Two Years

On 10 November 2007 I wound a warp for the very first time. The next day I finished dressing the loom and wove my first picks. I had a copy of the Handweaver’s Pattern Directory by Anne Dixon, access to the internet and all its wonderful resources and a secondhand 4 shaft Robinson table loom. Some never before seen photos of that first sampler:

Two years on I have a growing library of weaving books, a developing stash and 3 looms – the Robinson, an 8 shaft Ashford table loom, and a 24 shaft Noble floor loom. I’ve been fortunate to go to weaving classes with Liz Calnan at the NSW Handweavers and Spinner Guild.
Here’s a look back at my life as a weaver (click on any of the photos to go to one of the original blog posts about it).

(Edited to add: pretend the rest of the text is at the bottom, after the photos. WordPress seems to want to squash it all at the side in a totally unreadable format.)

I don’t know if that (below!) seems a lot or a little for two years of obsession. I suppose I am occasionally forced to give some grudging minutes to family, home, work, washing my hair etc.

So what’s next? In progress I have a warp tied on but not beamed for more huck lace (seen yesterday) and some silk chenille experiments on the Ashford loom. Weaving class at the guild should start up again next year, plus I’m booked into a one-day class on painting/dyeing warps at the Guild Summer School. Next April I’ve got a week-long class with Kay Faulkner at the Orange Textile Fibre Forum.

A fortunate life

(now the bit that should  be above!!! Remember you can click on any photo to go to that blog entry)

First class project - plain weave scarf

Class twill sampler

Autumn scarf

Monks belt sampler

Ocean shadow weave scarf

Rosepath class sampler

24 shaft twill sampler

4 shaft colour&weave sampler

lace & finger manipulated sampler

Fancy twill scarf

4 shaft double weave sample

8 shaft colour & weave

8 shaft twill sampler

Swedish lace sampler

Double weave scarf

Overshot sampler

Bellringing in overshot

Undulating twill sampler & scarf

Bellringing in summer & winter

Ringing in huck lace (runner)

collapse weave?

Collapse weave v2

More ringing summer & winter

Diversified plain weave

freestyle scarf

Deflected double weave scarf

Advancing twill bookmarks

Treasure pouch

Felted cards

Freestyle rosepath cards

Freestyle rosepath bag

Huck lace ringing scarf

Killamarsh in huck lace

I first played with this idea at the beginning of the year (blogged here) – bellringing methods interpreted in huck lace. One of my ringing friends asked me to make scarf as a Christmas gift for his mother, using “Killamarsh Surprise Major” as the pattern.

Johnathon chose two reds from my stash of cottolin, one verging on orange, the other a bit bluer.

The variation in texture – plain weave, spots and full lace – plus the slightly different colours in warp and weft create a gentle interest through the cloth.

I’m not sure if you’ll be able to see the movement of the plain weave (representing the treble or highest bell) and lace (the path of a “working” bell).

In the original piece I had trouble with shafts sticking. I had trouble again with the deflected double weave (blogged here), but that was likely largely due to my woeful warping job.  Before starting this project I opened up the loom’s control box and tested all the solenoids – no problems there. I warped carefully and think I got a reasonably even tension. I started weaving the header – and got sticking.

One possibility is that the loom needs adjusting. There’s some uneven tension in the cables that go past the control box and up to lift the shafts. However it’s not clear the best way to adjust that – and I felt a more likely suspect (and certainly a contributing factor) was user error (ie me).

In my very first work on this loom I had similar challenges and improvements in my treadling technique made a huge difference – lifting my feet and treading crisply. I needed to practice and improve my technique and rhythm  – but I didn’t want to ignore mistakes or to continually interrupt myself by unweaving. My solution was not elegant, but it was effective. I added a blank lift between every actual lift of the shafts. So for each pick I pressed the treadle twice – once for the real lift, once a “blank” which shook out any sticky shafts. Every once in a while a shaft would lift or half lift on a “blank” and the movement would unstick things. So the next real lift would be clean.

It worked! I didn’t have to do any unweaving, I don’t think I had any bad real lifts, and I could focus on working smoothly. It’s not a permanent solution and it would be hopelessly inefficient for a production weaver – but it gives me my chance to learn. It was a pleasure to weave instead of a struggle.

I’m keen for more, so I decided to try another new thing – tying on a new warp to the old threading. Currently it looks rather scarey and a huge tangle just waiting to happen – time will tell.

 

More freestyle rosepath

The recent flurry of posts is nearing an end, as I approach my self-imposed deadline and also bring my weaving story right up to date.  This was on the loom a couple of weeks ago, and reached its final form earlier today.

The card fronts (blogged yesterday) were fun -  I wanted more. This bag is the same idea of cottolin warp threaded in rosepath, all sorts of yarns and torn silks as weft. I deliberately left loose ends and created even more by tying small bits and pieces together, to get lots of texture.

I used the fabric to make a bag in the  Doni’s Delis style. I decided to go all the way with lining, pockets and zip closure (complete with pull tag of some of the weft yarn, knotted with crown sinnets using instructions from 200 braids to twist, knot, loop or weave by Jacqui Carey. I really like this book – great photos, lots of options and clear instructions). I also tacked together the selvedges in the part that goes over the shoulder, to help the bag sit nicely (the cloth is a bit stiff to drape or bunch well).

One of the things I like about “allsorts” wefts is the changes in scale using the same liftplan. Another favourite is using clasped weft with the rosepath lift. You can get a really interesting broken line effect.

I tried to use every weft at least 2 or 3 times and also kept to just plain weave and a single rosepath pattern, to get some coherence over the fabric as a whole. However I did try to keep varying the combinations.

The colour theme was “autumn” – although for me that encompasses a lot! I couldn’t capture the richness of the colours in these photos.

Freestyle Rosepath Cards

In September I stood down after two years as president of ATASDA, resulting in time to weave plus a need for more thankyou cards.

Happily I could combine both in a really fun project. I put on a long, narrow warp in cottolin. I wanted to continue the experimentation of the freestyle scarf, but increase the possibilities by using a rosepath threading (4, 3, 2, 1, 4, 1, 2, 3 repeat). I didn’t use the traditional binder between pattern wefts (for that see my class sampler here). Instead I dug through various drawers and boxes and created a huge, messy, colourful pile of yarns and fabrics – and just went for it.

There’s a mixture of plain weave and the simplest rosepath lifting; clasped weft, inclusions; various silk yarns I’ve dyed, plus thrums from past projects; ripped strips of fabric, mostly silk tissue, organza and habutai, but a few satins and synthetics. Basically nothing was safe!

I had a size in mind for the card fronts, hemstitched at beginning and end of each … and just wove. Sometimes I’d think a few changes ahead, sometimes just the whim of the moment.

I ended with 20+ cards – and am finding it a little difficult to part from them

 

Off loom weaving

June to September was tricky time-wise for me, and  for a couple of months the looms were empty. However it wasn’t totally without weaving.

This little treasure pouch is about 9 x 15 cm (say 3.5 x 6 inches). It was made on a piece of cardboard with some notches cut in to hold the warp, using instructions in Kids Weaving by Sarah Swett (on Amazon here). Rather than using a yarn needle to weave in the weft, I wrapped some tape around the end of the yarn to stiffen it and just used my fingers. I took the pouch and a bag of supplies to a family lunch as an activity for my nieces and nephews, but the cousins were having so much fun running around together that we didn’t get to it. Perhaps another day – one in particular I think might enjoy it, though the others might find it a bit slow.

The second off-loom project was really more felting – but still with a weaving element so I’m counting it! I needed to send some thank you cards. I used some merino wool top that I dyed and carded a year or two back. Each colour fibre was laid out separately and made into sheets of pre-felt (meaning the fibres are lightly tangled/felted so it holds together, but there’s still a lot of shrinkage and toughening up to go). Then I cut up each sheet into strips, and it was like weaving with paper in primary school. Finally I carefully finished felting each woven square – you can see some bits went a bit haywire.

The cards went to thank fibre-y folk  who had donated prizes for an ATASDA raffle. Diane Groenewegen is a very accomplished textile artist (her ATASDA member gallery page is here), and when I visited her studio on an open-day my card was pinned up on display (reflected glory!). Another recipient of my little cards was Beatrice Jackson, also an ATASDA member and a wonderful weaver – Beatrice and some of her work can be seen here. ATASDA is lucky to have members who are not only incredibly gifted in their own work, but also willing to support the group plus encourage relative newbies like me.

Advancing Twill silk bookmarks

“Advancing twills are another name for “skip” twills… they are wonderful design tools for creating large patterns.” (class notes from Liz Calnan).

Earlier this year the weaving class worked on advancing twills. Liz took us through a series of exercises on paper.

Looking at this threading example (right to left), there is a run of 5 threads using shafts 1 to 5, then another run of 5 starting 1 shaft up, 2 to 6, then another run and so on until it repeats. So that’s a 5 end block, left twill, advance 1. We tried varying the number of ends per block, left or right twill, and advance. Some combinations don’t work – a simple example being a 4 end block, advance 4. You’d never use the other 4 shafts. Liz also advised us to choose a combination that works for plain weave for more colour combinations when weaving – warp dominant, weft dominant or mixed.

Next design choice is tieup. Liz’s tip here is to restrict the length of the float to one less than the number in the run, to avoid huge floats in the weaving. She also suggested we try part of the tieup upturned, giving areas of left hand twill and right hand twill for more interest in the cloth.

Treadling can be as drawn in, or straight or … well, best to try things out and see (preferably on the computer!). Just remember to check regularly for floats on front and back.

I went into more detail in drafts 1 and 2 of this post – both eaten by the technology in different ways (and different levels of user clumsy fingers). So if you want something on expanding the threading and transition ends, leave a comment and I can try again another day.

Faced with all these design possibilities … I opened a book! The best of Weaver’s Twill Thrills which has Doramay Keasbey’s article frost crystals in twill. I used one repeat of her threading, with just a little sateen threading at the sides. Silk bookmarks in 20/2 silk, the weft various colours I’ve dyed in the past.

I really didn’t enjoy this weave. Liz had kindly lent me a Padget 8 shaft table loom which had recently been refurbished – it and I just didn’t get on.

Another shot of the bookmarks (sorry about the dull and inaccurate colour) shows the results of problem 1. The cloth beam is varnished and my ties kept slipping when I tried to put any tension on the loom. The bookmark on the right was the first woven. It has an extra repeat and is still very short (and thick and ridged). I cut it off and used some rug grip around the cloth beam which solved the slippage, but still found I was unable to get into a comfortable rhythm. I think partly it was the arrangement of the levers to lift the shafts (not what I was used to), partly I was unhappy with the sett I’d chosen especially at the selvedges, my variable beat, and just lots of other little niggles.

Closeup of bookmark #1, in all its ridge-y glory!

I’d planned a dozen bookmarks as gifts and a couple went quickly, before I took the photos. These ones are “resting” in a folder – I’m not at the stage I could give them away without fussy apologies. I think I could do better. The last few were never woven – life is too short and weaving time too precious to stick with something that just isn’t working. There are lots more possibilities out there!

Deflected doubleweave scarf

Deflected double weave, differential shrinkage.

This piece combined and extended two earlier class projects.

I wrote a bit about double weave back here – you effectively create two layers of cloth on the loom at once, and can play with which layer shows on top (with 4 shafts), or which part of each layer shows (using 8+ shafts).

Another class topic was collapse weave – deliberately creating a textured (not flat) cloth. First attempts used columns of 3/1 and 1/3 twill with a range of weft yarns. I got mixed results – blogged here and here (the “what not to do” version).

You might be able to see the two layers here, in the cloth off the loom and hemed but before wet-finishing.

One layer of the double weave is 20/2 silk, sett quite loose at 12 ends per inch.

The second layer is Ixchel laceweight Cashmerino (70% merino, 30% cashmere) very widely sett at 4 ends per inch. The distribution of yarns isn’t even. In a 10 dent reed I had .i.i.S.S.S.i.i.S.S.S. – where i is one end of ixchel and S is two ends of silk and each pair of “. .” is a dent of the reed.

The two layers are both plain weave and interact in a diagonal progression. The draft is based on an article and photos in Vicki Masterson’s article “Texture with deflected double weave” and published in The best of Weaver’s Fabrics That Go Bump (page 92). The article didn’t include full threading and tieup details, but I think my re-creation is pretty much the same.

This is a corner after finishing. Shrinkage was 29% in length and 57% in width.

The ixchel felts and shrinks up very easily. The silk doesn’t shrink much at all, but is caught in with the ixchel in the weaving and has nowhere to go except bubbling up.  (An aside: I’ve done a fair bit of “real” felting in the past, going direct from animal fibre to textile with no spinning or weaving involved. Some felters don’t like the use of the word for finishing a woven article, which I believe is more properly termed “fulling”. Guess I’m not proper).

The end result is around 17cm wide and 214 cm long (that’s about 84 inches – on the long side for a scarf, but I’m on the tall side for a woman so it works out). It drapes beautifully.  The undyed fibres are very slightly different creams. It’s just the right weight for a Sydney winter.

Here’s another “before wet finishing” shot.  I took care and did some extra fiddling  while weaving, to make sure the ixchel never wrapped around the edges. The silk selvedges give a gentle frill effect. At the bottom I did a couple of picks of ixchel, then 12 picks just silk. Once off the loom I folded it up and quickly tacked down using ixchel and it made a nice bottom edge finish.

The one thing that wasn’t so pleasant about this project was the actual weaving. First was a loom problem, blogged here. Eventually that was solved by a very nice fellow in a fishing tackle shop (similar weight cable is used in fishing for large toothy creatures such as sharks). He didn’t have a crimp-making device in stock to sell me, so very kindly did the job for me. The second problem was user error. I have two back beams on my loom, and for the first time used both so I could beam the ixchel and silk separately. I had twisted bouts in the ixchel and think I had it rolled on the wrong way. Anyway, I couldn’t see how to remedy it and ended manhandling the beam each time I needed to wind on. The loom was not happy and I had to be on guard constantly for missed or wrongly lifted shafts. Still, I persevered and the end result was definitely worth it.

Freestyle scarf

Still in catchup recording mode – I wove this scarf back at the beginning of June.

Cottolin warp in silver-grey and black. Allsorts weft – hand-dyed silk yarns of different weights, torn strips of tissue silk, some early spinning efforts, oddments from the thrums bag and lots more.

Class technique went out the window. This section was so much fun. Wildly varying beat, using a fork to bubble weft up and create loops then dragging up previous areas  forming voids.

I tried to use a fibre or colour or technique a few times along the scarf to get some sense of overall unity.

I included some clasped weft (if you’re not familiar with that, Kaz Madigan has a great video tutorial here.). This shot also shows some twill, a section of plain weave using fabric, and the bottom part has clumps of silk throwsters waste included here and there. Unevn selvedges increase the air of spontaneity.

This was a joy to weave. After stressful workdays I could refocus, narrow my focus, let go, respond to the small section of cloth developing in front of me.

The end result is long (227 cm – about 90 inches) and narrow (14cm), so lots of draping possibilities. It’s almost as much fun to wear as it was to weave

Although I’m in review mode there is other weaving activity afoot. The big loom has a warp almost on, for the first time in months. And what’s that in the background?

My new Ashford 8 shaft table loom! Nestled inside is a cone of new-to-me yarn, mulberry silk chenille from Beautiful Silks.  I plan to christen the new loom with a sampler warp to tryout the chenille.

Diversified Plain Weave sampler

This is a class sampler I wove back in May – so if my recap of the theory is wrong, please let me know so I can correct it

Liz (Calnan – my weaving teacher) explained that diversified plain weave is a development of plain weave. Thick and thin yarns are used in sets of three – thin, thick, thin – in both warp and weft. You need 4 yarns: a thick dark and a thin dark, a thick light and a thin light.

The thin threads provide a stable plain weave ground. The thick threads in warp and weft dominate visually. They can appear to have long floats, but in fact they are held down by the thin threads. You help the visual effect with yarn choice. For example in the warp you could use light thick and dark thin. In the weft choose a dark thick and a light thin.  When the thick dark weft goes under the thin dark warp the warp is hardly visible. The weft is safely held down in the cloth without interrupting the visual design. When the thick light warp goes under the thin light weft – weft not visible. You can get some very graphic designs without having to worry about float length.

An example. Say I want to weave circles using 6 shafts. I develop a design – it looks OK, but I have floats over 5 threads. If I’m using fine threads that might be OK, depending on the end use of the fabric. If I want to use thick threads for a nice warm scarf the long floats can catch and be impractical.

I can have my pattern and stability by adding extra thin threads and using diversified plain weave.

From a distance the circle design is still apparent. However the maximum float is now over three threads – one thick and two thin – so the final cloth is much more satisfactory from a structure and wear point of view.

Let’s take a closer look at what I did. (btw, I’ve done these drafts using Fiberworks PCW software. According to my notes the draft is based on the look of #588 in Stricklers A Weavers Book of 8 shaft patterns, but I haven’t noted what I changed and the book is back in the guild library.)

The top right 6 x 6 grid of the tie up looks the same. I’ve used 2 extra shafts to carry thin, dark warp threads. I have groups of threads, threaded on shafts 232 (that is, thin on shaft 2, thick on shaft 3, thin on shaft 2); 141; 252; 161; 272; 181. In the weft I used 2 shuttles – a thin light thread and a thick dark one – in groups of three picks: thin, thick, thin.

Some extra work using the two shuttles, and some extra chunkiness in the design. On the plus side, as long as I maintain the rhythm with the thin threads, I can have the visuals of floats of any length, while the actual floats are totally consistent 3 threads.

Here’s that design on the sampler/scarf. You can see on the right of the photo that I had a couple of straight runs before the pointed threading, and on the bottom I lifted in a straight run. I didn’t have appropriate thick and thin yarns in my small (developing!) stash, so I decided to treat it as an opportunity for colour experimentation.  I used bendigo mills 2 ply classic wool throughout.  “Thin” equals one thread (in the warp “sweetpea” if you know bendigo yarns – a rich dark pink). “Thick” was 4 threads bundled together (in the warp 1 each of “almond”, “raffia”, “rosebud” and “peony” – light neutrals and pinks). The weft was also all bendigo 2 ply, but lots of combinations of darks bundled, and different lights at different times.

The pattern  is the same on the back, but the negative image (ie lights and darks swapped). I wanted a nice soft draping scarf, so sett at 18 epi (where “end” is the individual threads of 2 ply – effectively 3 sets of “thin, thick, thin” per inch). Liz’s notes suggest denting a full three thread sequence together if possible. I had a 12 dent reed on the table loom, so I used 4 dents per set – a thin on its own, 2 together (half of the “thick”), 2 together (half of the “thick”), a thin on its own.  I think the result is exactly right – very soft and cushiony.

Although you have to fiddle with the 2 shafts, working with the thicker yarns meant the weaving was very quick. It’s effectively plain weave so you don’t have to do anything special for the selvedges, although the thicker yarn did give a rather nice scalloped effect.  After finishing I had shrinkage of 7 % in length and 11% in width.

Another nice thing about diversified plain weave is that every extra shaft you have gives you a bigger grid to design in. Shafts 1 and 2 look after the thin plain weave. If you have 8 shafts, you have a 6 x 6 design area. My floor loom has 24 shafts, so I could have a 22 x 22 grid design area.

Altogether a fast and fun weave, and something I’d like to explore more some time.

On this section the "dark" weft bundle was too great a contrast to the "dark" thin warp - though I still like it!

Sorry about the very ordinary photos -  a combination of a borrowed camera I’m not familiar with since mine has died (sigh), plus fading afternoon light.

Currently on the loom…

… freestyle rosepath.

I guess that’s not its proper name, but then it’s not about “proper” weaving. Influenced by what I’ve read about Saori weaving, but on a rosepath threading and a mixture of plain weave and rosepath during weaving, some clasped weft in both. Warp cottolin, weft all sorts – a lot of it silk I’ve dyed in the past both yarns and fabrics torn into strips, plus thrums, some tied together with tufts waving. Intended to become a bag à la Doni’s Delis.

A great project to get back into weaving after a long dry spell with neither time nor headspace for creative pursuits.

It’s good to be back.