Saturday, October 14, 2006

Randall Darwall Workshop Part 6 - A Sense of Play

Throughout the workshop, Randy also demonstrated to us how simply discharging colors from areas of commercial yarns, fabric, and warp on the loom can create added interest; he just sprayed diluted household bleach and then rinsed (not the warp on the loom) them. These can be further dyed to create even more complex material. I didn't photograph the yarn and fabric he used in the class, but his vest and shoes had gone through these processes, and were made unique and personal.

Oh, don't use bleach on silk.


2 comments:

  1. I have to tell ya, Meg.... I'm doing some simple knitting and thinking that bleach bottle technique will add something neat and interesting to my yarn too!
    thanks for sharing the tip!

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  2. Jenni, that's a great idea, especially if it's all dyes/yarn type that can be bleached. Test on scap yarns first, but I'd love it if you'll send me a phicture of before and after bleeching.

    Re. knitting, I have a funny story. Summer High School Baseball Games in Japan is one of the biggest sporting event of the year. It starts in mid/late July around the time summer holiday begins, and goes on for about two or three weeks, and one school represents every prefecture (state, roughly) so we get parochial. Earlier games are, as with most tournaments, not too exciting, so one year, I decided to learn how to knit during this Tournament. I figured if I start in July, even I can finish by September/October time. Well, it started good, just the implest of patterns,then the games got a bit more interesting, and then rather exciting, and then the school representing Kanagawa Pref (mine), which just happens to be a school we can see from my parents' livingroom, played, and things were intense, and I kept knitting and knitting and yelling and screaming... And by the time the back piece of my very simple sweater was done, it was an isosceles triange. And OUR school was doing so well, I couldn't be bothered knitting any more, so I abandoned the project, and that was the end of my knitting career. It was too hard to keep the tension even for a irratic person like me. A year later, my mom found it, and undid the top one-third, and made it into a kind of a top I liked, but it was also yet another lesson or a relic showing how great I am at starting a project but not so at finishing them. Thank goodness for weaving.

    Anyway, send me pictures if you will!

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