An Army of Caterpillars

The brief for this assignment was to take the title 'An Army of Caterpillars' and use it as the basis for the visual studies and also as the basis for design for weave.

I decided to concentrate solely on the caterpillar part of the title, as there was so much inspiration in this alone. The colours and textures really inspired me and I felt translated well into the medium of weave. It has been a long time since I did the weave specialism last September/October, and it felt like coming home, getting back onto the hand loom again.

This time we had to make more decisions for ourselves, on the warp threads as well as the weft. We had to warp the looms, (with instruction) for the first time ourselves. A challenge in itself the first time. I was using a sixteen shaft loom this time, whereas last time I only had eight shafts to contend with.

I felt the project went particularly well, but please feel free to leave comments on this work.


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Patterns taken from caterpillar markings.

The brief for this part of the assignment was to produce 4 weave samples which reflected the visual studies undertaken - An army of caterpillars.

These are two of my samples which reflected the colours of the caterpillars studied.

Both were woven using double cloth techniques and have a three dimensional surface.

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Sample on left incorporated beads into the weave, and also the green stripes were of hand dyed threads.

Sample on right is of distorted weft weaving, which I subsequently used for my bag.

Two samples woven on sixteen shaft hand loom, using double cloth techniques, to resemble the caterpillars studied in visual studies.

The piece of work for this assignment was to make something to wear or a fashion accessory. I chose to make a bag. The fabric was woven on a sixteen shaft loom, using distorted weft pattern. The bag is lined and decorated with a piece of mikalov lace (which resembled a caterpillar) and the strap is made of a kumihimo braid.

My final piece of work for this assignment was a table runner, inspired by the caterpillar colours.

It was woven in cream cotton thread, 4 rows of plain weave followed by one patterned row of overshot pattern. The overshot rows were woven using a thicker strong thread. After weaving the overshot pattern rows were pulled up and tied both sides, and then the fabric was dyed using procion cold water dyes, green on one side and yellow on the other. After the dyeing process was complete and the fabric had dried, the tied threads were cut and withdrawn, revealing the dyed patterning on the fabric.


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