Hello! Just in case you don’t remember me my name is Jessica Hagar. It has been awhile since my last post but I am here to update you on what I have been doing. I just finished up my first semester of senior thesis. I am working towards creating a body of work to display in a gallery space by May 2015. This is my final assignment as a student at the Appalachian Center for Craft. It has been quite an adventure. I have learned a lot about myself and my working habits and also I have learned how to work through my creative blocks and answer some of my own questions. It has been quite a challenge but I feel I have progressed and am ready for the next chapter.
The concept that I have been trying to establish through my work is highly inspired by nature and the human form. The interaction of these two entities and how they can understand one another and be apart of the same space is something I would like to capture visually. I have spent a lot of hours contemplating and searching my mind for some clever or brilliant way of describing it in a non representational fashion, but I continue to bring myself back to the human role in these moments. I realize that it is about the human experience because we can’t see it from nature’s perspective. Although, I find it highly intriguing to attempt to see the interaction from nature’s perspective and wonder what that might look like? Anyways! I would like to share a few photos with you of my work throughout the semester….
These are some of my very first explorations with the human form and also with linen and embroidery.
I then found myself exploring the possibilities of painting with fiber reactive dye and adding objects to the fabric such as beads to bring in more dimension and visual intrigue. I also began exploring how different ways of printing the silhouette could change the overall meaning and feeling of the piece.
These are some of my final pieces of the semester. I took photographs of a friend and then via photoshop translated them into silhouette forms. I then printed them with fabric ink and painted them all with dye. I stitched metallic thread and beads to symbolize rain like qualities in a couple of the pieces. I plan to continue working on these and also I plan to work with more transparent fabrics. I will be back soon to show you my progress. Thanks for reading!
If you have any suggestions that would aid in my explorations and research please do not hesitate to send me an email jessicarosehagar@gmail.com
Final day is here already! This is Jinni and I thought I’d share some picks of my finals in weaving 2 this semester.
This is my first weaving with metal in the weft. I did some rust dyeing to see what the galvanized metal might do. It rusted it well and I was able to form an organic shape because of the metal.
This was my second and last project in Weaving 2. These came from the tube in a tube weaving project. I formed the shapes and stitched them down, although it still retains some dimension. I really found the stripes to be interesting with this project.
detail
For stability, I put some board in the back of the pieces, which also became the hanging devise.
The picture above is my weaving when it was still on the loom. Each colored section is a tube with a tube inside it. By doing a tube in a tube, it allowed me to work with the tubes attached to each other. I then separated the tubes and was able to hang it on the wall as separate pieces.
These are my wire in the warp studies that I did for a part of final. I wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to put wire and fishing line in the warp, and it turned out working quite well in the end. I was inspired with working the metal in the warp and will probably continue with it into my thesis. Happy Holidays everyone!
Since the last post, I have been experimenting with the tube in a tube weaving structure. I started out using linen and cotton for my first samples, and was using the lace weaving techniques I tried in my last project.
I used wool for another sample as you can see below.
I had some sisal yarn laying around and also decided to do a sample with it. It isn’t a very cozy fiber, but I really like it’s attitude in that way and have since decided to use it in my final.
Sisal fiber tube in a tube. I also used cotton with the sisal fiber.
This ended up creating a different structure than what I had sampled before. I put some metal in the outer tube with the cotton and used the sisal in the inner tube. I decided that the structure of this sample was what I wanted out of this weaving, and that I would try dying the sisal fiber since I enjoyed having the color on my other samples.
I have started on my sampling for my final project and have been using cotton and wool so far. The wool is the colored stripes.
I am excited to see how this turns out, and have plenty of work to get back to, so until I finish my finals…over and out!
This semester started fast!
Sometimes I just can’t be-weave how much potential there is with doubleweave! So this semester, I thought I’d start running in many directions. Linen is my new found love, so I’ve used it for my entire warp for my three samplers. For my samplers, I want to pursue the possibilities of lace, metal, and wool techniques.
I started using lace techniques that were developed for loom work. Then I started looking at bobbin lace and thought I would give it a try on my loom.
After many hours of tedious labor, I decided that this worked better in theory than on my loom. Well, at least I had some good results out of the other lace samples.
Some more sampling after my bobbin lace catastrophe helped move me along…
And I started sampling with metal wire. I have really enjoyed the potential of this material so far.
Using the metal, I started picking up where I left off with my final last year. Since there is no support inside the buttons, working with the metal helped to keep the structure raised off the woven surface.
So now I’ve started working with the wool, and I have combined it with sisal fiber. I love these two materials together, but there are still more ways to push the boundaries on this sampler. If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a message! I’ll be back around midterm (Oct 28) to update my blog so check back with us! Over & Out. Jinni Copp
Here in the Fibers Studio, we recently completed a t-shirt printing commission for the September Second-Saturday Open House at the Craft Center. Senior Fiber majors, Beth Bradford and Jessica Hagar, and Fibers Artist-in-Residence, Kelsey Wiskirchen, printed 100 t-shirts in various colors.
T-shirt Screen-Printing in the Fibers Studio
From this project, we learned the efficiency possible with a team. While one artist printed, the others prepared the t-shirts and hung the freshly printed shirts up to dry. After the printing process was complete, we all heat-set the ink and boxed the shirts up to complete the commission. The t-shirts were given for free to visitors at the Craft Center on Second Saturday.
Heat-setting the Textile Ink
Prof. Jeanne Brady demonstrating spinning
Welcome to the new semester! Things are picking up in the Fibers studio and we are excited for all that is in store for this fall. The looms and print tables are back in action! Pictured above, Fibers Professor Jeanne Brady is demonstrating spinning wool into yarn on the first day of classes. Stay tuned for updates from students in Weaving and Surface Design.
I mentioned in my previous post that I’m in my first semester of thesis, and it’s a little overwhelming. There are so many things that I want to do, so many things that I haven’t tried, that I barely know where to start. It feels as if the things I’m working on and experimenting with are unconnected because they’re so varied, but since they all come from me, how can that be true? Especially considering that my theme revolves around connection: connection to community, friends, family (whether blood relations or chosen family), etc.
It’s the thing that brought me to the Fibers major and the Craft Center in the first place, so I’m trying to come full circle and, for lack of a better term, complete the circuit.
So what am I working on right now? A piece about my connection to the knitting and crochet community, supported by the people who share my enthusiasm for the processes. One about my family and the way textiles form a link through the years to previous generations, or from them down to me. And I’m working through an idea about how I connect to the geek community through my love of genre television, books, and movies, and especially my love of costuming at conventions. I’m not quite sure where this one is going right now, because I’m taking it in a couple different directions, but hopefully one or both of them will work well. They might even be two parts of a whole. We’ll see.
So, how do you connect to people?
Beth here again. I’m in my first semester of thesis, and I’ll be honest, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. But that’s a blog post for another time. In the meanwhile, I want to show you what I recently finished weaving.
This is where it started. Well, no, technically it started with my family’s genealogical research and tracking one line back to Scotland in the 1800s. But even though my however-many-greats grandfather came from Scotland we apparently aren’t Scottish because we don’t have a clan affiliation. This idea started brewing when I had to write a research paper in Weaving II and chose tartans as my subject, reading about how they were woven and how they were important to Scottish history. I wanted to create a tartan for my family. However, as I read more about it, I realized that it would difficult to register a surname tartan (with The Scottish Register of Tartans), so I decided to create a personal tartan instead.
Man, it’s really hard to get all the colors to show up correctly in the same image because purple throws everything off.
I chose my favorite colors and then spent hours playing with the tartan designer at ScotWeb. While someone who knew me well might think that I’d use orange as the main color, given my love for it, I picked the purple and blue instead, knowing that orange doesn’t go well with my complexion.
Using a much smaller yarn and a much higher epi/ppi (measurements akin to thread count, if you aren’t familiar with weaving lingo) than I’m used to, as well as wrangling four colors at once, it seemed to take forever. But I was constantly amazed that I was creating something so fine. I often stopped just to touch it and look at the angle of the twill.
But finish it I did, and when I showed it to one of my friends with the declaration, “look what I made,” her response was, “this looks like fabric.” Yes. Yes, it does. Because that’s what it is. She couldn’t comprehend that I’d made the fabric itself, even though she knew I was a weaver, and she herself is a knitter. I was pleased.
But now I have about five and a half yards of my own personal tartan and plans to turn it into an Aboyne skirt, which is the skirt worn by women in Highland dance. It’s different than a kilt in that it’s gathered instead of pleated and you can see them in this image from aboynegames.com.
Let’s hope I do just as well with the sewing.
Hi there, Beth again. I’ve somewhat recovered from my, er, shall we say incident with the shadow weave, and managed to start it over and explore what it has to offer. I used the same pattern but different yarn, and it gives a completely different look and feel, both because of the color and the fiber the yarn is made from.
In place of the purple wool, I used a white linen, which has a very crisp texture and allows the fabric to hold its shape somewhat. Since several of my classmates and I attended SOFA Chicago back in November, I’ve been trying to think of ways to make fabric more sculptural instead of a flat surface, and this is the first experiment to that end. It’s not going to stand up to a harsh breeze, but it doesn’t flop over at the drop of a hat, either.
In addition to the more dimensional aspect, I’m enjoying playing with how the fabric looks different at different angles. It almost seems like a different fabric if you look at the diamonds vertically vs. horizontally. If I can just get the high contrast of black and white to stop messing with my eyes, I’ll be happy.
Jessica here! Hope I did not keep you waiting too long. I have finished my project since I posted TubulARTastic and In this last blog I would like to share with you my results and plans. Here is a photo of the piece:
Top View
Bottom View
With this finished piece I decided how to move forward with my final project which was to create another tube within a tube but on a larger scale. I planned to weave it tighter and I planned to cut the bottom of the outer tube. The wire lights proved difficult to weave into my smaller tube by hand and somewhat disturbed the weaving. I am still working on this aspect if anyone has any advice for me that would be great! I played around with one of my first tube samplers to see what it would do when I cut the bottom. I plan to use hem lock as a way to secure the threads that I cut
I was then introduced to the idea of lace weaving. I began doing some research and decided to give it a shot here is a link for a PDF about lace weaving that I found helpful ( www.weavingindiana.org/PDFs/EleanorBest/LaceByHand.pdf and here are the results:
The sections of the warp I twisted together by hand and then slid a piece of my copper wire through it to secure it in place. I did this to the back and the front layers so that the lace weaving wraps all the way around my tube.
I have done a lot of running around lately looking for inspiration to help me with this project. I have just been snapping pictures of things I think might be useful to me like the following:
These simple lamp structures I found at Lowe’s home improvement really gave me a lot of insight and ideas of how to put my final piece together. The lighting techniques used for these lamps gave me some ideas about how I might light my pieces in the future. I plan to use the same hanging devices as I used in my first project, but the tighter weaving will help the threads to be more stable.
I tried to find a way to pull all of these ideas together but struggled until one day I was sitting in my History of Crafts I class with Dr. Carol Ventura. She was lecturing on weaving that day. I heard her say something about how she thought that human muscles resemble a weaving. At first I found that idea kinda disturbing, and even gross, but as I began doing my lace weaving I saw what she was talking about! The way that the threads overlap and twist really do display muscular qualities. Then I came up with my title, Fractured Elegance. I began thinking about other aspects of the human body and the way a fractured bone looks and how that broken quality at the bottom instead of it being so rounded would mimic the strong points created in my lace weaving which will hopefully tie it all together.
I have finished weaving my Final piece and here it is!
I am going to make a paper template before cutting the outer tube to the shape I want this will help me plan out my design easier. Then, I will begin constructing and putting final touches on the piece. Check back at this same post in a couple weeks I will add a photo of my finished piece.
Thanks for the love
The Finished Piece!
ACC Fibers Department 
