Collapse Designs on 4 Shafts: a Sneak Peek at Upcoming Workshops

There are SO MANY ways to produce textured fabrics! And it's relatively easy to weave complex-looking fabric on just 4 shafts. Which is the subject of a workshop I will be teaching this summer at the MAFA (Mid-Atlantic Fiber Association) conference at Millersville University in Pennsylvania.

The sample pictured above, for example, looked like this before washing and fulling.

The warp is 20/2 pearl cotton and the weft is 18/2 merino. You'll see that the weft floats in alternating blocks on the top of the fabric, but not on the back. After washing and agitating in hot, soapy water, the weft floats will full and shrink, pulling in the cotton warps in a checkerboard pattern. The image at the top of the page shows what was the back of the fabric on the loom -- which is the far more interesting surface due to the checkerboard pattern.

Here is the draft.

I did 3 other samples on this 20/2 cotton warp. Here are the images of the samples after washing.

20/2 pearl cotton alternating with 18/2 merino weft stripes in plain weave

18/2 merino weft floats alternating with 20/2 pearl cotton weft in plain weave 

Same as above sample, but with merino weft floats on one side only

I particularly love the texture of the middle sample, as it looks the same on both sides and it shrank up the most (width-wise) of all the samples -- making it spongy and lofty. I think it would work well as a lightweight jacket or coat fabric. With lots of color in the warp and weft, of course.

Here are some more photos of samples I've woven up and washed in preparation for this workshop.

Deflected Double Weave

Double Weave (two layers woven simultaneously)

Differential shrinkage using merino and superwash wool

Collapse fabric using a wool/latex weft (warp is on the horizontal)

 Fulling with woven-shibori technique

 Weft floats fulled and cut to create an eyelash effect

So many techniques, so much to learn. I will be teaching another collapse-cloth workshop -- this time on both 4 and 8 shafts -- at the Hartford Artisans Weaving Center at the end of the summer. In September, I'll give a Power Point presentation on the subject to the New York Guild of Handweavers -- hopefully with lots of new photos to show from the summer workshops.

'Patience... and the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown'

This old Chinese proverb comes to mind when I weave. It seems like such a long journey from winding a warp to finishing a garment.

Well, at least I am not reeling the silk from the cocoons... to make the strands of fiber... and then to spin and ply them into yarn.

Here are some photos documenting my latest project: a vest and jacket made of deflected double weave fabric, finished for differential shrinkage, using two painted warps. The photo above shows the fabric on the loom: an 8-shaft deflected double weave structure using two warps painted in two different color palettes. The "background" layer is 18/2 merino painted in a range from burgundy to orchid purple to gold to rust, while the pattern layer is 20/2 pearl cotton painted in turquoise, yellow, lavender, and pale green.

What I enjoy most about working with the merino is that it fulls beautifully, making a sturdy and forgiving fabric and emphasizing the pattern made by the cotton. Here's a detail photo.

Here's the draft, showing only one repeat. There are lots of variations, and the back of the fabric is just as interesting -- but very different -- from the front. This is characteristic of deflected double weave.

I won't bore you with the problems I had at the start, aiming to weave at least 10 yards of fabric in deflected double weave as a collapse-weave fabric. Well, then again, maybe I WILL bore you a bit. When you're weaving with two different yarns -- which is necessary, if you want to achieve a collapse weave -- the selvages can be an issue. You have two separate layers because it's a two-shuttle weave, leaving the ins and outs of two very different yarns on the selvage. Even when you add a section of plain weave on the selvages, you still have the problem, because of the two different yarns. I struggled with this, and finally added fishing line about 3 inches away from each selvage, affixed to the front and back beams (so it did not advance with the warp). I wove around the fishing line and, every time I advanced the warp, I cut the loops around the fishing line, creating a fringe along with weft. Problem solved!

So, days or maybe weeks later, I had about 9 1/2 yards of fabric to wash and then full. I started in my bathtub, stomping on the fabric much as I would do if I were stomping on grapes to make wine ;o)

Then I put it in my front-load washing machine, on a rinse, drain, and spin cycle only. That's all it took to become a nicely fulled fabric, making the cotton pucker into an interesting pattern.

The photo doesn't show the color shifts with the two painted warps, but you get the idea. Here's a somewhat blurry photo showing the yardage as it dried -- indoors, of course, since it's wintertime. You can see the fringe along the selvages.

It's hard to cut into fabric that you have spent hours (seems like years) weaving, but it is essential if you want to create a garment. Unless you want to make a toga, I guess. I adhere to the Nike slogan, "Just do it." One suggestion: it helps to weave way more than enough yardage, so you know that you have extra fabric in case you make an error.

Suffice it to say that I wove enough fabric for a jacket, using a wonderful pattern by Marcy Tilton (Vogue 8693). (Applause here for Marcy, as her patterns work so well for handmade fabrics.) I won't show the photo yet, because I am entering it into a juried fashion show and I don't want to tempt fate!

But -- at the top of this post and below -- here is a glimpse of a simple vest I made, using my leftover yardage. The pattern -- this one is Vogue 8713 -- is so very easy that I sewed it up in an afternoon!

Deflected Double Weave for Collapse Fabrics

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "It ain't over till it's over." This phrase is true not just for baseball, but also for achieving texture in your fabrics. You plan and warp and weave and cut off -- but the fabric isn't finished until it's finished, because it looks entirely different after washing.

Here's an example. Below, the fabric on the loom.

And after washing -- after "fulling" by agitating and scrubbing by hand with soap in hot water, to be exact.

Now THIS is cloth with character! Lots of wriggling shapes, thanks to "differential shrinkage," in which one fiber (wool) shrinks while the other (cotton) doesn't. And lots of strong color, thanks to deflected double weave.

I wove this on my trusty little 4-shaft Structo loom, pictured here.

I have always wanted one and finally purchased one this year. I took it on a trip to Chicago -- and simply packed it in my suitcase. Portable weaving studio!

For those who are interested, the pattern is an adaptation of one designed by Madelyn Van Der Hoogt, featured in the January/February 2007 issue of Handwoven magazine. I altered the threading slightly and substituted 18/2 Superfine Merino by JaggerSpun for the white sections and 20/2 pearl cotton for the black.

Here's the drawdown:

All of this was in preparation for a workshop I recently taught at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center. The idea was to use an 8-shaft pattern, threaded with 18/2 merino and 20/2 pearl cotton, and create a sampler using lots of different treadlings. The sett is very important for collapse fabrics. For differential shrinkage, you want a loose sett for the yarn that will shrink and a normal (plain weave) sett for the yarn that will not shrink. So I set the merino at 18 epi and the cotton at 36 epi. Same for the picks per inch: I wove the wool at 18 ppi and the cotton at 36 ppi.

This is what the main pattern looked like, before washing.

And here's what it looked like after.

Lots of interest and bold graphic designs. I apologize for the lack of color in these samples -- this blog is named "Random Acts of Color," after all -- but I wanted to create samples that very clearly illustrate what was going on. Deflected double weave is an easy structure to understand, once you get the basics down.

Again,  for those who are interested, here (below) is the draft for the threading and tieup.

The sample above was woven tromp as writ -- but if you're interested in the different treadlings I gave people in the workshop, here they are. (The blue horizontal lines are there simply to visually separate the different treadlings.)

Weave it up, try lots of different treadlings, and remember, it ain't finished until it's finished!

Turned Monk's Belt: Another Structure for Combining Two Painted Warps

Weavers love painting warps: You can't buy the beauty of the ever-changing colors. For me, painting two warps brings even greater rewards: When you combine them into one warp and weave a warp-dominant structure, you get a fabric with two continually shifting color palettes.

I'm on a mission to discover the best structures for this technique. To my eye, Turned Taquete is the most magical, as is Echo Weave. Then there's the magic of twill stripes, woven in 3/1 and 1/3 structures.... And double weave. And deflected double weave. And turned overshot. Turned Honeycomb, not so much. The warp-wise tension makes for straight lines, not honeycomb waves.

But why not Turned Monk's Belt? Effectively, you're weaving a supplemental-warp structure, which would allow for all kinds of improvising, using different yarns, random-width blocks, you name it. But for this project, I wanted to stick with a simple, traditional 4-harness Monk's Belt pattern, just to see what happened.

I used a ground warp of 20/2 pearl cotton and a pattern warp of 10/2 unmercerized cotton. (Thank you, Leslie Mendelson, my friend!) I painted the ground warp in a series of peach/gold/soft orange colors, while the pattern warp was painted blue/aqua/purple/sky blue. The sett was 36 ends per inch for each layer, meaning 6 ends per dent in a 12-dent reed.

The weft was 20/2 pearl cotton dyed in soft orange. Since this was only a sample, as it was just 2 2/9" in the reed. I wish I had planned to finish both ends with a nice, neat hem stitch, because this Monk's Belt pattern would have made a nice... belt!