Explore Fiber is a collaborative website showcasing and exploring fiber as a fine art material.
Paper is a wonderful material to work with for teachers for a couple of great reasons: it’s cheap and plentiful. Weaving is easy to incorporate into your art curriculum! It is multidisciplinary, multicultural and has multiple applications from young students to AP art programs. It is not necessary to have specialized equipment or tools to get some wonderful products that are limited only by your students’ imaginations!
There are MANY ways this technique can be incorporated into students’ artwork! Here are just a few ideas – see if you can come up with your own application.
In this example above (by author), the backpack of the magazine image was cut into narrow warp strips with an X-Acto knife. The old map magazine image was woven across (the weft) carefully, in order not to tear the warp strips. The weft strips were woven in a twill pattern (over two, under one for one row, then stepping over one element and repeating over two, under one for the next row). This created a twill weaving pattern and allows the weft strip to be more visible in order to maximize the image being more visibly cohesive. These are just a few things that can be woven together:
Students original drawings can be cut and manipulated to create interesting contrasts between the drawing and the weave structure.
Additional layering can be build up on the positive side of the image for relief sculpture details.
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