Woven prints

Since I've been on the subject of fabric print designs that mimic other textile techniques I suppose I should mention my woven prints. Because of course I'm going to make a pattern that looks like it was woven.

My floor loom is in storage because it doesn't fit in my little house, and my rigid heddle loom is otherwise occupied so this is the closest I can get to weaving at the moment.  But this design is giving me the sense that digital art is a bit like cheating.  In real life, if I wanted to weave a fabric in a different colorway I would have to re-dress the loom with new yarn to weave a new fabric - a process that takes hours to days.  But with this newfangled computer thingy I can change the colors in seconds.

I could spend hours playing with the colors on this pattern, giggling with glee like a little kid with magic crayons.  Yes, I am easily amused.

I haven't really gotten around to weaving real ikat, so I decided to try imitating it too.  For those of you who don't know, ikat is a technique where the warp threads are dyed into some sort of pattern before putting weaving.  (The warp threads are the ones put on the loom first - the framework of the fabric.  The weft thread is what is woven into the warp.)  Because things tend to shift a bit in the process, stripes of ikat tend to be irregular, like you can see here:

The great thing about digitally creating ikat is the lack of mess.  Most of the looms at my old art school were stained with dye from people painting their warps directly on the loom.  Personally, I don't want dye all over my loom!

But making new digital colorways still feels like cheating, even if it did take an extraordinarily long time to make the basic design in the first place.  Yes, still very new to digital art and everything seems to take much longer than it should.  I actually spent the whole weekend trying to make a clean pattern of triangles.  All weekend!  And it still looks wobbly.  I think I need to spend some time making new woven stripes colorways!

​Thanks folks!