Front & Back

When I exhibit my work, a frequent questions is "What does the back look like?"

When the weaving has a single weft color, it's easy to predict what the back of the cloth looks like. As one might imagine, the reverse is the negative of the face, just like an old-fashioned film negative. If the structure in one area on the face is 9/1 satin, on the reverse it has to be 1/9 satin. If it's 6/4 satin on the face, it's 4/6 satin on the reverse.

Here's the face of the Halloween image, woven in 10-end shaded satin with white weft on a black warp:



And the reverse:



The border, by the way, is derived from one of Photoshop's built-in patterns (gravel?), changed from color to grayscale, and enlarged so that it becomes a random mottled pattern not clearly identifiable as little rocks.

When a weaving has more than one weft color, things get more complicated. I'll post an example tomorrow.