I found this task really difficult as my neutral textile is knitted wool and translating yarn as yarns is difficult to get my head around..
I tried finger knitting with knitted scrim – a sort of macro/micro idea, I was amused by using a knitted fabric to represent a strand of wool, the idea has something interesting about it. It didn’t excite me massively though.
Knotting sisal and jute was about looking at a fibre under a microscope… hmmm
Placed next to my original study I’m very unsure about hitting consideration of colour or proportion of colour without a bit of extra explanation about where this madness came from.
The unravelled sock kept its kinked structure and was fun to work with, this exercise is feeling very forced though.
Thinking of words used to describe wool; wiry, steely, copper tones etc made me think about including some metal into my yarns. I came across some metal swarf so I dipped a string in PVA glue and coated it in the swarf – this made a brilliantly dangerous yarn – like an angry sheep! it is surprisingly sharp to touch and sticks to everything like cleevers, I thought that it would have a steely glint but the glue made it look quite dull. To make it safer i dragged across merino tops of colours i observed in the original study, they have attached like snags of wool on brambles and I was pleased.
I really wanted a steely glint so I spun some yarn and during the plying stage introduced some spirals of swarf.
These final two sample yarns a much more successful than the earlier ones, exaggerating what I could see in my colour study , using creative words and thinking about how to stretch myself gave me more to engage my creative mind with. It really does feel time to move on though.
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