Waffle

These beautiful, wriggly, squishy waffles are around 1.75 cm or 0.6 inches across. The cloth is just as thick!

When the first row was woven, on the loom and under tension, you could see the 3D starting to happen. After machine washing and tumble dry – amazing, beautiful, totally impractical. One day I will find the right yarn and the right purpose to make this work.

So, this is my week 2 report for virtual weaving class. I wrote about planning the waffle weave sampler last week. Obviously the first section has been woven, cut off and wet finished.

As I described earlier, having a straight threading on 24 shafts gave me lots of options. This first section has waffles on the equivalents of 4, 5, 7, 9 and 13 shaft pointed threadings. Hopefully you can see the increasing texture, increasing cloth thickness and decreasing cloth width as the waffles get larger.

In the end I didn’t do much colour play with the weft. A lot of my attention was on the loom itself. I’ve had trouble in the past with incorrect lifts or shafts dropping, so it was a calculated risk to use all 24 shafts. As it turned out, some sections of design were really helpful in showing the pattern of problems. I found a number of ways to do finetuning and I think it’s just about there. By the end I was very happy with the loom’s performance.

Another big waffle photo 🙂

This has a plastic bobbin for scale (maybe the 1 inch grid on the cutting mat is more helpful). At the top is a “fancier” waffle. It’s the top section from this draft I showed last week. It’s an effective 13 shaft pointed threading, the same as the deep waffles below it. The addition of areas of plain weave  make a huge difference.

Here’s another mixture combining plain and waffle weave. This was inspired by weave #519 in A Weaver’s book of 8-shaft patterns edited by Carol Strickler. I wasn’t able to map the threading directly, so had some fun playing in the software to get a result along the same lines. My final version is the 3rd from the top in the section of draft above. I’m pretty chuffed with the result.

The front and back can look quite different. This is the bottom section in the draft shown above. I started using the same colour weft, but quickly changed to a contrast colour to allow the pattern to show. I’m not sure about this pattern. The top/front has a strong horizontal element which doesn’t appeal the me. The bottom/back I like better, but probably not enough to use any time soon.

A final photo, this time of a section I think does have potential.

In our last class meeting we speculated about the use of bands of waffle and plain weave, especially given the different amounts of dimensional change when the cloth is finished. I like the scalloped edges, perhaps at the ends of a scarf. Verticle stripes of waffle with plain or basket weave could also work. (right at the top of the sample is a bit of basket weave).

I won’t have a virtual class posting next week – I’ll be in a week-long class at a Tafta Forum – Imagery in Cloth with Kay Faulkner!

Virtual class

Term 1 of weaving class at the Guild has finished and we have a few weeks holiday. We decided to keep in touch with a weekly “virtual class” in the hopes we’ll all be weaving at least a little throughout. Classmate Martin has already blogged about his waffle weave plans here (I don’t think any of the others keep blogs).

My holiday project is a “super sampler” which I can use to play with waffle, oatmeal and dice weaves. I’m using 22/2 Cottolin, 26 epi, straight threading on 24 shafts so I’ll also get practise with design and shaft substitution. The right hand side is stripes that I’m hoping will work well with at least some sizes of waffle. On the left the colours are pretty much random, and the centre is plain. You can see progress is limited to date – I managed to injure my ankle slightly somehow over the weekend and am waiting for the swelling to subside.

This has the benefit of more design time. Our teacher, Liz Calnan, often highlights ways to improve efficiency – one tip being that if you have a loom with lots of shafts you can reduce time and errors getting a warp on and maximise flexibility  by tieing on to a straight threading. By chance yesterday Fern posted here about the benefits of going the other way!

For example, on a straight 24 threading I can weave a design for a 5 shaft pointed threading. A down side is more (heavier) lifting. If the tieup/lift includes shaft 1, I need to lift all the shafts in columns with a 1 – so 1, 9, 17. If it includes shaft 2, I need to lift 2, 8, 10, 16, 18, 24. You can see why I’m waiting for my ankle to heal!

The plus side is that a single threading allows weaving designs on straight threadings for 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 24 shafts, plus pointed threadings on 4, 5, 7 and 24 shafts. If something doesn’t fit neatly I can play around and try to get the “flavour” of it, or combine 2 designs or…

The 23 thread float in the “basic” 24 shaft waffle may be a little impractical at 26 epi – but it’s one of the possibilities and I may give it a go just for a sense of completeness.

I’ve got quite a bit more prepared – some from Liz’s notes and various weaving books, some from sitting and playing in the software. I sure hope I can spend time at the loom over the long weekend.