Moving Day

Good news everyone... I just launched a new website and I am moving this blog over there. Older posts can be read on the website or here, but from now on new posts will be at ginapisello.com.

Thank you for hanging out with me here on Blogger and I hope you will take a moment to look around the new digs. Let me know what you think and I hope to see you at the new site soon.

-Gina

30 Paper Weavings in 30 Days

I recently completed a 30 day online class run by Helen Hiebert called Weaving Through Winter. The class had a very open structure, Helen did a 30 minute video introduction each week on a theme and workshop participants could take the concept and run with it. We posted pictures of what we made and offered comments and suggestions to each other. It was a wonderful daily practice and meditation. If you want to see all 30 of my pieces check out my Instagram posts at @gina_pisello. I will show you my favorites below and tell you a bit about what inspired them.

Enjoy!

This is one of the last pieces I made in class. I was inspired by weaver Kay Sekimachi and light streaming onto the red paper before sunset.

This weaving went through several stages before becoming the piece at the bottom. I tried folding an origami bowl with it, but the shape and size of the weave was wrong for this particular origami piece. I would like to try again with a different weaving pattern.

I wove abaca paper strips together then folded it into a Tomoko Fuse spiral. I love the way this turned out.

A simple weave around a silhouette.

I didn't know what to weave on this day but found inspiration in torn paper torsos I made years ago that sit framed on my desk. This one was hard to weave, but I really like the results.

This is a Danish heart basket, commonly made at Christmas time. I used folded paper and wove a love letter with a Japanese paper bag for this simple weaving. There are many more designs for this if you search Pinterest.

One week of the course was about weaving shapes. I wanted to do a simple circle and the tension of the weaving caused this to curve nicely off the page.

I experimented with hexagonal weaving trying to work out the formula for doing so. Turns out quilters have a way of doing this called triaxial weaving. I liked building this out from the center, but want to try doing it the "right" way sometime soon.

The completed hexagon weaving.

Another hexagon weaving.

I remembered that Claire Van Vliet and Hedi Kyle invented ways to weave books together in the excellent book Woven and Interlocking Book Structures. This one is my favorite with its crossing shapes and locking structures. I created the pages with eco-dyed paper.

This was an early weaving from the class. I wanted to explore strips that were angled. I like the optical illusion of it.

This is one of the later weavings. I cut warp strips around the leaves on the eco-dyed paper. Then I cut weft strips one at a time to bend around the leaves. I wanted to enhance this central image. 

Art of the Fold in Denver

I am pleased to announce that one of my artist's books, Small Migrations was juried into the Abecedarian "Art of the Fold" show. The online catalog is here. The books were all inspired by Hedi Kyle and Ulla Warchol's book The Art of the Fold which I have blogged about before. I hope you check out the catalog or if you are in the Denver area before September you can see the show in person.

Enjoy!

Small Migrations is just 3 inches high by 5 inches wide when open.

This is a slightly different version of the same kind of structure. I call it Subverting Expectations because the cranes fly opposite the direction of the flaps. It is slightly larger, but still small. I have made larger versions of the book in the past, but I like to work small so I can make the whole book from one piece of paper ( an atlas double page spread in this case).