I will continue stitching colour wheels until I am stopped. Blackwork embroidery on 14-count Aida.
This one uses just seven thread colours (six for the fills, plus white for outlines). Each section has a 3-part gradient on a bit of a curve, which was a bit different to design, but no harder to stitch than my earlier 2-part gradients.
500-year-old Snake Figure from Peru (Incan Empire), c. 1450-1532 CE: this fiber craft snake was made from cotton and camelid hair, and it has a total length of 86.4cm (about 34in)
This piece was crafted by shaping a cotton core into the basic form of a snake and then wrapping it in structural cords. Colorful threads were then used to create the surface pattern, producing a zig-zag design that covers most of the snake's body. Some of its facial features were also decorated with embroidery.
A double-braided rope is attached to the distal end of the snake's body, near the tip of its tail, and another rope is attached along the ventral side, where it forms a small loop just behind the snake's lower jaw. Similar features have been found in other serpentine figures from the same region/time period, suggesting that these objects may have been designed for a common purpose.
Very little is known about the original function and significance of these artifacts; they may have been created as decorative elements, costume elements, ceremonial props, toys, gifts, grave goods, or simply as pieces of artwork.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art argues that this figure might have been used as a prop during a particular Andean tradition:
In a ritual combat known as ayllar, snakes made of wool were used as projectiles. This effigy snake may have been worn around the neck—a powerful personal adornment of the paramount Inca and his allies—until it was needed as a weapon. The wearer would then grab the cord, swing the snake, and hurl it in the direction of the opponent. The heavy head would propel the figure forward. The simultaneous release of many would produce a scenario of “flying snakes” thrown at enemies.
The same custom is described in an account from a Spanish chronicler named Cristóbal de Albornoz, who referred to the tradition as "the game of the ayllus and the Amaru" ("El juego de los ayllus y el Amaru").
The image below depicts a very similar artifact from the same region/time period.
Why Indigenous Artifacts Should be Returned to Indigenous Communities.
Sources & More Info:
Metropolitan Museum of Art: Snake Ornament
Serpent Symbology: Representations of Snakes in Art
Journal de la Société des Américanistes: El Juego de los ayllus y el Amaru
Yale University Art Gallery: Votive Fiber Sculpture of an Anaconda
Hi all! I've been kind of quiet on this blog, but I have something really exciting to share today: after six years, I FINALLY figured out the weaving draft for the Fellowship cloaks from Lord of the Rings.
This is a problem I've been trying to figure out since shortly after I made my Legolas cosplay in 2018. The cloaks that the nine members of the Fellowship receive in Lothlórien look like a nondescript gray fabric from far away, but zoom in and you'll see a very complex pattern of horizontal and vertical bars of dark gray and white.
(First image from Alleycatscratch, second is a photo of the scarf of the same fabric I bought from Stansborough where I was attempting to trace the pattern repeat with orange thread)
This is going to be a long post, so I'm just going to lead with the completed draft:
Imagine me Will Smith wife posing at this for the last 24 hours.
It's got the correct size of pattern repeat! It's got the five individual ripples! It's got that dumb little pattern break in the middle that breaks up the center of the leaf motif! I am OVER THE MOON about figuring this out, especially starting out with very little knowledge about weaving drafts in general. More ramblings about this type of draft and my thought process below:
This particular pattern is known as "shadow weave," a subset of color-and-weave where the pattern is created from the interplay of different warp and weft colors plus the weaving draft itself. To get an idea of how that works, let's start by looking at plain weave in one color:
The solid purple bar at the top indicates the color of the warp threads, and the solid purple bar at the right indicates the color of the weft threads. So far we've got our basic under-over-under-over pattern in a single, solid color (purple). But what if we add an additional color (green) to the warp, and alternate those colors? Then we'd get a speckled fabric like this:
The visual effect looks pretty much identical regardless of if you start with green or purple. However, if you also alternate purple and green in the weft, it produces a very different effect depending on if you start with purple or green (note the differences in the bar on the right):
So cool, now we can make either vertical or horizontal stripes! If you double up on the colored threads in some areas, you can even flip between the two and start dividing the fabric into "blocks," like so:
Note that with all these changes, the only thing we've been doing is changing the order of the colors in the warp and weft. The actual weave structure itself is still just regular ol' plain weave. The pattern that we've created in the pictures above is called "log cabin," which you can read about here. But similar effects can be created by skipping shafts/picks in the weaving draft as well. So how do we get from log cabin into the more complicated and general category of shadow weave?
It's weird to describe how to convert a given pattern into shadow weave. There are multiple very good books with chapters on shadow weave as well as books entirely dedicated to it. Despite my best efforts, all these explanations still got so technical so fast it feels like, to me at least, asking a 6 year old to recite an entire Shakespeare play verbatim immediately after confirming that they can, in fact, sing the alphabet song. So I'm going to give my best shot at explaining it, and if it doesn't make sense, just blame it on me and check out some of the linked books above if you're really curious.
Think of shadow weave as a beauty filter for a black and white drawing. If you create a pattern out of black and white blocks/pixels/whatever, the shadow weave "filter" can be applied to it to create a similar pattern that preserves the shapes in the original, but makes them out of vertical/horizontal lines instead of solid color blocks. So in some of these books you'll find mention of converting a twill or an overshot pattern into shadow weave - that's what this is referencing. The original pattern (usually designated with light yarn) gets a secondary shadow pattern (in dark yarn) inserted into in between every other thread (also called an "end" when referencing warp yarns).
I got stuck at this point for literal years. I could find examples of weaving drafts using shadow weave, but couldn't figure out how to generate ones of my own. I imported some of the drafts I found in books into weaving software and poked around to see if I could push the patterns in the direction I wanted by changing individual elements. My experiments in changing individual warp ends and weft picks always ended up looking like stretched or compressed versions of the original pattern (when I was being careful), or incomprehensible garbage (when I was being daring). I even bought a sample of the fabric from Stansborough in the form of a scarf, thinking I could brute force it by using a magnifying glass to figure out the interlacements. I was able to figure out how large the pattern repeat was (approximately 160 x 80 ends), but otherwise I got nothing but eye strain. I ended up tabling the project and coming back to it every couple years, banging my head against it until I gave up.
Until one day last week when I was flipping through the Strickler book and saw this page:
And I was like
HOLD UP
IT'S HER
...or at least a close cousin of her. BUT IT WAS A START.
So the first step was to identify what about this pattern needed to change in order to make this look like the Fellowship cloak. Overall, the main differences were:
Pattern repeat on Strickler 304 was too small - it was 42 x 42 ends and I needed it to be somewhere in the ballpark of 80 x 80 before altering the repeat.
The Fellowship pattern has a weird vertical dividing line that runs down the middle of the leaf motif, effectively doubling the width of the repeat by creating two similar looking but different leaves. This was the change I was least concerned about, as flipping between vertical and horizontal lines is pretty a straightforward process as shown above with the log cabin draft.
Strickler 304 also has a different number of waves (peaks and valleys, or whatever you want to call them) compared to the Fellowship pattern. There are 3 waves in Strickler and 5 in Fellowship. Figuring out how to add these extra waves was the biggest obstacle for me to address.
And finally, a couple of things I didn't need to care about for the weaving draft: 1) the Fellowship pattern is elongated in the warp direction, but this has more to do with a little extra spacing between weft picks as compared to the warp threads. When weaving this you'd just need to make sure you don't beat it very hard and you'll get that tall rectangle shape instead of a square repeat. 2) Both patterns have mirrored symmetry around a diagonal line drawn through the center, meaning that for treadling I could "tromp as writ" or basically just mirror the threading diagram to get the treadling instructions. For reasons I can't figure out, the Strickler pattern isn't exactly tromp as writ but looks close enough to it that the effect is still there. But I don't really care enough to figure out why - the important thing is that it gives us a threading diagram to start with!
So to start with, here's what Strickler 304 looks like in my weaving software:
(By the way, this is Fiberworks PCW Bronze. The trial version is free, and the only difference between that and the paid version is that the save/print options are disabled. I'm not sure they know about screenshots, bless their hearts.)
This is a design for 8 shafts and 8 treadles, thus the 8x8 square in the upper right corner. And you can see in the threading diagram (upper horizontal bar) and treadling diagram (right bar) that the curvature of the waves takes a similar shape to the curves of the final pattern. We just have to figure out why. And since I had already tried changing individual warp ends and treadling patterns without much success, I needed to approach in a different way.
What ended up helping me see the forest for the trees was de-shadowifying the pattern. It's relatively easy to get the black-and-white version of the pattern from the threading draft - you just need to delete the shadow, which means removing every other warp end. This is what deleting all the dark ends from the warp and light ends from the weft looks like:
We can also see with a little more detail how the threading diagram is similar to the curve in the pattern. The pattern is 21 pixels tall, but it's been chopped up to repeat over 8 shafts, like so:
OKAY COOL COOL COOL. EVERYTHING'S COMIN' UP MILHOUSE IVORIVET. From this green squiggly line we know two things:
The final number of warp ends in the shadow weave pattern is double whatever the height of the squiggle is. In the case of the Strickler pattern, we're going from 21 to 42. Since we know that we need our final height for the Fellowship pattern needs to be 80, the squiggle for that pattern needs to be around 40 pixels tall.
We needed to stitch three repeats of the Strickler threading diagram together in order to see the full squiggle. How many waves does the Strickler pattern have? Three. How many waves does the Fellowship pattern need? Five. How many shafts do we have to work on? Eight. What is 5 x 8? 40!!!
So how about we make a NEW squiggle, only 40 pixels high instead of 21? (We're gonna drop the pixels in blue, since threading diagrams won't work if you put a single end through two shafts.)
Next, we're going to chop up that squiggle and use it to create a new threading diagram in Fiberworks. I'm also using "tromp as writ" here to create the treadling pattern.
LOOK AT THAT. IT'S GOT MORE WAVES!! FIVE OF THEM!
And then we add back in the shadow by creating a space for a new end between each existing end:
And then add in the shadow. I'm using 4 as my number for the shadow offset since we're using 8 shafts. So shaft 1 shadows to shaft 5, shaft 2 shadows to shaft 6, etc.
And we're going to apply tromp as writ again to get:
AYYYYYY WE'RE GETTING CLOSE! I'm fairly certain that the reason why the Strickler treadling wasn't exactly tromp as writ had something to do with centering the pattern repeat a little more than this, but I don't really care about that so I'm going to leave this treadling the way that it is.
From here out, we need at add that weird vertical dividing line that chops up the center of the leaves. So we double the pattern repeat along the horizontal axis, and offset a 40 pixel section in the middle of the threading diagram by 1 pixel. I've also colored in the differences between the dark and light ends to help differentiate the original and shadowed curves a little bit more. (I also tried offsetting the colors of the warp ends by 1 as well like what we did in the log cabin example, but I ended up liking the way that this looked more.)
THERE SHE IS!!! MY PRECIOUS!!
From here on out, there is still a ton of work I need to do if I actually want to weave this cloak from scratch. I did buy roving in quantities that could be used to spin both the dark and light yarn (dark gray Gotland for the dark yarn, and dove gray merino + white alpaca for the light yarn), but there's still the matter of, like, handspinning a cloak's quantity of extremely fine yarn. I did start spinning the Gotland several years ago as fine as I could possibly manage, and got through maybe 20 ounces of it. However, I'm a much better spinner now and I'm not sure if the my skeins from several years ago would be suitable for weaving, or if it would be worth replicating what I did back then vs. just starting over with a new standard. There's also the possibility of just... buying weaving yarn if I want to skip that step, which would definitely save me a significant amount of time.
Anyway, thanks for reading this far and I hope it helped break down why this was so exciting for me!
got a message from my friend recently to say their now one-year-old has recently taken a big interest in this kitten. they enclosed a picture that I obviously can't share but imagine the most cartoonishly angelic baby in the world sitting in a sunbeam reaching for this little guy with wide eyes. the world can be so kind.
Michele Carragher, the head embroider on Game of Thrones, made this awesome tutorial to show how she created the dragonscale fabric that appears on several of Daenarys’ costumes in S3 and S4.
Ms. Carragher says that the dragonscale fabric was created because “In season 3 the Costume Designer Michele Clapton wanted a Dragonscale like textured embroidery that starts to emerge on three of Daenery’s costumes, which becomes heavier and more pronounced, growing and evolving as the season progresses” (Carragher).
In stages 9-11 of the tutorial we see how the textile evolves from lightly to heavily embellished. This progression is meant to illustrate Daenarys’ personal growth and the growth of her dragons (source).
i dropped by my favourite secondhand bookstore and found what is possibly the most incredible knitting book iver ever seen. that teaches you how to knit little gardens and sew them into a massive quilt 3d. the photos i took are atrocious and do NOT do this book justice
thats a PRIORY GARDEN WITH MONKS
IT EVEN TEACHES YOU HOW TO MAKE ALL THE TOOLS ABD BASKETS AND POTS AND PLANTS
LOOK AT THE SOME OF THE FOLIAGE
i have never been more upset to not have $30 ready to buy this. its incredible. i have to find it online somewhere. i knew the moment i saw this i had to share it with EVERYONE
In the autumn of 1883, a paper in the nation's capital reported that "an Iowa woman has spent 7 years embroidering the solar system on a quilt" — to teach astronomy in an era when women could not attend college. Her story.
Her name is Ellen Harding Baker, and she taught science in rural Iowa during an era when most institutions of higher education were still closed to women (while also raising five children).
She used her Solar System quilt to illustrate her astronomy lectures. To ensure the accuracy of her embroidered depiction, Baker traveled to the Chicago Observatory to view sunspots and the Great Comet of 1882.
Friends of Littleguymart, let's make a difference to some Palestinian evacuation funds.
If you've enjoyed this blog over the years and have a few dollars to spare, please do this. I know I haven't been posting many little guys lately, and honestly I've been pretty burnt out on being online (though I'm doing well irl). But I know there's a good community out there that have made lovely fanart and left funny little tags and made it worthwhile. Hopefully my recent focus on fundraising won't burn too much goodwill, but if it does, I figure it's worth it.
Generate a random number between 1 and 294. Make a donation to the corresponding fundraiser on this spreadsheet. If you roll a fundraiser that's met its goal, roll again!
Message me with a screencap of your receipt and I'll doodle you a little friend.
Magikarp Plush Giveaway for Donation to Shaima and Muhammad's Children!
Hi all, inspired by Malik's (15 years old) love for video games and Salma's (5 years old, currently suffering from severe intestinal infection) love for plush toys, my friend has offered to make a Magikarp crochet plush, freely given to anyone who donates to Shaima and Muhammad's fundraiser (minimum $5 USD donation)!
There has been no donations for a while, so any donation to help break this stagnation is highly needed!!
Hello, my name is Wafaa 42 years old. After my campaign ended, I wanted to start evacuating my… Said As needs your support for Help Mohammad
The dimensions of the plush is roughly 22 inches length, 11 inches width, and 20 inches fin to fin. This item is for U.S. shipping only.
Every multiple of $5 will count as a separate entry (for example, if you were to donate $15 to the campaign, it would count as 3 entries!)
The raffle will end September 7 end of day, and the winner will be announced September 8! Please send a proof of donation (including the date and amount contributed) to me via direct message before the cut-off date!
Please spread this giveaway information to your Pokémon loving friends, so they can win a cute friend and help a family in the process! My friend is very experienced in making crochet plushes and i can personally attest to its high quality!
baratheonpilled
titsay
