Stratocumulus

I've been an admirer of Cathy Tipping's work for some time and was excited to hear about a new longstitch she was working on during her university holidays. Being a cloud watcher from my childhood days, I could sit and admire this work for hours, I love it so much.

This work was commissioned by the owners of Milkwood.

Luna

I was fortunate enough to be part of a design competition that gave me the opportunity to have my fabric woven at a mill in Brisbane and then upholstered onto a chair. There will be more to come in the next few months. I hope you like it.

Upholstery by Paris Decor

Chair by LUKE

Wired Commission

I was lucky enough to be invited by Suzy Tuxen at AFOM to collaborate on a commission for Wired magazine. I've been talking about making a carpet for a long time so here was the opportunity. There were many moments where I felt like I was never going to get there! But I did in the end thanks to those with quick nimble fingers who helped weave rows and cut down the yarn to size.

Boxes of carpet presents - cut pile.

Carpets (and weaving in general) is all about graphs. At its most simple a design can be drawn on graph paper and then translated into a carpet, with a few constraints in mind. It took me a while to work out the type proportion and knot ratio, but after sampling and figuring out the right sett (weave speak for how many ends per inch) it all seemed to fall into place.

I felt such a sense of relief when I cut it off the loom before tying up some loose ends and rushing off to work bleary eyed. Not only because it was finished but also because the proportion worked and the carpet was straight. I spent a day tying it onto the loom to make sure the tension was as even as possible.

Although carpet techniques can be simple, they are among the most time consuming. Up there with tapestry weaving. Each row took about fifteen minutes to weave, with no mistakes in it. That makes it 81 knots per square inch. Sounds like a lot but just to put it into perspective, the Ardabil Carpet at the V&A has more than four times as many, totaling 340 knots per square inch. About 26 million knots in total. The Persian carpet is an immensely beautiful piece of craftsmanship dated to 1539/40 AD, most probably a royal commission and one of a pair to have come from a group of mosques in Ardabil in North West Persia. The other rug is housed in a gallery in Los Angeles and is even more densely woven. Over 10 x 5m in size, it would have taken a group of talented weavers with very nimble fingers about four years to weave! I only wish I could have seen it up close and turned a corner over.

Back view of the rug, probably my favourite bit.

It was photographed by the talented Shane Loorham and sent off to Wired to be published in the May issue. Hopefully there are more carpets to come. Thanks Suzy!

Journey to the Moon

I loved the beauty of Emmet Gowins black and white aerial photographs. Images of crop circles and bomb testing sites in the middle of vast nothingness. It planted the seed for these samples and final jacquard fabric.

Beautiful inky navy spec-dyed cotton from Avril paired with coral mercerised cotton.

Two colour jacquard in white/black and yellow.

Doubleweave using Habu black/white and white/black viscose. A little something I'm going to keep working on.

I was lucky enough to be flown up to Brisbane to work on a design to be woven into upholstery fabic at a mill. It's so different to any experience I've had with handweaving. So much faster but none of the romance of crafting something by hand. But then again, I could never produce upholstery grade fabric by hand. Here I was trying out different yarn colours but this one ended up on the cutting room floor.

Pleats Please

So this is a piece I made for an exhibition late last year and something I'm going to continue to work on over the next few months... exciting times really.

A cushion of sorts

I thought I might start with my latest stuff. I bought some beautiful spec dyed cotton from Avril in a few colours and decided the grey would be perfect combined with a great greenish yellow mercerised cotton I found at Dairing. I had wanted to finish this (not so) little project by Wednesday but ran out of yarn as I was just over half way through warping up. So my warp is pictured left along with the 2" wide ribbon I wove for the piping. I loved weaving this. Inky navy with white Habu paper yarn as weft. Will keep you posted once I've woven the panels and sewn it together. Also in the works is a moon cushion. Kinda excited about that one.

I couldn't help but post a photograph of the yarns themselves. The white/black skein is a beautiful viscose yarn from Habu.

new stuff to come

Finally uni holidays are here and I get a chance to update this over the next few days... Sorry its been so long but hopefully it will be worth the wait.