Tuesday 28 July 2009

Do we have a Video?

For the exhibition in Bad Staffelstein, I made video snippets to demonstrate both how the textile techniques look "in action" and to give a small impression about how time-consuming textile works can be. Here's one of the four snippets I made, showing tablet weaving in twill structure, done with modern weaving tools (also known as butchered playing cards). I translated the text into English - it's German in the exhibition, of course.

It's no teaching video, but it does show my weaving setup and work procedures - so tablet weavers might be able to see what I'm doing and how, and others hopefully still get an impression of how long such work takes, and that it's not the tools or any machinery that make the pattern, but the brains and hands of the person working.

2 comments:

amalie said...

I notice you're sitting facing down the weaving rather than having it running from left to right as we see in manuscript pictures. I do the same thing and have often wondered if this is strange of me. I can't get it to feel natural in the manuscript position. Do you think this is a personal preference thing or is there something else going on?

a stitch in time said...

Yes, I'm sitting differently. However, I can see the appeal of sitting squarely in front of the weaving, because with the rather long stretch of open warp that I prefer between my tablets and the weaving, I always have to stretch forwards quite a bit.
I really don't know why I'm still sitting that way, now that you ask me. Maybe it is because that's the way I sat when I learned how to tablet-weave, and I never got around to trying the other way. Maybe I'll take out my demo weaving tonight (it needs some attention anyway) and try sitting medieval style.