Double-weave textiles

I'm starting to think about my next weaving project, and I'm looking back to double-woven textiles that I made around 2002. My plan is to do a series of double-woven hair textiles. This first work is called The Stepford Wives (Woven version). I'd made a wire and hair sculpture of the same name a few years earlier, and wanted to replicate it on the loom. Double weaving involves making a textile with two layers. You get a different textile depending on how you join the two layers. If, for example, you joined only one edge, then you could have a piece of cloth that was twice as wide as the loom. For this work, the two layers intersect where the two colours meet. Where there is brown hair, on the reverse side is blonde hair, and vice versa.
This work is much smaller, maybe 15cm across? Probably equivalent to the width of three squares in the above work. I think it's called Us and Them. Unfortunately not great images. The first image is the front, and the second is the reverse. These works were the first where I used different coloured hair to represent individuals or groups, as opposed to the anonymous mass, with all the hair mixed together.


Because spinning the hair into yarn takes so long, I also experimented without different yarns. The following two works are made from wool and linen. The first two images are front and back of the same work. Because the wool is thicker than the linen, the linen ended up floating across the surface in a loose weave.


This work used the same warp and settings as above, but I think I made the shape by picking up warp threads as appropriate, rather than have set threads raised. Hmmm... Does that make any sense? If you weave, it's probably overly simplistic, and if you don't it's probably completely meaningless! Neither of these works, or the one to follow, have titles. I sold them through PCL Exhibitionists, but I don't think I exhibited them in a show.


I can't remember which side of this is the front. I think the black lines on the white background. It's the same size as the above two works, so probably about 50cm square. Wool with a linen warp, I think.