Tamar Balakjian, a Textiles and Surface Design graduate from Buckinghamshire New University, has designed a table named 'Preset Table’. Her idea for ‘Preset Table’ came directly from the development work for the piece ‘Wall of Sun Through Dust’, which came from her experiments inspired by Japanese bamboo weaving and traditional caning techniques. 

Tamar wanted to create a stripe that would follow itself from ceiling, all the way down the wall and into the floor in an interesting and almost inconceivable way. Each line of colour is one continuous strand from the top of the wall fabric, through the three dimensional woven bumps and into the hanging lines to the skirting board.

The coving and the skirting were created separately, but the lines match up perfectly creating the illusion of them being a continuation of the main piece. In the floor mat, hand woven in the style of chair caning, the lines match with the skirting board, then converge and diverge to create a pattern with a random appearance – a hyper controlled antidote to the hyper controlled wall fabric.

Her idea for ‘Preset Table’ came directly from the development work for the piece ‘Wall of Sun Through Dust’. Tamar considered reversing the bump (so that it represented a bowl) and altering the scale in order to create a table runner with integrated bowl. This quickly developed into a far more complex idea involving place mats for each setting at the table. Once the tapes were knitted, they were woven by hand over a ball shape and heat set, and then the place mats were hand-woven in situ on the table to ensure correct spacing.