This Pattern Is More than 400 Years Old... with a Few Changes

 It all starts with a 1626 portrait of John Erskine, 2nd Earl of Mar and Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, painted by Adam de Colone. 

The painting hangs in the National Galleries of Scotland, where researchers have found that the canvas is in fact a linen tablecloth, a practice that was common at the time. The tablecloth was woven on 14 shafts in this Gebrochene pattern.

If you're a frequent reader of this blog, you may recall that I've written about this before -- most recently, on September 18, 2022, in a post that gives you more details on how I altered the pattern but kept the original design line. I learned of it maybe 20 years ago from Marjie Thompson, who calls it "The Earl". 

It was not a stretch to take the threading and create a parallel threading 14 shafts above it, which I did just to see what would happen. I figured it could be woven as Echo or, by adding tabby to the treadling, as Jin (aka Turned Taqueté). The Jin drawdown I designed looks like this.

Here's a detail to give you a better idea of the design.

I really liked the varied geometry of the pattern, so this is what I used for the motifs in the center of the scarf, using two different weft colors, violet and gold. (The gold is in the central section, where the fabric scrunches up into pleats, seen around the neck on the mannikin. That's because the yarn is a combination of silk tram and stainless steel, which has memory.)

The mountain-like motifs at the beginning and end of the scarf -- in purple and orange -- are woven in a doubleweave pattern using what I call a "carved" tieup. (The idea is outlined in Marian Stubenitsky's definitive work, Weaving with Echo and Iris, which provides all number of tieup options for Echo woven as doubleweave.)

When you're weaving four-color doubleweave on an Echo threading, these "carved" variations in the tieup make for lots of color shifts, so that a color first appears on top of the cloth and then shifts to the bottom. This maximizes the potential for color blending.

Adding to the potential for color play: I used a painted warp combined with a black warp for the parallel threading. The technique is quite simple: You wind a two-color warp of natural and black and then paint the entire warp. The natural-colored yarn absorbs the dye and the black does not. 

I love the yarn that I used for the warp, and I doubt I will ever find it again, because I got it at one of those wonderful guild sales. It's a 24/3 unmercerized cotton, so I really didn't have to worry about threads breaking and selvages fraying. For the doubleweave weft, I used 16/2 bamboo in blue, orange, and burgundy, and for the Jin wefts, I used 60/2 silk in deep violet and, as I mentioned, tram-silk/stainless-steel in gold, purchased from Lunatic Fringe, which pleats and bends in the center section.

To me, the motifs look like mountains and the colors remind me of a western sunset. So I've named the piece "Colorado", which means "ruddy" in Spanish. It reminds me of the sunsets over the Sangre de Cristo range, near where my daughter and her family live. The Earl is well traveled indeed.

Thanks for reading!

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!

More Explorations in Extended Parallel Threadings

Pictured here: a 12-shaft design woven on an Echo threading in 20/2 silk. I call this design "Burano" because it has a lacy look, reminding me of the lace-makers on the island off of Venice. 

So let's walk through the steps in creating this design and weaving the different samples in Echo, Jin, Shadow Weave, Rep and Double Weave. (This is exactly what we do in my workshop, "One Warp, Many Structures: An Exploration of Extended Parallel Threading." I must really like the process, because I keep repeating the format on my own, at home....)

First, how to create the design itself? I think I found the original pattern, a twill pattern with elements of a Crackle threading, on Handweaving.net. Can't remember, exactly, because it could also have been on Pinterest. Both are great places to scan weaving drafts for ideas. Here's what the original draft looks like.

Intricate, symmetrical, appealing -- reminds me of a butterfly! I starting playing on Fiberworks, expanding the design to 12 shafts using an extended parallel threading. And this is one of the designs I came up with: an Echo tieup on an advancing and descending twill treadling.

Following one of my other workshops -- "Paint Two, Beam One" -- I hand-painted two warps of 20/2 silk. The first was in a range of blues and the second in purples and rose colors, but I decided I needed more color, so I added two more painted warps in complementary colors, creating four stripes bordered on both sides by two ends of black. And here's how it wove up. 

This sample is the same pattern as in the first photo of this blog post. I used a bronze-colored weft in 20/2 cotton, because the gold tones really warm up the overall tones of the warp. And then I proceeded to weave up samples in Echo, Jin, Shadow Weave, Rep and Double Weave, varying my tieups, treadlings and weft yarns, all on the same extended parallel threading.

I am so grateful to my weaving teachers, particularly Bonnie Inouye and Marian Stubenitsky. I first learned about the potential of extended parallel threadings through a workshop taught by Bonnie, "Opposites Attract," in which she explores the potential of Echo threadings to achieve a broad range of structures. And I also continue to learn from Marian Stubenitsky's definitive work, Weaving with Echo and Iris, in which she took Echo designs and ran with them, showing countless possibilities for variations on 4 to 32 shafts.

Here's how my Jin sample wove up, offering yet another example of why I love Jin so much:

And here's how the threading works with Shadow Weave, shown here in a detail:

As for Rep (below): Well, not so great, but I think it was partly owing to my choice of wefts, where I alternated 20/2 cotton (thin weft) and black rayon chenille (thick weft). I think this sample would have been better if I changed my sett, making it much denser, and chose something thicker and less textured than the chenille for the thicker weft. Nevertheless, I see some potential here!

And then I wove up a double-weave sample, which I also like very much:

Just one more, this one in another variation of Echo:

Subtle, yes, but still I like it -- particularly the way the diamond shapes change in both size and color throughout the stripes.

Weaving at home and teaching weaving on Zoom have both given me great comfort this past year. And we all need comfort, even as we are painfully aware of how others lack food, shelter, health care and health itself. This year has given us hardship and hope in equal doses. Friends and loved ones are farther away and closer in our hearts. May you and yours enjoy the blessings of this season of light, however you may celebrate, and may you take comfort in every way you can in the year to come!

 

Waves of Color: Double Weave with Echo Threadings

"Knit on with confidence and hope through all crises."

Elizabeth Zimmerman

As usual, Elizabeth Zimmerman nailed it: Substitute "weave" for "knit" and that's some of the best advice I can think of in these troubled times. 

So let's look at one of the most beautiful techniques weavers have been focusing on lately (at least judging from Facebook and Instagram and texts I've gotten from friends).

There's this gorgeous piece, from my fellow upstate New Yorker, Amy Parker (first photo shows side one, second photo shows side two):

This is an 8-shaft double-weave fabric woven on 32 treadles with a variety of warp and weft yarns, according to Amy, all around the grist of 10/2 cotton. Each vertical section has 2 colors in the warp and 2 in the weft, so the back side of the piece looks different from the front.

The draft is by Marian Stubenitsky, who generously shared it here on handweaving.net. (It looks a little dark in this reproduction, but hopefully you get the idea.)

Here are some 32-shaft samples by Susan Weigel Balascio, posted recently on Instagram. The samples, using fine threads in the warp, are wonderful. One half of her warp was black merino and pale yellow and the other half was 20/2 Tencel in blues and purples. In the first sample below, she alternated purple merino and a thin red/gold film for her weft yarns. For the second sample, her weft yarns were 38-gauge copper doubled and a 3-ply green silk.

While photos are great for observing color and form, there is no substitute for the sense of touch, to know the hand of a fabric. Susan says the samples are light and lofty, which is ideal for collapse fabrics. Thank you, Susan! 

As for me, sheltering in place with my husband and my looms, I've been weaving up lots of samples with 4-color warps, in preparation for workshops I hope to begin teaching online. The photos below show both the front and back sides.

The thing I like about this last sample is the texture, produced by using 18/2 merino for one of the wefts. The technique is known as differential shrinkage, where one fiber shrinks (the wool) while the other does not (cotton), creating pleats and puckers in the fabric. (Specifically, the double-weave structure divides into two layers in some sections and interlaces in others. Where the layers split, the layer with the wool weft will full and shrink with agitation in hot water and soap, drawing in the cotton layer so that it crinkles and collapses.)

Here are a few more samples, these in just two warp colors, showing how differential-shrinkage techniques will make the fabric collapse -- but again, only where the two layers aren't interlaced.

There are many ways to achieve collapse effects with double weave, but they all require a sett and beat that are more open than normal. So, for instance, if you're working with 10/2 cotton in the warp, you would normally weave this in double weave at a sett of 48 epi (24 epi for plain weave x 2 layers = 48 epi). In the case of all the dimensional samples above, my sett is 36 epi. And I'm thinking it could have been even more open. 

Further, collapse techniques work best with finer yarns, so a 20/2 cotton warp would produce a lighter, softer hand in the fabric. 10/2 cotton in double weave creates a sturdy, less flexible fabric, although it would work well for a jacket.

One last note: Designing these structures isn't easy -- and sampling them doesn't always produce success, at least in my experience. Understanding that nearly all Echo-based double-weave patterns are interlaced double weave, you really have to know that there are large-enough parts of your design where the two layers are weaving separately. 

Remember that double-weave sample in the photo at the beginning of this post? I was SO EXCITED about taking it off the loom and scrubbing it up to produce a collapse fabric. Which didn't really happen...

Yes, that was the result. I suspect that there were really no spaces in the structure where the two layers did not interlace. My bad. I liked the sample better before washing! Which brings me to another quote from Elizabeth Zimmerman:

"Now, let us all take a deep breath and forge on into the future, knitting at the ready."

Knitting, weaving, whatever you choose, forge on! Thanks for reading.