When Ivy DeHart and her husband moved to Loveland, CO in 1975, she was a new mother and bored. Her husband encouraged her to take an adult education class at Colorado State University and offered to babysit while she attended the evening class. She chose “Learning to Weave,” taught by Linda Ligon of Handwoven fame and that was how it all began.
She was a member of the Northern Colorado Weavers Guild for 10 years. After a move to Boise, ID, she joined the Handweavers Guild of Boise Valley and for 30 years found it to be a place of encouragement with excellent weavers. She helped lead a Delightful Dyers study group for the guild with Mary Berent and Resa Jones for three years from 2004-2007. She joined Complex Weavers after purchasing her 32-shaft Megado loom in 2002.
She is a member of the CW “Twenty Four, More of Less” study group. She entered her first Complexity show in 2014 and won the Complex Weavers Award for “Interlaced Ribbons.” She has been entering Complexity ever since because it challenges her to keep weaving and learning.
Designing and Dyeing Painted Warps for Display Pieces
Ivy is a color and structure multi-shaft weaver of fancy twills and satins. She strives to have flowing organic lines in her drafts. Using structures in new ways encourages her to create. Ivy will be sharing her design process: how she combines structure and flowing color in a woven piece.
If she is not sitting at the loom working up one of her ideas into a fancy twill, Ivy will be dyeing her own yarns. She loves to play with color. One of the most powerful tools in weaving is to be able to control value, color, and shades in the yarn. The following bullet points will be covered in the seminar.
- The steps Ivy uses to design a piece with painted warps;
- How to find and choose a harmonious color palate;
- Understanding dyeing formulas and applying the warp painting process to a warp;
- Using a sample color wheel, with corresponding color formulas as a tool to get started with dyeing your own yarns and warps;
- Controlling a warp from dye table to the loom using a specialized raddle which you can construct; and
- Warping back-to-front with a painted warp to control tangles and minimize shifting of the painted colors.
Members of the class will receive a color wheel containing yarn samples on heavy card stock with their corresponding formula. The samples will be custom-dyed 10/2 Tencel®, using three MX fiber-reactive dyes in the primary colors of blue, red and yellow. The recipes and primaries for each color will be included.
Materials fee: $15 for the samples and printed handouts.
Supplies: Pen, pencil and highlighter.