Project 9 - Stage 4 - Developing Design Ideas

I decided that I would begin with doing sample 1 for this stage, and use an image which inspired me to translate it into a woven piece, I intended to also do sample 2 later on, but as often happens life got in the way and time spent in France meant that I was just unable to achieve as much as I wanted to.

I wanted to work with a whole new image this time around and at the time one of my bedside books was Microcosmos by Brandon Boll which is a collection of super macro photography that I found very inspiring.  The image that I finally settles on is a 9960x magnified photo of ulcer bacteria on a human stomach lining.  I think this one in particular grabbed me because I loved the colour combinations (artificial, i think) at once and the more I looked at it the more I could see in transformed into a woven piece.

I drew the plan for it out on graph paper and almost at once lost any interest in taking it any further! The paper plan was to me, deeply uninspiring, it really turned me off, and I came very close to giving up the whole idea but I loved the image so much that I convinced myself to carry it through.  I have to admit though that after drawing the plan I put it away and never looked at it again.

Some things I'd like to change about this piece are :- the choice of yarns, almost all work on this piece was done at night and in the light of day I realised that the wonderful deep jade green was actually more of a foresty green and seriously inaccurate with regards to colour matching, I would've liked to have managed to get my felted ghiordes knots into a lozenge shape but no matter what i did they seemed to stay circular, I wish I'd have waited to get a darker green thread to string the beads with, i dislike the paler thread showing through and in fact I might have abandoned the idea of weaving the strung beads completely as it wa very fiddly and time consuming, perhaps stitching them on afterwards would have been a better approach, also I think I should've used a darker warp thread to hide the odd spot where it shows through,  finally I wish I'd been able to keep the edges straighter, I think this was a consequence of using such a small loom and having to string it with a long warp which was then wound on, it was hard to achieve, even with help from my partner, so the tension was a bit uneven throughout.

Having said all of that, I really am pleased with the finished piece.  I think the felting works well in conjunction with the weaving, in brings the texture of the nodules to the piece, I'm not sure of another way I could have achieved this.  I've never seen another piece quite like it, whether that's a good thing or not, I'm not entirely sure!