Material

Assignment this week is to make a material.

I was interested in weaving and creating a material that facilitated the acceptance of exposure to the elements and the embracement of deterioration.
This is a textile that begs to be weathered by the elements. Take enjoyment in the deterioration of your clothes and the new compositions that emerge from the wearing of time.

I found a great low tech weaving tutorial online needing only a cardboard box!

I had time to weave one piece, this textile is woven from 100% cotton and water soluble thread.

The warp strung onto my box loom

My header woven in, ready to start passing in my soluble thread

Made my own shuttle out of cardboard too in order to pass the thread through the small space provided by the wooden paintbrush handle

Passing through some black cotton yarn I was striping in with the white soluble thread

Finished piece. This took a little over 4 hours to make.

Getting ready to wet it with water from the sink facet

I did not allow the thread to completely dissolve. Here, you can see the gel-like substance it turned into.

Disappearing textile from lara grant on Vimeo.

Notice the movement that is created by the dissolving of the thread. This was a pleasant surprise! I can’t wait to make a bigger piece.
Also, I apologize for all the movement and poor focusing, I really need to get a tripod…

In the future…
I would like to experiment with different weaves, such as double cloth which is a textile that is woven with two warps and two or two wefts, the wefts are interchanged to connect the two layers.
Or a brocade, which takes one warp and two wefts on each passsage, one making up a foundation cloth and the other creating the design. I see using the soluble thread as one of the wefts, once dissolved, the color of the foundation cloth being revealed.

Another version of this would be to use wide silk ribbon that I have hand dyed with natural dyes. I would then like to introduce iron powder. So, when the material is introduced to water, the thread dissolves and the iron rusts, which will effect the natural dyes and turn them a different color which is called a modifier.
Iron after baths can take any yellow or gold and turn it to a soft green. Reds become burgundies, pinks become plums.