In my Horizontal Stripes From Nature post, I made the observation that when I repeated the random stripes I extracted from a photograph, I ended up with a pattern. Meg (Unravelling blog) left an interesting reply,
"Regular repeats make things look the opposite of natural? I wonder if you could print one of them, cut them up, and try placing them in orders that appear less predictable?"
I'm always up for a challenge, so I decided to give this a try. I decided to see if I could expand on my sample stripes to create random stripes.
Here's the photo I chose.
And here are the stripes I got.
Could I make a larger sample with more stripes without getting a pattern? Could I create a random look by dissecting the image, rearranging the pieces, and then putting them together in a random way?
I worked on this for several days. I didn't print it out, but used my photo editor to crop out various sections of stripes. Try and I might, I ended up with an identifiable pattern. I recall experiencing the same thing in the past when I tried to serendipitously make a random stripe warp. For some reason, it never looked random.
So I let it sit for several days, thinking I was going to give it up. Last night I had an inspiration. This morning I worked with smaller sections of stripes, flipping some, and even changing their width. I managed to produce this -
Do you think it will pass for random?
What I discovered, is that it's a lot more work to create something that looks unpredictable. It required way more planning and experimentation. I had to evaluate each addition by looking for a pattern to appear. So this was definitely an interesting experiment. Probably one I wouldn't have tried without Meg's questions.
Would I ever use random stripes in a weaving project? Actually, I have an idea for something which I'll try in the near future.
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