Cloth Designs

I'm not always very good at communicating about things in the studio as they happen. I guess I try to tie things together to tell a coherent story. My life right now is not a coherent story at all. It's actually two interrelated stories if anything.

What was I doing during that "downtime" from printmaking and blogging about it? Well, show season is coming up fast so I was doing what I always do this time of year, preparing batches of cloth to be woven, cut, and stitched for the rest of the year. The design is the part of the process that demands the most unbroken time so I like to do all of it during the winter.

I decided to do something unusual with my designs this year. Instead of one clear, decisive blue, I designed two batches of "almost blue". One of them is centered on teal with shades ranging from gold to royal blue.

["Green"]

The second is centered on deep purple, with a wide gamut in terms of hues and shades running from a deep blue to a light lavender blushed with pink.

["Purple"]

I believe that these designs will give me plenty of garments that read as "blue" to meet the demand for that color. I can also use these designs to create shades from almost every other part of the color wheel. The first beam can be woven to look like everything from golden green to deep blue. The second one can go from deep blue to red, leaving only orange unrepresented in one beam or the other.

I will need to complete one more beam design before the end of the year, but for now I've got to keep focused on the printmaking. There's a steep learning curve to climb and I need to keep plugging away at it if I'm going to get that new venture off the ground in the next few years.