Summer Is the Time to Play... with Yarn

A friend of the late, great Kay Faulkner remembered how Kay would phone her and begin with the words, "I've been playing...."

My reaction was, if that's "playing," then I need to do more! But seriously: Creativity and play are related, if not joined at the hip. Allowing our mind to roam when we're making something -- or even walking away from the work altogether -- lets our imagination roam, without pressure. Taking a shower, going to sleep, daydreaming, lolling about in bed as we wake up -- or playing the violin, in the case of Einstein and the Theory of Relativity -- gives our subconscious the time and space to explore.

So I've been playing, as you can see in the photo above. The structure is four-color double weave, with 16/2 bamboo for the two warps and one of the wefts and 28-gauge wire as the other weft. It was definitely tough to weave with (and my selvages show it), but I think there's an idea in there. What if I wove yardage like this? Could it be a sculpture? Or what if I used wire in random picks in the weft, as Liz Williamson has done with her dimensional scarves and shawls? What if? Why not?

Maybe my subconscious can work on that. I'll let the weaving goddesses make the decisions. (Some days they're with me, some days they're not.)

I wove this sample en route to weaving a garment on the same warp, one that I hope becomes a dress or a mantle of some kind. But instead of using wire as one of the wefts, I used Gevolve S-twist linen crepe from Lunatic Fringe Yarns. Using this in double weave that has pockets (as Marian Stubenitsky describes the separate layers you sometimes find in four-color double weave), it crimps the fabric up nicely, creating a kind of natural stretch in the bodice, with no darts necessary. And if you switch out the active weft for an inactive weft (in this case, so that all the yarns are 16/2 bamboo), you can achieve gentle ruffles where the textured  fabric meets the flat fabric.

Here's a photo.

And here's a detail.

Finally, this is what the fabric looked like before washing, which allows the overtwist linen to draw the fabric in, creating vertical pleating on the opposite layer (that's woven with the inactive 16/bamboo in both warp and weft).

That dress would certainly work for someone more slender than I but maybe I could put gores in the side seams of the skirt... or maybe it's for an exhibit or a fashion show.... I'll just keep playing.

I've been messing about with beads also, ever since my friend Deborah Pope taught me how to make fabric beads.

Not exactly sure what they're going to become; most likely a bracelet. I used to think that any finished project, however humble, is infinitely better than any unfinished piece, however beautiful. Now I'm not so sure. What's wrong with an unfinished work, with finding out that you don't want to follow that trail anymore?

Questions to ponder. Thanks for reading!

Shaft Envy, Begone!

 

You don't need 32 shafts to weave beautiful fabric! I'm on a mission to prove this as I work on designs for a new workshop, "Echo on the Double: 4-Color Double Weave for 4 to 32 shafts." The workshop will include 5 to 6 variations in tieups and treadlings for each pattern, all in double weave, for any kind of treadle loom from 4 to 32 shafts. 

Pictured above, in the first 2 photos: Blooming Leaf design, Echo threading on 4 shafts in 4-color double weave, front and back. Second 2 photos: Falling Stars design, Echo threading on 8 shafts in 4-color double weave, front and back. The warp colors for all 4 designs are lime green and azalea.

Double weave on Echo threadings is endlessly fascinating because of the variety of patterns and color combinations that you can achieve. When you start with 2 colors in the warp (for a 2-end parallel threading) and then add 2 colors in the weft (one for the bottom layer and one for the top layer), you're working with 4 colors in all, which keeps color folks like me happy. And sometimes you'll wind up with the appearance of more than 4 colors, as in these samples below.

I used a sky blue and a beige linen as wefts, with lime green and azalea as warp colors. Look closely and you'll see a bit of the blue weft highlighting the pattern on this 8-shaft design.

The back looks quite different. Here, the sky-blue weft alters the lime-green warp, making it appear more like turquoise. It also alters the azalea warp, making it look more lilac. 

The color differences are more pronounced when you see this piece "in the flesh."

This color-shift effect is called optical mixing. (I also define it as "simultaneous contrast" because the colors of warp and weft appear different depending on which colors they lie next to). Echo as double weave allows you to exploit and play with this effect, regardless of the number of shafts on your loom.

Above, Blooming Leaf design on four shafts. The warp colors are the same as the 8-shaft design in the photos preceding this. The weft yarn for this layer is sky blue, which again softens the lime green, making it appear turquoise, and shifts the azalea to more of a lavender hue.

For the bottom layer, I used a burnt-orange weft color, which pretty much overwhelms the lime-green warp, turning it into a pale gold/bronze, while the azalea warp becomes more of a coral/orange. I like the bold color differences between the front and the back of the fabric.

There are so many other possibilities as well. For instance, I will be weaving some samples using overtwisted yarns as wefts, which cause the fabric to wrinkle and pleat in interesting ways. The key here is that the design has to include "pockets," as Marian Stubenitsky refers to them in her book, Echo and Iris. This is where the two double-weave layers are weaving separately, which doesn't always happen with double weave on Echo threadings. Often, you're weaving "integrated double weave," where the two layers are interlaced.

And then I would like very much to try weaving with copper as one of the warps and as one of the wefts, but that will have to wait until another time. First, I need to weave up a complete sample set for this workshop. Note: I've found that, as confident as I can be when I look at a design in Fiberworks, I still need to weave it up to see how it plays out. There are often surprises!

Then again, the surprises can lead to discoveries, don't you agree? And discovery is one of the reasons we love this craft.

Thanks for reading!

Falling Stars pattern on 8 shafts, Echo threading, double-weave tieup and treadling, 

with overtwisted yarn as one of the wefts.

Work in Progress: A Future Class on Double Weave for Echo Threadings

 

Above is a detail of a 32-shaft design I'm working on called "Dreaming in Color." It has a 4-color Echo threading and uses 2 additional colors in the weft. I guess that makes it 6-color double weave.

Anyhow, that's the beauty of designing for double weave on Echo threadings: With the right tieup, you can create a magical array of shifting colors. And, if you want to take your creation a step further, you can add a weft with a crepe or shrinking yarn to achieve a dimensional weave.

In order to achieve texture with these designs, you have to look for "pockets" in the structure. (With some tieups and treadlings, you'll get integrated double weave rather than pockets, meaning that the two layers are interlaced.) To see these pockets and/or interlacements, you have to look at the "structure view" in Fiberworks. Here's what the first design looks like in that simulation.

This is kind of a dizzying array of black and white graphics -- but if you look at it closely, you'll see stair-like lines in two sections. These indicate "pockets" in your cloth, meaning that in these sections you'll be weaving two layers of double weave. Also, the sections of both upside down and rightside up "T" shapes indicate pockets as well. (These patterns are discussed on page 170 of Marian Stubenitsky's book, Echo and Iris. As far as I'm concerned, this book has a lifetime's worth of learning in it, not to mention the beauty of the patterns themselves.)

And what about that unusual tieup?

This is the same tieup, in reverse, that Stubenitsky uses on page 175 of Echo and Iris. 

To understand what is happening, it's helpful to divide it into upper and lower layers, like this:

Top layer at left, bottom layer at right

Remember that, with double-weave tieups, the bottom layer has to be a photo negative of a "normal" tieup -- because in order to weave on the bottom layer, which is weaving upside down, the treadles that are lowered work like treadles that would normally be lifted. Likewise, the treadles that are raised perform as if they are lowered. 

As I say when I'm teaching, for the bottom layer in double weave, what's down is up and what's up is down. 

Anyhow, you can see that the tieups have changing "ratios," to use Stubenitsky's term, with sections of each layer all up or all down in an ascending pattern. On shafts where the top layer weaves plain weave, the treadling for the bottom layer is "lifting" (lowering) all of the same shafts -- and vice versa. The rectangles of lifted and lowered shafts create interacting designs in the cloth.

As far as good designs are concerned: I'm not sure I'm there yet, wherever that may be, but I think I'm moving in the right direction.

Detail of another design

All of this is in preparation for a new workshop I'm developing, "Echo on the Double," that will focus solely on 4-color and 6-color double-weave designs on Echo threadings. For people who love to play with color, as I do, these techniques have great possibilities.

Putting it all together is a challenge, of course: combining a strong design line with an interesting tieup and treadling, learning how colors blend and play out, taking care to get the right sett and beat and, ultimately, winding up with a good hand for the cloth. 

I hesitate to admit how many designs I create before achieving one that really works! Here's one, below, that I'm on the fence about. It uses the same design line for the treadling as for the threading -- not quite tromp as writ, because the threading is a 4-end parallel while the treadling is a 2-end parallel.

I kind of like the eccentricity of this pattern. The quirky, linear motifs kind of remind me of cave columns, where stalactites and stalagmites meet. Can you detect them?

Photo: Alex Demas, USGS, public domain

Unlike many of my blog posts, this one is more just thinking out loud or, as I call this design I'm working on, "Dreaming in Color." There will be many variations and probably many more patterns before anything goes on the loom....

Thanks for reading!

24-Shaft Four-Color Double Weave Sample Extravaganza Scarf

8 different samples do not a scarf make.

Another name for this could be "The Greedy Weaver Scarf." I've tried so many tieup/treadling/weft yarn variations on this 24-shaft threading that I really couldn't settle on just one sample for a scarf. So I wove a scarf using eight of my favorites -- and even that wasn't enough! But I will wear it with pride.

Also, I will use it as a resource and a teaching tool. I'm getting more and more immersed in the mysteries of four-color double weave: How the colors shift with the patterns, how the colors change depending on what color they're next to (part of the over-arching theory of simultaneous contrast), how the textures change with active yarns in the weft, how the two sides can be quite different, how much latitude this gives for designing. I could go on!

And I will in this blog post ;o) Let's start with the vital statistics: This is a 24-shaft pattern in a two-color extended parallel threading at an interval of 12 shafts. For the warp, I used 16/2 bamboo in rusty orange and a lilac I dyed myself because the color I wanted wasn't available. The sett was 60 epi and there were 816 ends in the warp plus two ends on either side for floating selvages.

Here's what the threading looks like (this shows one repeat out of two):

Because I repeated this once for 816 ends, there's a line right down the middle in some of the designs, which I really don't like, but be that as it may. These are samples! I wanted to play with tieups and treadlings to see what happened.

My first sample -- one of my favorites -- looks like this:

For the wefts, I used a 16/2 cotton in bright turquoise along with a 20/2 cotton in soft yellow, with the following tieup and treadling. (The treadling is just an 11-end advancing point twill.) The result is lots of color -- how many different colors, I can't really count.

Next I tried a tieup that produced a rectilinear design. I learned about it from Mimi Anderson, immediate former president of Complex Weavers, who creates beautiful scarves in four-color double weave. Here's my sample, followed by an image of the tieup and treadling.

Still with me? To keep things moving, I will show you just two more samples with their tieups and treadlings -- my two other favorite patterns.

Another favorite, front

And back

And below, my most favorite (that's a double superlative), which I think I'll use for a garment. The wefts are 16/2 cotton in bright turquoise and a gossamer-fine (20,000 yds./lb.) silk/stainless steel yarn in mint green. The silk/stainless relaxes after washing and makes the cloth pleat randomly thanks to separate "pockets" where the double weave divides into two layers. At other points in the fabric, the two layers are integrated, which allows for a lot of textural interest.

On the top layer of the fabric, the silk/stainless steel weft is so fine 

that you see mostly the warp colors.

On the bottom layer of the fabric, the 16/2 turquoise weft adds a blue cast.

And here's the tieup and treadling.

Thanks for reading! Happy weaving.