kinds, but also the fact that she wove around the shape of the sticks, so that when a stick curved, so did the weaving.  She also made some fantastic vessels which can be seen on her etsy shop, see below.

The exhibition has now finished, but you can see the exhibits on her etsy shop here, it is lovely to look at them again.

Weaving a rock formation

I've become fascinated by some rock formations near home.  This is one of the photos I took -

and I decided to try some experimental weaving to interpret it in fibres/textile.  So I took a mesh bag that held oranges last week, and some wool I bought for 50 cents at the op shop, and some dyed string in small pieces from the dyeing I did last year  where I had to cut the string off the pole-wrap shibori because I couldn't undo the knots; also a bit of tapestry wool from a bag of them also from the op shop.  I love recycling and everything in this is - or in fact upcycled, made into something better instead of languishing in the back of a cupboard.  Here is the result -

Experimental weaving on mesh bag, 100% recycled stuff 

©Christine Linton

Originally I had it facing up the other way to better reflect the curves of the rock formation but when I dropped it and picked it up upside down, I immediately liked the effect better.  Never mind accuracy, it's effect I'm aiming for.

There are two blogs I follow that have inspired me to try weaving:

http://windthread.typepad.com/windthread/2013/02/maybe.html

http://avisualsensibility.com

both different approaches and both very individual, and both worth looking at.

Changing the appearance of a weaving sample

How to still sew in the middle of an Aussie heatweave - had to go out and buy a fan for my studio so that I could sew; the heat 45 Celsuis/110 Fahrenheit finally succeeded in draining my energy.  So today I've been able to set up sewing again and stitched this Experimental Weaving onto my Connotations cloth. First I gathered these strips stitching from side to side which helps them twist, then gathered them; then wove them together.

Connotations Experimental Weaving  with gathered fabric threads.

Then I slid the weaving onto a space on my Connotations.  I let the strips fall naturally in different ways as I slid the weaving piece on because then I had two different appearances and two photos to look at.  (Addicted to photographing my work in all stages.)  Once it  had fallen into its new alignment, which makes it look totally different, I used bright orange DMC cotton embroidery thread to stitch it in place, varying my stitch size for a naive look.  My colour scheme for Connotations is blues, greens and orange.  I love this because of the high contrast of the orange, yet using blues and greens for the fabrics and orange for the thread (mostly, not entirely) means I am keeping some consistency.   

Connotations Experimental Weaving after stitching onto cloth

On the left of the weaving you can see an area of threads.  These are from my "waste thread" bag which hangs under my sewing machine table; I stitched these on by hand which is new for me because usually I free-machine thread waste onto fabric.  I'm consciously working a lot more hand stitching nowadays.  I find it very relaxing, the effect is similar to when you are walking in a place of natural beauty.

The fabrics themselves are strips of  hand-dyed, or painted with fabric paint, or plain commercial fabric (that is the blueish maive one.  The colour is exactly in the middle of blue and purple, if you put it against one of those it looks like the other.)