Designing Echo as Double Weave for 16 Shafts

Pictured above: a drawdown of the front of a 16-shaft 4-color double-weave pattern that I just finished designing. (You'll find the tieup for this, as well as a view of the back of the pattern, at the end of this post. I have to go through all my steps in figuring it out before I reveal it to you!)

My inspiration came from Pinterest, where a while back I came upon a design I really admired. 

It was for 24 shafts and I have just 16 on my Toika, but still I had to figure out what made it so appealing. It was for double weave in an Echo threading and the tieup looked like this:

My first reaction was, "Oh boy, here's one of those irregular double-weave tieups that makes absolutely no sense." And my second reaction was, "How did they DO that?" My third reaction was, "I want to do that!" 

I knew that the original tieup had been modified -- "carved" you might say -- to veer off a straight twill angle for some of the shafts, creating interesting and eccentric patterns in the cloth. So I set about adapting the design to 16 shafts, first by breaking the 24-shaft tieup into two sections, one each for the top and bottom layers of the original 24-shaft draft.

Here's what they look like.

Tieup for the top layer

Tieup for the bottom layer

Back to Stubenitsky's Echo and Iris, of course. On page 89, she lays out her method of designing double weave tieups based on what she terms a "ratio." (Note here: Of all the listings in the index of this book, "Ratio" is cited the most. Something to ponder.)

She begins with what she calls the "ground tie-up." Below is what the ground tieup looks like for a 16-shaft double weave in Echo. For both layers, this ensures that half of the shafts will weave plain weave throughout. (You can't really weave anything with this tieup; it just gives you a stable ground for creating designs using the other half of the shafts.)

It isn't as inscrutable as it may first appear. On treadle 1 (for the top layer, which is treadled with all the odd-numbered treadles), you'll weave plain weave by raising shafts 1, 3, 5 and 7. On treadle 2 (for the bottom layer, which is treadled with all the even-numbered treadles), you'll weave plain weave by lifting shafts 10, 12, 14 and 16. 

An aside: With double weave, the shafts that are "raised" to weave the bottom layer are actually being lowered from the perspective of the bottom layer, because the bottom layer is weaving upside down (from the weaver's perspective). It's helpful to think of the tieup for the bottom layer as a sort of photo negative, where up is down (black is white) and down is up (white is black).

Note that the second half of the tieup for both layers is totally blank. That's where Stubenitsky's ratio comes in. For this, I tried a tieup with a ratio of 4:4, meaning that, in the second half of the treadling above the ground tieup, 4 shafts are raised and 4 shafts are down in an ascending order for both layers (top and bottom layers, on odd and even-numbered treadles).

Here's how that 4:4 ratio looks.

Next I created a tieup with a 5 to 3 ratio, which looks like this.

Here's a 6 to 2 ratio:

And finally I designed a 7 to 1 ratio:

So here is what the drawdowns look like, respectively.

4 to 4 ratio

5 to 3 ratio

6 to 2 ratio

7 to 1 ratio

And here, below, is the grand finale: what I call a "carved" tieup for this pattern on 16 shafts (the pattern that appears in the first image of this post). 

And here's the image of the back of the drawdown for this (again, the front is the first image that appears in this blog post).

I like both sides quite a bit, but the problem is that there are quite a few warp floats of 7 picks. Not great, really, but then again, I'm considering that this is double weave -- so 7 divided by 2 layers is really a float of 3.5 for one layer. Round that up to 4 and it would be acceptable if this were Echo or Jin, so maybe it's not a problem?

More to ponder... Thanks for reading!

Weaving Heartfully: Happy Valentine's Day!

"heartfully." en.oxforddictionaries.com. With the whole heart; with enthusiasm, conviction, or intense feeling; warmly, cordially; devotedly.

What a great word! And what a great draft. I found it online, probably on Pinterest, and I have no idea where it came from, unfortunately. (Update: Thanks to Janice Jones, who kindly sent me an email about this, it comes from Oelsner's Handbook of Weaves, also available as a download from Handweaving.net.) Here's what it looks like in Fiberworks.

16 shafts, a 36-treadle repeat -- perfect for my Toika compu-dobby. I had a 10/2 Tencel warp on hand (wound from hand-dyed yarns by Teresa Ruch, with a solid purple yarn and a variegated red and purple yarn, purchased at Convergence 2018) and I sett it at 28 epi (for twill). The weft is 10/2 pearl cotton in red. Judging from the hand of the fabric on the loom, it's a bit too dense and heavy for a scarf. Perhaps it would work for a purse or a bag for my yoga mat? Then again, the hand might change substantially in the washing....

And then I got to thinking: Valentine's Day is here. So why not take this design and turn it into heart shapes, just by altering the tieup?  

Take a look at the scallop shapes in the tieup above. It's a damask weave, so the tieup is warp-emphasis for the purple sections in the drawdown and weft-emphasis for the turquoise sections. [Damask is defined as a fabric formed from satin (warp yarns floating over 4 or more wefts) and sateen (weft yarns floating over 4 or more warps) weaves, used to create reversible figured designs.] And the motif is split in half, because when you thread a point draw (shafts 1 to 16 and back down to 1), the motif reverses itself, creating the second half of the scallop shape.

I played around quite a bit, working to create a warp-emphasis heart shape against a weft-emphasis background, which required tie-down warps and wefts placed strategically. I had to keep in mind that there would be floats, because you really can't expect to have tie-downs in total symmetry. What's more important is the silhouette of the heart shape.

So here's what the draft looks like now.

I haven't woven it yet, because the original design is still on the loom -- but I could change that easily, right? That's the beauty part of having a computer loom. 

So there you have it, a heartful draft for Valentine's Day! Thanks for reading.

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Baby Wrap in 16-Shaft Echo and Jin: On My New Computer Loom!

Echo, which is a border at the beginning and the end of the wrap

A detail

Great news! I have a new (to me) computer dobby loom: a 16-shaft Toika Eeva with a 40 cm weaving width. This Scandinavian beauty came to me by way of my friend and fine weaver Hedy Lyles, who enjoyed this loom but was moving up to 24 shafts.

Here's Eeva, getting dressed. 

A view from the back of the loom

I wound a warp of 10/2 Tencel, 1187 ends, 8 yards long, so that -- at 40 epi -- I would have a weaving width just shy of 30" and plenty of length for sampling before I weave up a 5-yard-long wrap. 

Because I've been teaching a lot of workshops on 4-shaft, 8-shaft, and 12-shaft Echo (and other structures you can weave on the same threading, using different tieups and treadlings), I decided to expand my repertoire to 16 shafts. Here's just a section of the Echo design, based on an advancing point twill in both threading and treadling.

I can't really show you the entire drawdown because it's too large to reproduce on this page. Anyhow, it gives you the idea: I broke up the pattern line in several spots because I like the abrupt shift, almost giving the impression of stripes.

The wrap will be Echo for just 24" on each end, with Jin filling up the center. I did this for two reasons: 1) I love the variations between the two structures and 2) the Echo pattern has warp floats of as many as 5 picks while the Jin design, by definition, never has a float of more than 3 picks. So I figured that the fabric woven in Jin would be just that much stronger and more durable when it comes to supporting an infant.

Here's what the Jin design looks like (again, only a portion of it, as the entire design wouldn't show up well at all in this narrow space). Because I'm showing you just a portion, the design looks asymmetrical -- but the pattern is symmetrical.

And here's what the Jin design looks like on the loom:

The other side of the fabric (maybe a bit harder to see)

I find that there is a bit of a learning curve with a computer loom. For instance, if I have a misstep on the pedal that controls the treadling, it's hard to instruct the weaving program to go back. At least for me it is: sometimes the computer wants to loop around and I find myself right back where I started, having to unweave. And then you have to tell the computer to unweave. It's a tricky conversation, at least until I get the hang of it.

The upside is that the weaving goes much faster and is less physically taxing. This is especially helpful with a 20/2 cotton weft, which I'm weaving at about 30 picks per inch.

And another advantage: those 16 shafts! There is a lot to learn and a lot of designing to do and I'm looking forward to it.

Back to the wrap itself: One of the things I love about Echo and Jin is the color dynamics. I deliberately chose an unlikely combination of warp colors -- burgundy and turquoise -- because I knew from experience that the weft alters the overall color of the fabric in surprising ways, often producing the iridescence that Marian Stubenitsky covers so well in her book, Weaving with Echo and Iris. For the weft I chose an orange/coral color, sort of a cantaloupe, because it warms up the warp, so to speak. Below is a photo of samples of different-colored wefts, with the cantaloupe-colored weft at the very bottom of the photo. 

This is a very special project for a very special new person in our lives: Our first grandchild, Owen, who is now almost 3 months old. I think it will look good on him, don't you?