Flipping Blocks
After the 2021 Spanish Market, I and my loom were ready for a new, big project. I had been doing a lot of spinning from Pat Trujillo's Centinela-grown fleeces, so I had handspun yarn to work with. I perused my Pinterest board and settled on what I eventually named the "overly elaborate tumbling block" pattern for the border. I'm sure I realized it would be a challenge. I thought I was up for it.
So I worked with the selection of handspun yarns I had, choosing boldly contrasting ones for the border and center, and some more gently contrasting ones for the background, which I would decide on when I got to it.
For some reason I had very little problem getting the counts right in starting the design. This is a hugely consequential step, essentially committing me to a level of detail I will have to maintain throughout. This design doubled the spool count very quickly, and the numbers grew and shrank all the time. It was just the nature of the design. But what I didn't anticipate was how hard it would be to keep track of where I was in the design. The 3D nature of it kept me pretty much perpetually confused, until well after the middle. Getting through the first border took a long time and I was anxious to end all those blocks and come up with a background design. The background design needed to help me keep track of the border design by tying in to it both visually and logically. I chose to use the central cubes of the border design, and used them to transition to the background. From there it all fell into place.
I got to work pretty steadily on the piece because it was busy in the shop. That meant I wove this while demonstrating for customers. That may have contributed a bit to my many errors. I did some serious unweaving on a few occasions. Later on in the year other things took me away from my loom, and I saved the last little bit till after I finished the rather huge project of migrating our website.
The piece is now cut off, washed, shaved, and hung on the wall.
About the last thing I did was to give it a name. It had always been the "overly elaborate tumbling blocks" piece, but that seemed a bit too long for a title. After living with it on the wall a couple of days, I decided that the blocks flipped dangerously. It also hints at the kind of language that I used far too often while I was weaving it. So it is now dubbed Flipping Blocks.
