The 4 Seasons & 3 Elements Collections

The 4 Seasons Collection & The 3 Elements Collection - for PITAKA Playoff: Design a Seamless Pattern

The first one inspired by music, Vivaldi's music, the seasonal course of year (Spring, Summer, Autumn & Winter) and matching Fusion Weaving components.

The second one inspired by the 3 elements Air, Earth & Water and Fusion Weaving.

Woven with - matching to Pitaka as a innovative tech brand - innovative weaving structures and styles. One of the most important things to mention is, that I designed the weaving patterns so it will be weavable with Pitakas existing weaving standard. If you follow the links to the patterns, you will find a more detailed sample of the weaving pattern.

Below I will describe the development process and some features. I will start with the 3 elements collection, where I include some informations about weaving the patterns and new possible weaving patterns.

Afterwards the description of my music collection - 4 seasons - will follow. There, my focus is especially on the matching between Vivaldi's music and Pitaka as a brand.

Lets start! I hope you enjoy the process of building new collections for Pitakas Fusion Weaving concept!

The 3 elements collection:

Protect(s) our planet, not just your phone:

Inspired by Pitaka Ecosystem and PitaFlow with responsibility to our future!

3 elements in historical context: The ancient Celts divided the world into three sacred elements, with earth, water, and air as the swirling spirals of the tri-part triskele symbol.

About the process:

One of the first projects I wove as a beginning weaver was an undulating twill, and I loved the soft curves of the design. The flowing lines are well suited to projects inspired by water, but in this chillier season it makes me think of wind-blown snow or curving tracks made on ice.

You can weave an undulating twill on any number of shafts. The draft I am sharing here is a variation of the straight draw on 4 shafts. The threading cycles through the shafts in order 1, 2, 3, 4, but the number of ends on each shaft varies so that sometimes two or three ends are threaded on the same shaft before you move on to the next one. Note that each individual end is still threaded in its own heddle.

If you weave using the treadling for a straightforward balanced twill then the pattern appears as lines that curve but stay close to parallel.

This yielded to the WATER & WAVES 🌊pattern.

If you weave ‘as drawn in’ – that is, use the pattern of the threading to determine the treadling/liftplan – then the effect of the undulation is magnified.

Which yields to the AIR & CLOUDS ☁️ pattern.

You’ll see that there are some quite long floats in this design but that needn’t be a problem. If you use a fairly fine yarn with a suitable sett, say 24 epi, then a float of 6 ends is still only a quarter of an inch long. Alternatively, you could use a wool-typw of carbon yarn which will felt slightly when it is finished in order to prevent the floats from slipping or catching. I also recommend using a floating selvedge with this draft.

But how to finalize this collection? Whats missing? EARTH & TREES 🌲🌲🌲

The spiky angles of the point twill are great for winter themes, and in this 8-shaft draft I am combining them with an advancing treadling to conjure up snow-covered pine forests. What is an advancing treadling? Well, essentially it is a treadling where the twill progression is not continuous (1 – 8 and round again) but inches forward in small steps. In this case I am treadling 1 – 5, then 2 – 6, then 3 – 7 and so on. With each section I am pushing the progression forward by one step. It is a design technique that slows the twill down a little and stretches it out.

You may also notice that my tie-up is not quite balanced. Overall I have more weft than warp showing – in this case more of the green forest than the white snow – and as I progress slowly through the different lifts, the area which shows the most weft gradually shifts across the design too.

The 4 season collection

Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter

Like my other series - the 3 elements collection - the 4 Season collection is inspired by new weaving technology and patterns to use Pitakas carbon FusionWeaving with all its features.

The 4 Seasons are not just the calendary months, its the name of one of the most well known piece of music by Vivaldi - The 4 Seasons!

Before I will describe this masterpiece and why it is a perfect match with Pitaka Fusion Weaving, there is one question to answer:

Why is music matching with and inspiring for Pitaka Fusion Weaving?

I cite Pitakas introduction to Fusion Weaving, cause its the most perfect and unimprovable description:

Fusion Weaving™ series is infused with the pursuit of craftsmanship, aesthetics, and innovation of PITAKA. We hope this new case style can bring you experience like never before and energy like what music does.

Music Gives Us Energy

Music is magical, transcending time and space. It's a great inspiration for design and creation.

Within various forms and rules, every note from all kinds of instruments collides or mix to compose great pieces of music and energy that’s greater than our wildest dreams. 

The energy from music is fascinating.

To extend the music series, containing Overture, Concerto, Rhapsody and Sonata, with another aspect the 4 seasons, Pitaka could continue and expand the path taken.

About Vivaldis 4 Seasons:

Antonio Vivaldi wrote more than 500 concertos. Today, most people know four of them. But those four — commonly known as “The Four Seasons” — have become part of our cultural fabric. They may not even be his best concertos, but they’re ubiquitous. Even if you don’t know classical music, or think you know them, you’ve heard “The Four Seasons” — in movie soundtracks, on TV ads or playing on Muzak loops. 

There’s a weird alchemical process involved in the crowning of cultural icons. Why have “The Four Seasons” prevailed when equally strong Vivaldi works are far less known? They’re good music, certainly. They sparkle. They’re filled with catchy tunes that propel the music forward and never overstay their welcome. They are also among the first examples of program music, illustrating the world around them: This is a cold winter wind, this is a spring cuckoo. For those uncertain about what they are supposed to be listening for in so-called classical music, concrete illustrations are a welcome point of orientation. 

Another part of the alchemy is the urge to replicate: The creative cells continue to divide.Here I want to mention, that this part is perfectly matching with carbon weaving and especially with new technologies and innovative designs like Pitaka produces.

Composers and performers try to make the piece their own, not only by playing it, but by answering it, changing it, creating new works in its image. Nigel Kennedy, Mark O’Connor, Philip Glass, Max Richter: All have written responses to the “Four Seasons” in recent years in the form of new violin concertos. There are a lot of iconic classical pieces and a lot of attempts to modernize them (remember the disco-era “A Fifth of Beethoven?”), but I can’t think of another work that has inspired so many direct spinoffs. 

Perhaps it’s because we love the music so much we play the meaning out of it, then back into it, like a word you repeat over and over until you’re briefly uncertain of its sense. “Many people fall out of love, because you hear it all the time,” says Richter. “It’s a paradoxical situation: It is a beautiful piece of music, but you end up sort of hating it.”

Richter says “Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi — The Four Seasons” is the result of “a voyage of discovery — I reclaimed it by thinking my way through it.” 

Phillip Glass' work ‘The American Four Seasons’ was performed as part of "The Seasons Project," in November 2010 at the Strathmore. Richter’s piece sticks closest to its model of any of the recent Vivaldi responses. It follows Vi­valdi’s outlines while diverging from the specifics. At some points, you can hear the original music clearly through a windowpane of slightly different sound — a veneer of electronics, a slight reshaping of the line. At other points, the whole piece takes off in such a different direction that Vivaldi is no more than a distant inspiration, while the music shimmers in splinters of Baroque-like ostinato. 

“The thing about Vivaldi,” Richter says, “is that it’s constructed in a way that really lets you in. The movements are quite concise, but on a micro level it is modular music, made of these little atoms. You can pull them apart easily, sort of like a Lego kit.” Another part, which let me think of Pitaka and its way of designing new products. It would be more challenging to re-imagine, say, a Romantic piece with long expressive lines, like the Mahler 10th.

Everyone who loves art has known the impulse to enter into a piece: to memorize the poem, to want to buy the painting, to grasp some element of the work so it will never be lost. But it isn’t only sheer love of the music that inspires contemporary artists to emulate it. It also has to do with packaging. “The Four Seasons” is a tour de force for a violin soloist — Vivaldi himself was a mean violinist whose improvisation awed one observer who felt that “such has not been nor ever can be played.” Violinists are eager for other works that can offer the same kind of plum showpiece. 

The violinist Robert McDuffie approached Philip Glass to create a contemporary pendant to Vivaldi’s opus, and took the resulting piece — Glass’s second violin concerto, subtitled “The American Four Seasons” — on tour around the world. (Glass rose to the occasion by writing an amiable piece that had clear links to its antecedent while remaining firmly Glass­ian.) He managed better than the violinist Nigel Kennedy, whose “The Four Elements” tried much too hard to be funky and pop-tinged, without offering the ear a lot of interest on its own. 

For the violinist/composer Mark O’Connor, “The Four Seasons” served more as a general model for a showpiece concerto with an extra hook. O’Connor’s “The American Seasons” are tailored to his own mastery of a number of violin idioms — not only classical, but also bluegrass and jazz. The skill is commendable, but the piece itself was an easy-listening pastiche. 

The allure of packaging also extends to composers. Living composers tend to inhabit a world focused on new music, inhabited by ensembles and performers interested in contemporary sounds. Orchestral audi­ences are resistant to new works — but not, possibly, to new works that incorporate something familiar. In 2010, when McDuffie brought Glass’s “American Four Seasons” concerto to Strathmore, the audience whooped and hollered, not the usual response to new music at an orchestra concert. And Richter’s “Recomposed,” with violinist Daniel Hope, has brought a classical mainstream recognition — including a CD on Deutsche Grammophon, classical music’s “gold label” to a composer better known for more indie-style projects. 

With some canonical classical works, talking about packaging might sound like sacrilege. With “The Four Seasons,” it’s perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the music. These concertos first appeared as part of a set of 12, published under the title “The contest between harmony and invention,” but Vivaldi would hardly have minded their appropriation. He was writing at a time when music was functional, turning out dozens of concertos was not unusual for a working musician, and composers routinely borrowed from each other. And with “The Four Seasons,” he wasn’t seeking to bare his soul. He was seeking to write something that would delight.

Nearly 300 years on, the struggle between harmony and innovation seems to be continuing unchecked, and both “The Four Seasons,” and contemporary responses to it, are rare in transcending the dichotomy, for better or worse, and representing a fusion of both.

We got our buzz words! Lets stop here, before we go too much into the deepness of analyzing music. FUSION weaving and the struggle between HARMONY (already existing accustomed things) and INNOVATIONS. Thats the right time to introduce my 4 seasons collection now. Combining innovative weaving technology, harmonic colours, fusion weaving and inspiring design ideas, which can be combined in 100 ways, like with only 2 lines like Pitakas Sonata case, or in the way, I designed them. Lets rethink the way of music matching with seasonal colours and innovative products!

The series consists of:

SPRING 🌱🌷🌿

• fresh green colour (already used in the music series) with a flourish pattern.

SUMMER ☀️🌊⛰

• blue and yellow, the colours of beach and surfing, but also of sun and mountain lakes.

AUTUMN 🍁🍃🍂

• yellow, orange, red, green all the leaf colours of the beatiful autumn season.

WINTER ❄️❄️❄️

• snowflakes, frost and ice crystals, not only as inspiration for the pattern also for the colours. Inspired by the iPad Pro MagEZ case in white. Cold in colour, but heartmelting by its weaving structure.

WHAT COULD BE THE NEXT STEPS??

Look at my portfolio, I added 4 weaving patterns for iPad which are one more step further, and for which the carbon weaving process has to be developed in the future.

Thanks for reading the creation process. Hope you like it! 😊👍