Monday 18 August 2014

Echo, Iridescence and Double Weave for Dummies!

UPDATED 19 SEPTEMBER:
Spent at least the last month iterating and reiterating the sections on double weave in the book (Echo and Iris) before I really got my head round it. This is a fantastic book and I would recommend it to anyone other than a beginner. Whilst the earlier chapters 'teach' the materiel clearly, I feel the double weave sections could do with more alliteration and a few extra steps in the explanations; just a little too much is assumed and left hanging on the assumption the reader will make the link, though to be fair I have done so and others might be able to do so easier and quicker than I.

The breakthrough for me with the double weave sections was working out how to quickly produce drawdowns on my software: as with the echo/iris sections, this enabled me to experiment, make the 'missing' links whilst an idea was fresh and work out my own rubrics for the techniques. Fortunately, the alternative approach given in the book for producing tie-ups in double weave fitted perfectly with WeaveIt's software (without that, producing drafts for 32 shaft double weave is VERY laborious; you 'aint going to do too many of those 'manually' before you get fed up and just plump for the first iteration of your design!).

Once grasped though, the technique with echo and iridescence really does take double weave to a level beyond anything I have seen, read or heard of before; as with the earlier sections, it's really inspirational work so looking forward to trying the first design I have produced.

In order to readily use the techniques in the book to produce and experiment with lots of design variations I now have what amounts to a 'Mike's Dummy's Guide to Echo and Iris for WeaveIt' - about a dozen step by step instruction sheets for each technique. For anyone using WeavIt they would make a useful appendix to either this book or the WeavIt manual.