Description
Kathrin Weber has been a full-time studio fiber artist since 1980. Her work revolves around dyeing, weaving and teaching. She has a fearless enjoyment in using hand-dyed color in her teaching, shop sales, and weaving. She enthusiastically encourages student to dive into color. No matter what her classes are officially entitled, they are ultimately about color, technique and weaving good fabric.
Kathrin is a member of Southern Highland Handcraft Guild. She has a strong belief in encouraging technical proficiency and personal design. She served 6 years on the Standards Committee for Southern Highland Guild and as the chair of Standards for Piedmont Crafts Guild. Kathrin is currently serving as a member of PCI Standards Committee. She teaches at Penland, Arrowmont, John C. Campbell Folk School, Peters Valley, Appalachian Crafts School, Fiber Guilds and Fiber Conferences across the country.
Kathrin encourages fiber folks to join her on Blazing Shuttles Chatter Facebook page to meet and join several thousand weavers who are making beautiful woven items with her hand-dyed yarn.
Lecture: Designing at the Loom with Multiple Warp Chains
May 4, 2022 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific. during the guild meeting
Non-guild members are welcome
An online presentation via Zoom
Designing at the Loom With Multiple Warp Chains: In this presentation Kathrin offers non-traditional techniques for working smoothly with multiple warps and designing with diverse warp elements at the loom. She discusses flipping sections of space-dyed warp from end to end which creates color flow in opposite directions. Kathrin also address shifting threads in hand-dyed warps to create flow in the colors lengthwise as well as horizontally. A few video clips and a lot of slides are included.
A couple of initial thoughts: Don’t be afraid to mix colors and textures. Fabric that requires color sequence to create the design frequently prefers fairly sharply contrasting hues and values. If you are familiar with repp and/or log cabin, you know that when colors similar in hue and value are used together there is little “Pop” in the design. If you’d like something with more pizzazz, use contrasting warms with cools, bolds with pastels, lights with darks. This is a place to experiment and play. The students Kathrin has had who regret choices they made when choosing warps to use together almost always wish they had gone more bold and less “safe” with their choices.
The use of a dummy warp is traditionally thought of as primarily a tool to speed up threading the loom by tying onto a previous warp instead of re-threading from scratch. But, in Kathrin’s work the dummy is much more than that. It adds huge freedom in designing at the reed. Decisions can be made while handling the warp threads and seeing their relationship to each other in real time. Designing at the reed with multiple warp chains can open doors to added texture, color, and playing with intention.
