Art & Soul Weaving

A few weeks back I spent some quality time with a bunch of art-loving folks at the Art & Soul Retreat here in Hampton.  It was my first time at any of these classes and it was a fun, different experience.  I'm used to the bead and wire crowd from my many classes in those realms.  This was a little different, though, because the focus was heavily on mixed media.  I loved being able to try some new things--I really focused on color and texture.

I picked a day-long class called Loom Weaving for a New Age taught by Cindy Yost French & Kat Allison.  Let me start out with a shot of my (nearly) finished product:

These lovely ladies have developed a portable small loom called the Copper Loom but now that copper is so expensive they've made adjustments and now the loom is fabricated from PVC pipe.  This bag of pipes and such is what we started out with in the morning.  The genius behind this design is that it honestly starts out like this and then turns into a tool that you can use for weaving...and mixed media weaving was the emphasis of the day.

 Once the loom was together and the warp threads were tight, we were encouraged to go to town with straight weaving and then they taught us some other techniques to crochet onto the warp threads and add other textures. I packed a bunch of orange and pink materials since that's what I had most on hand--lots of ribbon, raffia, leather, yarn, and wire.  

My technique isn't perfect because my sides aren't even, but I was so excited with how all the different ribbons and yarns were looking that I don't really care about the sides.  :)

I'm only showing macro shots of the detail because the piece isn't quite finished yet.  It's still on the loom.   When I eventually take the next step and get it off the PVC I'll post an update.  :)

If you're interested in exploring more, Kat has an Etsy shop with some of her amazing woven pieces as well loom kits.  Plus, the gals are on the schedule for the Portland version of Art & Soul in the fall.