Iridescence Workshop

Our guild was so fortunate to have Bobbie Irwin present a two-day workshop this past weekend on how to weave the quality of iridescence into fabric.  She came loaded with information, samples and humor.

She mailed our warps in advance so that we could arrive with warped looms, ready to weave. Our colors were randomly assigned.  She assured us that each of us had won the color lottery.

We had no influence over the colors we received and she admonished us to not trade colors between each other or switch the color orders she provided in our instructions.

There were fourteen of us in the class and I'm pretty sure that none of had the same colors.

The thing that made this class so special was that it was fresh for everyone, seasoned weavers as well as the newbies.

And it was forgiving.  A newbie weaver from our summer intro class had some problems with the loom she checked out from the guild library, so a seasoned weaver stopped her own work to get the errors corrected and get the newbie back on track so she could have a good experience.

Kathy was our lone table loom weaver and while it may look clunky and slow, she whipped out her sample.  Bobbie told me that this she had never seen more floor looms in a workshop and certainly the most Schacht looms,all but three of us.

I had one of the different looms made by Dorset, no longer in business.  It was by far the lightest loom and perhaps one of the reasons it's no longer in business.  I kept having to pull it back to me.

The purpose of the workshop was to learn how to create color play between colors in warp and weft.  Perhaps you can see it in the block on right where you see both the yellow and purple. It is light dependent.

Bobbie had a nifty technique of adding tassels at the selvages with the weft colors.  I think that's far more effective than tags that never seem to make sense after the fact.

It's so hard to display the effect of iridescence in a still photo and I hope this sample shows a little of it.  We were wowed by Bobbie's samples and I think we were all challenged to take this information back to our own looms. I know I am.