Silken Sands

I began this weaving with loose ideas and concepts. After an overload of planning and documentation in past months, I wanted to weave a summer fabric in silk and cotton allowing intuition to be my main guide.

Commencing with the natural silk/cotton blend warp and the same yarn in the weft, I gradually introduced a natural raw silk, a hand dyed blue softly spun silk, and yet another raw silk (also dyed blue). To add some energy and contrast to this softness, I had to include a wonderful multicoloured yarn sourced from the Linton Mills in the UK in 2011.  Varying the beat, using two shuttles and two sticks at times, this weaving continues to grow and speaks to me of the soft colours of silken beach sands and seaweed.

Having now just returned from a few restful days at Port Albert (Gippsland's oldest port), and after a long trek around the shores of the nearby Nooramunga Coastal & Marine Park, I was surprised to see how the colours of the tidal beaches there echoed the colours in my weaving begun two weeks before this visit. I was also delighted to see a recent post by Curiousweaver http://curiousweaver.id.au/ about her recent seaweed weaving experiment! 

As a non-swimmer with a fair Irish-Anglo complexion, beaches are not usually a place where I spend much time. So my colours are not of typical Australian sunny, hot beaches, but rather of softer shades, where different blues and greens meet and move across the sandbars.

Beach at Nooramunga Coastal & Marine Park, Port Albert, Victoria

Another strong image on this walk, that may well appear in future weaving, was the large number of huge banksia trees. I had never seen so many banksia in one place and was intrigued by their twisted forms, their large soft yellow flowers in full bloom and the myriad of fallen dark eyed banksia cones.