Barbara Schutzgruber – Storyteller & Weaver

March and April were filled with a variety of projects.

I’ve been weaving at Cobblestone Farm for ten years now. [see February 2016 Weaving at Cobblestone Farm]. Over the past year volunteers have been working on turning one of the upstairs bedrooms into a visitors resource room. Last spring I started weaving a rug to be used in the room which involved taking an inventory of the materials on hand for the warp yarn and weft rags, measurements of the room and table that would be placed on the rug and making sure I had enough heddles. 

Over the next year the rug was woven as 2 panels (34″wide x 72″ long with 2-3″ headers for turning under) to be sewn together with a striped warp and red corduroy mill ends.

It came off the loom in early March, washed and panels sewn together.

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The March  Ann Arbor Fiberarts Guild Fiber Spa was a book binding workshop lead by AAFG member Carol Repasky.

 

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April came to a close with a 2 day paper pulp sculpture workshop by paper artist Sally Rose. 

The first day I made a variety of 8×10 thin sheets of paper and molded them into cups. It was fascinating to see the next day how the shapes changed as they dried and the thin paper, which was very fragile when wet, was very strong once it had dried.

Day 2
I made 2 larger (30×15) sheets of much thicker paper. This was much harder to work with when still wet compared to the thinner paper.

I ended up breaking 1 sheet into several sections, layering them to make a tile, and kept the other sheet flat. It took a week for these pieces to dry. The tile is now hard as a rock and looks more like a piece of iron ore than paper!

The single sheet began to twist and ripple as it dried. To keep it from bending I used books to flatten it as it dried. Now that it’s dry it doesn’t look much like paper – more like leather, is very stiff, and half the size of the starting form.

All of these projects have been interesting learning experiences.
I may continue playing with book binding
but will give paper making a pass.
The new project on the loom at Cobblestone… placements!