The warp is made of cotton-wrapped polyester and the weft is polyester wrapped with metallic fibers. There's an unplanned shift from silver to gold (hey, I'm keeping true to the spirit of the Olympics at least!), as my local fabric store ran out of the silver thread. Which should be all right, project wise. The magic of cotton-wrapped polyester is that when burn-out paste is applied to it, only the cotton burns away. So I can burn out sections of the fabric by a half-tone. First I'm going to be screen-printing over the fabric, although I need to run a few more tests on my sample piece to make sure the burn out paste works when applied over the screen-printing pigment.
Edit: Actually, it turns out pigment acts as a resist for the burnout paste, so oops!, that's not going to work.
Throwing the shuttle.
Beating back.
I figured it would take me three days to wind my warp, thread my heddles, sley the reed and weave it. (Six or seven hour days. I've been sleeping in late this week as it's technically my week off). But today is day five and I should finally finish weaving. Honestly, I think I bit off a little more than I could chew with this project - or more than would afford me a day off during my break. I hope it turns out well. I'm actually feeling kind of nervous about printing over it after all this work.
3 comments:
WOW Say! It looks GREAT! Worthy of a gold medal anyway.
That's such an amazing process- I loved gaining some insight into your weaving. My sister is majoring in print-making, so she does a lot of screen printing, too. She often mentions how terrified she is to ruin a beautiful piece of material... I can only imagine how much more that feeling must be amplified when you've painstakingly woven the fabric yourself!! It looks wonderful. Take care, Say! :-)
Your fabric looks fabulous! I've been learning to knit vs. weaving. Now that the Olympics are over I need to get back to weaving. I have used polyester as a warp but never cotton wrapped polyester. Where would I find cotton wrapped polyester? I might want to try it out.
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