I own a good pair of shears and I’m not afraid to use them. I long ago lost the fear of cutting up my handwoven fabric. I’ve woven literally thousands of yards of handwoven fabric in my long illustrious career, dating back to the very late 70’s. Cloth is cloth. Once it is off the loom it is fair game, though I usually don’t cut it immediately. Sometimes I’ve waited 20 years to cut something up, but I eventually cut it up. Not everything I make is a prize winner, and that’s OK. For me it is all about the journey and the adventure and what I learned from the piece, and if I really like something when I’m finished, I even might wear it for awhile. And occasionally even a prize winner won’t really be worn much because it is more of a runway piece, and I just don’t have that many places to wear runway pieces.
That said, I’m also not afraid to cut up old work. Goodness knows the last four months have seen me cutting up lots of stuff from my 1980’s craft fair days, even bagging scraps to sell to quilters and doll makers. We only live so long, and I have a huge old body of work that will eventually have to go someplace. So I put stuff out at excellent prices at my guild sale, and various other venues that will take the work, and I am making a dent and moving it along.
I came across this skirt, woven in 1994. It has been collecting dust in the back of my closet for a long time. There is nothing wrong with the skirt. As a matter of fact, I wore it often in the 1990’s, and have a couple of photos of me wearing it while demonstrating weaving. I could of course only put my finger on one of them.
It is a mixed warp, done for a sectional warping demonstration. I remember having a lot of yardage. This skirt was fun, but no one wears an eight gored nearly floor length skirt anymore. Certainly not me. And I’m sure the style will come back around again, but this is one of those pieces, where there is a substantial amount of yardage involved and it could be restyled into something else. I’ve been mulling it over for awhile.
I’ve recently showed the skirt to a couple of people who have been through my studio. I mentioned I was planning to cut it up and re-purpose it. Oh the horrors. I’ve gotten letters. Imploring letters not to cut it up. I’m actually laughing at how passionate people can be. I’m not. Passionate about holding onto something that isn’t working for me anymore.
I just finished a really cool dress from bamboo, I showed an almost finished photo of me in it in the last blog post. The pattern is Vogue 1382 and it is current. It is an Ann Klein dress, and it turned out really well. I’ve been staring at the dress, and the pattern and the skirt… 🙂
So to convince everyone that I’m not a complete whack job, I decided to do a quick photoshop representation of what the dress could look like adding a black linen component in the middle.
Then I decided to see what would happen if the colorful handwoven fabric was in the middle and the black were on the top and bottom.
This is really about composition. Unlike a painting, where your eye moves around and settles on some central imagery, I don’t want the best part to be over my stomach. I like the black in the middle, and I think that’s what I’m going to do. I have the linen pre-shrunk and some black silk organza for the underlining for the middle part, and the skirt has been aggressively washed and machine dried. I got a bit more shrinkage in the fabric than I got when I originally washed it back in the 90’s, gently, minimal handling and hanging to dry. I wanted the fabric a bit more stable. I’ll probably use a fusible underlining on the handwoven part, and see what happens…
On second thought… Now that I’ve gone over and proofed the blog, I’m really liking the handwoven in the middle. Who would have thunk it?
Stay tuned…