Juried into the Convergence Fashion Show in Reno...

Every two years I set myself a challenge: weave fabric for a garment for submitting to the Convergence fashion show, a biannual conference sponsored by the Handweavers Guild of America. This year, the conference will be held July 6-13 at the Peppermill Resort in Reno, Nevada -- and I'm happy to announce that two garments of mine were juried into the show.

This coat took me two years to complete, from conception to winding warps to dyeing them to weaving the fabric to dyeing the lining and sewing the coat.... It's called "Summer's Lease I," after William Shakespeare's beautiful words, "Summer's lease hath all too short a date" (from his sonnet, "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day").

I wove the fabric on my 12-shaft Macomber, using a draft I created with extended parallel threading. Then I wound two warps of 20/2 silk, painting one in a range of fuchsia, rose, pink, and lavender and the other in gold, lime green, sage green, and turquoise. The fabric is woven in Echo Weave and Turned Taquete and the weft was 60/2 silk in orange.

Here's the image that inspired my pattern and colors.

I kept it on my computer for years under the title "Paint this Warp." I have no idea where I found it!

For the lining, I purchased yardage of Habotai silk, then dyed it in a range of bright pinks using low-water-immersion dyeing.

I wove about 10 yards of fabric and, having taken Bonnie Inouye's workshop, "Opposites Attract," I began experimenting with other structures, alternating my treadlings for Echo and Turned Taquete and then venturing into Rep and Double Weave. The Double Weave wasn't successful because I did not re-sley my reed for a tighter sett. But the Rep turned out really well, with a weft of hand-dyed Habotai silk ribbon alternating with 60/2 silk.

Here's the second garment that was juried into the fashion show, this one named "Summer's Lease II."

The top is woven in Warp Rep and the skirt is Turned Taquete, cut on the bias. Here's a close-up of the top.

As for patterns: the coat is my own pattern, fashioned after a swing coat I own and love. The skirt and top are my own designs. Photo credits and thanks to Timothy Fuss of Pixelwave, who does a wonderful job photographing handwoven garments.

Hope to see you in Reno!

20/2 Silk, Painted Warps, 12 Harnesses, Echo and Jin (this headline has no verb)

Actually, this headline is a list of my favorite things. I love weaving with two painted silk warps: When you beam them together and then thread them A-B-A-B, you can weave fabrics with subtle and beautiful color shifts -- an effect I like to call "color play."

And then there's Jin: a structure that produces excellent drape in your fabric and allows for expressive patterns as well. AND when you use an extended parallel threading, all you have to do is alter your tieup and treadling to get Echo -- a design technique that works beautifully when you want to combine two painted warps on your loom.

In the photo above, the Jin appears in the lower half and the Echo appears in the upper half. To me, they flow together nicely, in part because I used the same treadling as I shifted into Echo. All I did was eliminate the tabby treadling that's needed for Jin and change the tieup. (Easy to do on a table loom, much harder to do on my floor loom, another argument to get a computer dobby loom...)

Here's the Echo drawdown.

Here's the drawdown for the Jin pattern. Basically, I designed an advancing point twill on an extended parallel threading. (It's easy to do with weaving software. In Fiberworks, for instance, all you do is click on "parallel repeat" in the "Warp" menu and choose how many shafts you want between the two different lines of threading.)

On the loom, it played out like this (keeping in mind that I changed my 60/2 silk weft from olive to orange about halfway up in the photo):

I even like the plain-weave treadling (which weaves as a faux basket weave, as you can't achieve true plain weave with these structures).

See the floating warp thread on the right? That error made me think that I should adjust the tieup to give the fabric some serious warp floats, so that I can create an "eyelash" effect in the fabric. My plan is to mix it up when I weave the final yardage, going from Jin to Echo to faux basket weave with eyelash accents.

The takeaway from this blog post is really that old cliche: Sample, sample, sample! By the way, let me know if you want me to send you copies of the drawdowns. Happy Thanksgiving!

12 Harness Turned Taqueté: From Dismal Failure to Success (with a Few Treadling Errors)

First, the success: Finally, after what seemed like hours on the floor fiddling with treadles, I'm able to weave the draft I envisioned in my head (and on Fiberworks): a 12-harness turned taquete adapted from a profile draft for 8 harnesses published by Bonnie Inouye in the Complex Weavers Journal. I fell in love with the circles and curves and have been working on it through several iterations.

Now, the dismal failure.

Right. Not the same draft, but that's not the reason it doesn't look like turned taqueté. The treadling was all wrong (that accounts for the hours under the loom) AND I forgot to check for floats. The pattern is all floats. Although I do acknowledge that it might be interesting if you wove it as an eyelash fabric (cutting the floats so that they became like "eyelashes" on top of the fabric).

Now, for those of you who are better math-heads than I am, this all might seem terribly obvious. For me, I didn't get it until I wove it. And then I got it pretty quickly, as you can see, because I wove about an inch before I cut it off. Stewed about it for quite a while and wondered what the heck was wrong.

Went back to the drawing board -- Fiberworks, that is -- and succeeded in creating a network draft with parallel threading for 12 harnesses based on the profile draft mentioned above. I used two different painted warps of 20/2 silk and combined them, threading them A-B-A-B for the parallel threading. The weft is 60/2 silk in purple from Webs. Snatching success from the jaws of failure!

This is only a sample, aiming for a fabric I would like to weave for a jacket.  Right now, I'm playing with treadlings. And getting the threading right, of course. A careful observer might notice three threading errors in this piece -- but I won't tell you where they are ;o) Suffice it to say that I broke down and bought some repair heddles, because I'm tired of making them out of string. I find that turned taqueté is a challenge to thread, particularly with parallel threading, because it has no regular blocks. It's all over the place and, if your attention lapses for only a second or two, you have to deal with it when you're weaving.

Here's one more view of the sample, with a different treadling and an off-white weft. I think it looks washed out, but it always pays to experiment. You never know!

A post-script: tying up 14 treadles for 12 harnesses is enough to convince me I need to purchase a computer dobby loom....

'What Is Turned Taqueté? A Weave by Any Other Name...'

I have been trying, with modest success, to understand the weave structure known as Turned Taqueté. 

Turned Taqueté is described alternately as polychrome Summer and Winter but without tabby... or warp-faced compound plain weave... or like Samitum but based on plain weave, not twill.... Quite honestly, I do not have enough weaving background -- or I am not enough of a math-head -- to fully understand all the analyses and terminology. I do know that there is a tie-down weft and that the pattern warps float over three wefts and then are tied down as well. Ideally, the weft is much finer than the warp, allowing the warp pattern to show. And for what I want to do -- that is, paint two different warps and then weave them together in one fabric, so that the colors play against each other and with the pattern -- Turned Taqueté is terrific. Alliteration intended. 

Simply put, this structure provides for a wonderful drape and beautiful design possibilities. I wove the sample above (and below) on 8 harnesses using two hand-painted warps in 20/2 silk and a weft of black 60/2 silk.  

The incomparable Bonnie Inouye designed the pattern and I modified the treadling a bit. Below is a small version of the drawdown. (If you would like me to share with you the WIF file, send me an email at dkovn@hotmail.com.) The pattern appears in the most recent issue of the Complex Weavers Journal, in an article by Inouye, "Turned Taqueté, An Introduction." In the article, she also discusses how to draw this structure on a network, using either Fiberworks or WeavePoint software. Network drafting is another wonderfully intricate subject -- one that is discussed and illustrated at length in Marian Stubenitsky's new book, Weaving with Echo and Iris. Network drafting allows weavers to soften and curve their patterns, so that the structure appears fluid rather than rectilinear.

I think I have just dipped my toe in the water....