Stage 2: Knitting and weaving with holes

I started by knitting a piece with different sized knitting needles. The smallest were standard size 11, the largest were my daughter's drum sticks. This is what I made. 

I was rather disappointed by the subtlety of the differences, especially given that it had been quite difficult to knit. I wasn't sure if that was a result of using thick wool, so I changed yarn a couple of times and the result was more obvious with the thinner less compressable yarn. 

Then I tried weaving. I decided to use stripes of fishing line (microfilament) which has a pale green tint on the reel and using a flash, but is quite transparent in normal daylight, alternating with more standard warp yarn. This gave me a variety of options of combinations, so I only had to do one sampler to work out several different effects.

This gives an idea of how it is easily possible to introduce gaps in the weaving.

I have always liked the way the texture of the tapestry is apparent through the shadows, as in the grey area of this one.

This photo below shows two translucent areas - the ribbon, with a striped texture of its own and little in the way of shadowing.

And the tapestry-weave part with wet-looking highlights and shadow-texture. It allows much more of the background to be visible.

The ends of the microfilament won't conform by tucking in, and so make an intrinsic part of the outcome of using this yarn.

Anniken (see earlier blog) and Parniczky (Craft & Design magazine March/April 2014) both weave with this very skillfully and effectively.

As this section also seems to be about light, and reflection as well as refraction, I included some silver foil in the weaving to try it out.

This was an interesting idea but doesn't work well here. Perhaps using silky or plastic yarns would  be more effective.

I saw that the weaving sample was interesting, but rather colourless on its own.This was me trying to mask the weaving with translucent coloured poly organza.

This adds some depth and colour to it, and makes the microfilament less visible, so that the blocks of weaving and cotton yarn look as if suspended. This had some potential for developing it further. 

The photo on the left is the same combination but lit from in front, showing how much reflection pattern there is from the organza.

On the right is the combination of the weaving with a more tightly woven organza (with holes for curtain rails), showing that it disguises the microfilaments even more, and making me think that its not always a case of 'the filmier the better'.