Bonnets and Spirals

Since my last blog entry, I’ve been busy. The last few weeks of August and first part of September were given to making a set of bonnets to replicate the collection of Coptic bonnets in the German Textile Museum in Krefeld, Germany. This was in preparation for a paper that I gave at the Textile Society of America Conference in Vancouver, BC in Mid September.

I find these bonnets fascinating. For one thing, they are rather representative of the variety found in Coptic bonnets in general. For another thing, each time I’ve learned a great deal in making replicas. I look at a bonnet, and then set up a warp, and start working, and then I get to a point where I check back with the original, and find, wait a minute, there is something else going on here. The details in these bonnets are a testament to the mastery of the technique.

Once I had an ‘acceptable’ set of nine replica bonnets, I set to another project. A colleague of mine has been working on the Spiral Textile project. Check out the website.
https://spiraltextile.com/
Julia has been encouraging me to make a contribution, some sprang samples. If you are working with sufficiently fine threads, you can get a spiral using the lace technique. Plot out a series of holes in a spiral shape, and you’ve got your sprang spiral.

S and Z work provides a different challenge. As Peter Collingwood notes, A design worked in, say, S, will not completely ‘stand out’ in front of a Z background. Collingwood does offer a kind of a ‘fix’ for this. You must divide the background into 4 quadrants, and then place the design onto this quadrant.