What I'm weaving

I finally remembered to take a photo at weaving of what we're doing. It's Theo Moorman technique where you weave a background cloth and add supplementary wefts that sit on the surface of the cloth, held down by (theoretically) invisible tie down threads. You can use it to do all sorts of shapes, and make landscapes and pictorial things, but after doing a sample I decided to go with transparent squares. Or perhaps rectangles, sometimes I keep weaving and it is no longer a square. I am calling it a table runner, but really I'm just weaving.



We are fairly confident that the slubby background thread is a silk, and I'm weaving it together with a cotton so it's strong enough. It looks a bit coarse in the photo but in reality it's quite an interesting mix and is making a nice cloth. The squares are in pastels - some so pale they're hardly noticeable - and it's fun, but a bit fiddly. The tie-down threads tend to lose their tension and go a bit wonky. And you have to manually put the colours through so it's hard to get a rhythm up.  But in some ways that's good - it's not automatic and every little while you stop and think about where you're going to put the next colour.

My Dad went back to NZ on Friday after nearly three weeks here. As usual it went by incredibly quickly but he managed to not only help with the painting but do some gardening, and cook us dinner on his last night of fish that he had caught himself and brought over. Yep, another few kilos of beautiful frozen snapper fillets made it across the Tasman. Amazing, and we all love it. This is not a great photo because we mostly have our mouths full...