Sarah Knits and Weaves

Fiber arts have been with us for centuries. They are often considered to be very mundane and household female tasks of spinning, knitting, weaving, or sewing, but fiber arts can light up a room. Now weaving is taught in art schools, with new inventive techniques coming out all the time. Hollywood stars, both male and female, are knitting on the sets of movies and television shows to relax and produce a product, busy professionals nationwide flocked to yarn stores in the days, months and years following September 11, 2001 for some sort of comfort. People are becoming more conscious as to their clothes, are you wearing organic pima cotton woven in the mountains of Peru into a flowy skirt or polyester knit tank top? This more fiber and fabric conscious environment and the internet has created communities across the world that are producing and discussing their fiber arts as a whole.

One well known Indiana artist is using both new and old technologies to produce dimensional weaving projects that are sold in art fairs and galleries, and win many awards. Martina Celerin was born in the Czech Republic and grew up in Canada where she enjoyed painting and drawing. She earned a doctorate in plant sciences and moved to Bloomington to work as a molecular biologist at IU. In 2002 she decided to spend more time with her young sons and return to her interest in arts.

Celerin loved the colors she could get with acrylics or oil pastels but felt the finished piece was too flat and wanted to add dimension to her artwork. Weaving has allowed her to add that dimension and create shapes the way she wanted to. The recent development of barbed wire needles used to felt wool fibers together has allowed even more freedom and creativity in her artwork. She uses all sorts of yarns and unspun fibers as well as pieces of leather, jewelry, rocks, and just about anything that will somehow thread onto her loom or on a piece of yarn.

My Work

I used works of Martina Celerin as an inspiration for my project. Since January I have been collecting yarns, fibers, and pictures to create this piece. I knew I wanted to create a landscape but had originally planned to actually go out into the woods or a park and weave there, this spring. Unfortunately many trees and plants suffered from a cold snap and there wasn’t as much color as I wanted up when it came time to work on the project, so I used a painting by Carl Graff as an inspiration and guide for colors and lighting patterns.

To begin I built a loom using a cross stitch frame. When it was assembled, I used a hand drill to place wire nails a quarter of an inch apart across two parallel sides. Then I warped the loom using a cotton rug warp strung between the nails. In weaving the warp is the yarn strung onto the loom, no matter how complicated of a loom, and the weft are the yarns that are woven between the warp, either raised using heddles or over under the whole way. To create the scene I began using yarns, mostly in a plain, tabbi weave. Each line of yarn had to be woven individually over and under each warp thread. As a border above the hills before the tree line I used soumak weave to create a chain stitch across the weaving. To begin the trees I wrapped brown wool three ply around warp threads about an inch above the chain border, then wove green yarns behind them. On the tree line I used roving to create very puffy full leaves for the trees. In the sky I wanted to create a fun cloudy summer day, so I used white roving and a cotton ball to make clouds, even purposefully creating things in them for someone lying on the grass to see. In one area of blue I used a native American symbol for the time put into this weaving by using a cotton and wool of the same color to make an hourglass. After the weaving was finished I embroidered in flowers on the hillsides and a bird flying in the sky.

The yarns used in this weaving created different textures and feels as well as the colors they were meant to portray. The main yarns woven were wools, either one or three ply hard wools and small bits of Merino the softest wool available. Wool creates a small sheen but is relatively matte and can be brushed to create a slightly fluffy appearance. The other animal fiber I used was Alpaca to create the light green bushes, this alpaca fiber was spun in a boucle technique over a nylon binder to create bumps and bulk. For some of the trees and the fence I used brown and green silk spun very lightly. Silk, which is also a protein fiber like wool, comes from very tiny silk worm cocoons and can be spun many different ways to create different looks. For the large dark hill I used a variegated green rayon chenille. Rayon was one of the first manmade fibers and is much softer than yarns made from petroleum as it is cellulose based. Much of the yarn in the sky is cotton, as cotton is the most matte yarn available, and doesn’t always take dyes well so is available in very light colors, it is also touchable soft much like a cotton ball. To create clouds and tree leaves I used wool roving and locks, which are unspun bits of wool either dyed or undyed, and processed or not.

I think the process of creating this woven tapestry will improve the way I weave on my own loom. It has allowed me to try different techniques like soumak weave and small bits of tapestery or embroidery as well as see how colors come together differently than when placed in a balanced weave. I also now notice skies rising in depth of color or shading in grass more than I did before.