365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Sunday, November 29, 2020
Langer Spranger, Longer Spronger
Day 47: In between bouts of working on the Hexagon Quilt, I've been playing with sprang...to be correct, "språng," and pronounced "sprong"...and wanted to figure out a way to construct a frame on which to make larger pieces. A brainstorm struck in the middle of the night as my brainstorms are usually wont to do, and this self-tensioning contraption was the result. It allows me to make sprang of any length as long as it fits between floor and ceiling, and could be any width depending on my (currently quite limited) supply of dowels. The bonus is that I am able to keep the warp under uniform tension, and although the water bottles are empty here, they could be filled as required to suit the fiber. Garden velcro coils hold the shed sticks in place until it's time to beat in the next row. That said, I will apologize to my readers for the garish yarn. It was something I purchased during a brief dance with knit/crochet colour-pooling (a technique I've determined is a complete waste of effort) and it needed to be used up in some manner. What better way to get rid of ugly yarn than in a fiber experiment? I will have no qualms about throwing it away after it has served its purpose as a "classroom material, and who knows? I might even come up with something worth keeping. Doubtful, because the long-dead days of hippies and psychedelic displays are best forgotten, but since history tends to repeat itself every few generations, it's possible they will resurface.
Labels:
needlearts,
sprang,
sprang loom
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