WOVEN OPTICAL ILLUSIONS BOOK

About the book: Have you ever been intrigued or bamboozled by optical illusions? Have you ever wondered how you might begin to start to weave something like that? Whether you answered an emphatic YES, or are even vaguely interested, then we’ve the book for you!

Woven Optical Illusions is a book covering optical effects from two shafts to 24 shafts. It includes familiar structures like plain weave, twills, tied weaves such as summer & winter and taqueté, double cloth, and also ones that might not be as high in your weaving lexicon, such as beiderwand, shadow weave, deflected double weave, Atwater-Bronson lace. There are also designs which are already familiar to weavers, albeit used in a different way, such as herringbone.

But you will also learn how to create optical effects such as 3-dimensional depth including shaded columns, bulges, tumbling blocks, shadowing effects. Tilted lines that converge and diverge will play with your sense of what is straight. Colour can be used to enhance depth, create additional colours or just change its own appearance. We’ll also show you how to create shapes and colours that aren’t physically there in the cloth!

Inspired by artists including Victor Vasarely, M C Escher, Bridget Riley and many others, this book will take you from inspiration and design development through to Technical Notes. Explanations on the illusions, along with detailed drafts and profile drafts help you to create your own illusional cloth. You’ll be able to learn some background as to what causes the effects in the first place.

A gallery of other weavers’ illusions is included. Plus, there’s an alphabetical glossary of all the illusions in the book plus a bibliography of weaving, art and science sources for further reading

STOP PRESS: Also available as an e-book from Crowood Press

Crowood: https://www.crowood.com/products/woven-optical-illusions-by-stacey-harvey-brown-katharina-kronig.

Blackwells: https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9780719843396.

ERRATA – Sadly, despite our very best efforts, in the first printing there were a few images which need replacing. This should not be an issue in later print runs.

If you have one of these first copies, you’ll find the replacement images here. They can be cut out and pasted over the original images in the book.