Tuesday, September 24, 2013

New Optical Illusion attempt

As I have posted before, I love visiting the Mighty Optical Illusion site. I have been doing some research on colour and found these pages but then did a different search and came across this site also.  I thought I might be able to adapt one of the images using textiles.

It sort of works, one end of the solid dark pink fabric appears slightly darker than the other.  But it didn't turn out as well as I had hoped.  This may be because I decided to also try the colourwash quilting effect, which I have not done before, and my colours are not as solid as in the original image.
My sewing was not all that good either, the squares didn't line up particularly evenly.  I'm not too bothered by that, I can use the quilt top anyway. It is not finished, I will have to make it wider and perhaps put in some more sashing. Then I will quilt it and see what effect that has on the illusion.
I may try again at a later date, perhaps I will use smaller squares.  I used 2" squares (quilting is the only time I use imperial measurements as most of the tools are designed for that). I also only used fabrics that I had as I decided not to buy any, except for the solid colour as I have very few solids. I decided to only use each piece of fabric once which was another limitation.  I did cheat a little and make some of the pieces 4"x2", mainly to carry a colour from one shade to another.
At the moment it is on my to-do pile, also known as the UFO (Unfinished Objects) pile.

I am currently attending a series of tapestry workshops.  We were discussing possible designs and I thought I might try this design as a tapestry.
We discussed how I might go about it, what size warp to use, how to move from one colour to another, etc.  It will be quite a challenge for me as I tend to put texture in my tapestries and there would be none in this - so far. If I do it as finely as we discussed, and have no texture, the weaving will have to be very even, every little mistake will show. I am not intending to do it very big, so I think I will challenge myself to do a lovely even piece of weaving.
I have tried an optical illusion tapestry before and had to learn how to do lots of wraps and sewing of slits.  I'm hoping to avoid that this time, I think I might do the rectangle without slits, using interlocking, yet another technique for me to practise. So lots of thinking is happening, now I just have to get to the doing!

I don't have the right colours in my wool collection and will have to go to buy some.  I was almost out the door today but then thought that I really should try to finish The Old House first.
However, it is school holidays as the moment and some of my regular commitments are not on, so I may go the the Australian Tapestry Workshop later in the week, just so I can have the colours there, ready to start.
If I go this week, I will be able to see the Kate Derum award exhibition again.  It finishes on Friday.

2 comments:

parlance said...

I think the optical illusion does work, because the pink rectangle looks lighter at the top and darker at the bottom. However, to me the important point is that the entire piece actually looks lovely, not whether the illusion is as good as you wished.

Mary said...

Thanks Parlance, I suppose I should be less self-critical. I am not considering trying tapestry version of the illusion. We'll see how that goes. If I do it.