Learn the Secrets to Designing Handwovens!

	Robin Lynde takes design inspiration from Georgia O'Keefe.

To be a “Designer” of handwovens, you don’t have to be able to draw, you don’t have to be “good” with color, and you don’t have to have years of experience or classes in an art school. You can start designing today with the March/April 2011 issue of Handwoven: “Designer Secrets.”

This issue presents a first-ever “Designer’s Notebook” series. In this group of articles, designing weavers share their foolproof methods. You can use a painting, a section of the color wheel, a piece of fabulous pottery, or a set of yarn wraps, among other techniques, to get dazzling results. You’ll find all the directions you need to weave the striking projects shown in the issue, but you’ll also learn the steps for creating your own successful designs using the same methods designers use.

Summer and winter pillows on four shafts by Sarah Jackson

Four of our experts started with a color palette (Pantone’s 2011 Spring Fashion Forecast), creating projects in warp rep (Rosalie Neilson), a clever 4-shaft twill and basketweave (Robyn Spady), ply-splitting (Barbara Walker--no loom required!), and twill and plain weave using variegated yarns (Daryl Lancaster). You’ll be amazed at the different effects achieved with the same colors, depending on choices of weave structure and yarn.

Designing doesn’t stop with choosing colors, either. Some weavers love designing on the loom. Find out how to create set of towels in which each one is unique because of varied treadling orders and pattern and tabby-weft colors in overshot.

	Warp-rep rugs by Rosalie Neilson

And there’s more! Design secrets don’t stop when the cloth comes off the loom. Find out how to make incredible fabric textures (bubbles and bumps) by wet-finishing special yarns.

And still more! For those threads left behind on the loom when you rushed away with your perfect fabric? Well, you can make those into jewelry the way Robyn Spady does.

With this issue of Handwoven by your side, your weaving designs will soar.

––Madelyn

Twill and basketweave towels on four shafts by Robyn Spady		Bubbles mat by Anneke Kersten