Melanie Olde Workshop

 In May I organised, on behalf of Creative Fibre for the upper half of the North Island, a workshop with Melanie Olde of Australia,  "Thinking Outside the Plane".

 

To quote Melanie "Weaving often deals with effects to manipulate the single flat plane of a cloth, but what if you expanded, pushed and pulled that plane?  Handweaving offers many opportunities to explore and design the 3-dimensional plane, taking cloth to another level through specialised multi-layering techniques."

 

The workshop covered how to increase and reduce the surface area of weaving, how to merge different sequences for exciting effects and create fabrics that pop out of the plane.

That was the official explanation; unofficially we just had fun.

 

 A piece of Melanie's work.

My first piece with all four layers working well.

 

 

Off the loom and manipulated - looks a bit like a rock pool anemone.

One layer of warp was either on a second back beam or, as in my case, weighted at the back.  This allowed us to do fun things like stack four layers of pencils in rows - 4 layer Orthogonal.  The white warp, in my threading, is the binding warp passing up and down through all layers while the other three warps are linear and pass straight between the layers.

A fabulous workshop and who knows where the information will be taken.