A few notes after the 1st weaving session
To fully understand the challenges of Weaveology from the point of view of weaving, it is essential to understand the stages the designer traditionally goes through to design a woven fabric on a jacquard loom. The woven fabric, as designed in Europe, is made up of zones filled with a repeating weaving pattern. Each of these areas is represented by a solid color, known as a ‘technical color’, which corresponds to one weaving pattern. This means that during the design process, for each color, the designer focuses on the properties of each pattern individually. Through Weaveology, we are using a methodology and technique similar to those used by pointillist painters. Instead of painting a flat expanse of color, they painted pure strokes of paint to create optical mixtures. Here, we're not focusing on a single pattern which, when repeated, will fill an area with technical color, but on a set of weaving patterns which, assembled like a mosaic, will fill an area with technical color. In terms of methodology, this means that the designer must first determine the properties, or features, to which a set of weaving patterns will respond. Next, he/she must select the ones he/she will keep for weaving and generate a kind of ‘mosaic’ for each technical color.
