Portraying Power Stations: Part 2 - Weaving

In the immediate aftermath of my Drax experience, and for a long time afterwards, I wasn’t exactly motivated to invest time making a cooling tower design. The only thing I could envision was some sort of apocalyptic, anti-tourism poster, and I couldn’t even bring myself to make that. (Here’s something I spent ten minutes on the other day to give you an idea.)

I made and did other things instead, and then last Christmas (two years After Drax), I spontaneously bought a simple child’s loom in Ikea. I followed the wordless instructions to warp the loom and wove in some scraps of yarn. I liked it, but then became paranoid that it couldn’t be so easy and I must be doing lots of things embarrassingly wrong. I undid everything, including the warp thread, and put it all away.

After several months of staring at the loom box in indecision, I finally bought a couple of books (Modern Weaving by Laura Strutt and Weave This! by Francesca Kletz and Brooke Dennis). After reading them both cover to cover, I went shopping for cheap yarns, chose a project from Weave This! to loosely base a design on (I didn’t have the variety of yarns to actually follow their “pattern”) and this is what turned out.

It was exciting and therapeutic and satisfying. I could experiment with an idea or a texture, and then I could undo heaps of it quickly without feeling like I’d wasted loads of time.

By the end, I was amazed: once you cut your weave off the loom and tie it all up, you’re holding an actual piece of cloth. You’ve made some real fabric! I still can’t get over this.

I don’t get that same feeling from knitted or crocheted blankets. Perhaps it’s because you see the fabric develop as you make it, free of the needles, whereas weaving is firmly fixed to the loom during its creation. Whatever the reason, it seemed completely improbable that my finished woven piece was actually holding itself together. This sounds totally stupid, because most fabrics are woven, but that material is not woven by me using cheap yarns and uncertain methods on a children’s loom. It was a revelation.

Inspired by maps, for some time I’d been wondering about how to go about sewing an overhead view of a power station. It was only after my first attempt on the loom that I realised I could try weaving instead.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I didn’t choose to weave Drax. I could have done, but I wanted to portray a working power station surrounded by fields and trees, not dominating them, and preferably with a river snaking around it. I chose Cottam Power Station, but I should have done better research: it closed on 30 September 2019, while I was still weaving.

Here’s my version:

I tried some different techniques in this project, but many of them didn’t come off. Sometimes I didn’t bother interweaving and interlocking the yarns of different colours because I wanted crisp edges, but that just left open segments in some areas, which I’m no fan of. I suppose it shouldn’t matter if your woven piece is meant to hang on a wall and not be made into something else, but the gaps leave me uneasy: by not being so structurally sound, the very fabric-ness that I liked about my first woven landscape is missing.

This probably matters less if you’re brilliant at maintaining tension (you can see from the edges of the piece that I’m not, that the vertical warp threads become slightly squished towards the centre), but perhaps I need a loom which can have closer warps.

Every time I think to blame my loom, though, I see something incredible that someone has woven on a home-made loom — perhaps an old picture frame or canvas stretcher, with either tacks hammered in or slots sawed for the warp threads.

There are other aspects I’d like to have done differently, too. On the one hand, I like the subtlety of the power station in its environment, but on the other, the vastness of its cooling towers is lost. The yarns I’ve chosen produce a certain height and texture in some areas, but the power station itself — except for the steam clouds — is bothersome in its flatness. The piece is also too big for the loom itself, so it was difficult to finish it off. I still can’t decide how to secure each side, but I need to do something: I can’t help seeing a place mat when I look at it.

When I started my first weaving project, I wasn’t very interested in traditional methods (which is obvious in my choice of books and the cheap yarns I bought), and now I’m desperate to know more. No doubt part of that is a way of begrudging myself any pride or satisfaction after making something fairly big. But traditional weaving is also full of beautiful, confusing-looking objects with amazing technical terms: warp and weft, heddles and shuttles, twisted headers, the fell, overshot, dobby, end and end, pick and pick. Even the word ‘loom’ itself sounds old and comforting.

There’s a Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers and it has a branch in Sheffield who meet once a month. The name is delightfully old-fashioned and simultaneously makes me think of Discworld. I might go, but I’m scared of these people with their knowledge and proper looms and real weaving yarns, which they might have spun and dyed themselves.

Maybe I’ll get to work weaving the next rural-industrial landscape first.