Paper Textile Weaving and More!
Facebook’s Analog Research lab (ARL) has full-time artists in residence as well as visiting artists who come to teach free classes. These artists create various works to put up on the office walls, including posters, paintings, Lego portraits, and more. Throughout my internship at Facebook, I’ve taken several classes here, including paper textile weaving, introduction to drawing, and introduction to watercolor. First I’ll be focusing on paper textile weaving with Miguel Arzabe. You can find him on Instagram – his page is pretty cool!
To start, we picked out a poster as a base. Then, we cut vertical strips down the length of the poster. It’s also possible to cut the strips in curved lines, but since it was my first time, I stuck to the straight cut. We were provided strips of paper cut from other posters, and we threaded those through our base until the work was complete. Clearly I’m not very good at using a paper knife, but here’s the before and after!
I had a bit of trouble choosing a color scheme (it looks like I changed my mind halfway through on how I wanted the poster to look), but in the future I’ll do better :)
This was the first class I took at the ARL, and it was a great way to be creative and de-stress. It was also my first time seeing paper textile weaving, so it was pretty cool to learn.
I just want to also mention other fun events at the ARL: It has also hosted a Print Fest, where we could screenprint (and keep!) our own bags.
And lastly, I wanted to mention the intro to watercolor class. There were three activities involved, with the first being mixing colors to create a color wheel, the second involving mixing shapes and color, and the third a free watercolor. The ARL is definitely my favorite space at Facebook, and I’m really happy I got to take classes and participate in events here.
