A Talk with Master Weaver Lillian Whipple

The photo resolution may not be good enough to show it very well -- but the warp for this piece is 240/2 silk! Or maybe it's 260/2, which is another yarn she often used for warps.... 

Here's another example of her work:

That's Lillian Whipple's superpower: weaving with silk so fine that most of us would need our reading glasses to see it. Here are a few more of her ever-so-delicate, feather-light "kimono" weavings, each one a work of art on its own, each about 1" wide by 2" long.

Many weavers boast of having an entire collection of Lillian's pieces. That's because, at every Convergence conference for many years, she was known for sharing them with every attendee she encountered, myself included.

Motifs on Lillian's loom

Lillian's beloved 24-shaft AVL

I first met Lillian at Convergence (not sure which year), standing in a group of friends, when she approached us, introduced herself, and shared her tiny, lovely kimono samples with all of us. This was my first time I'd received one of her weavings and I felt like I had been initiated into a very special club. Since then, I've met many people at weaving conferences proudly wearing name-tags accompanied by maybe half a dozen of Lillian's postage-stamp-sized pieces, each woven in exquisite detail. 

And one day, surprisingly, she appeared in one of my workshops. It may have been at Convergence in Reno in 2018. (Side note here: Like Lillian, many well-known, highly respected teachers are more than happy to take workshops. I think of Chaucer's quote about the Clerk in his Canterbury Tales: "And gladly would he learn, and gladly teach." But I didn't know that then. All I knew was that Lillian Whipple was in my class and I'd better be on my toes.) 

"It was about 50 years that I was weaving," Lillian told me in a recent phone conversation from her home in California. "I can't weave anymore but I had a great time and I'm still hearing about it," she continues, laughing. "I have many pieces on my walls and in my closet to remind me."

She has two COEs (Certificates of Excellence from the Handweavers Guild of America), highlighted by an in-depth study for her second COE entitled "By a Fine Silk Thread." For more than 15 years, she chaired the Fine Threads Study Group for Complex Weavers, serving as a mentor to talented artists like Molly McLaughlin. Her many accomplishments include teaching, exhibiting, writing and publishing, and a host of awards for her garments and wall hangings. She is perhaps best known for her Taqueté and Summer and Winter weavings in fine silk -- such as the pieces shown at the beginning of this post.

What drew her to weaving? "It satisfied something in me," she muses. "I was able to create what I wanted. I was able to design what I wanted and the field was open to me, wide open."

Her advice to aspiring weavers relates to this. "I would tell people to enjoy themselves and do what you want and go where you want, because it's wide open! You can do anything you want, I believe."

Words to weave by. Thank you, Lillian!

Top, Whipple in 2009 and below, one of her Summer and Winter weavings. 

(From WeaveZine, October 1, 2009.)

 

What Happens in New Hampshire...

When a bunch of talented weavers get together for a workshop?

Well, for example, this...

Jin on 4 shafts woven by Jill Hunter 

(a design I created called "Blooming Leaf")

And this...

8-shaft Echo pattern, "Chakras," woven by Kathy Hutchins

And this!

"Chakras" design using a different tieup and treadling, 

woven by MaryAnn Bennett

The workshop, "Echo and Jin for 4 Shafts and More," aims to help weavers explore various tieups and treadlings for Echo and Jin (Turned Taqueté) in either 4 or 8-shaft threadings. I taught it at the New Hampshire Weavers' Guild in Concord, NH, this month and discovered there was more to the lesson plan than I thought.

Turns out, the workshop is as much about exploring color as it is about structure. Participants have the choice of working with a 2-color warp or a 4-color warp -- and with either choice, the weft colors make a big difference in the final results. This can be surprising, especially when you consider that both Echo and Jin are warp-emphasis designs.

(For both weaves, the recommended sett is somewhere between that for twill and double weave. And the weft yarns for Echo and Jin are typically finer -- usually half the grist -- of the warp yarns. So while these are not warp-faced fabrics, such as Rep, they are certainly warp-dominant.)

So, back to color and how important weft colors are to the final look.

Mary Ellen Burnett took this photo to document her weft colors. 

The pattern is "Blooming Leaf" on 4 shafts.

The photo above demonstrates how varied the samples can appear depending on the weft yarns. And this doesn't even touch on variations in the patterns themselves, as you change your tieup and treadling.

For the four-color warps, which create what Stubentisky calls "iridescence" in her book, Echo and Iris, students chose a wide array of hues and values. Here are some examples.

10/2 cotton warp in gray, black, sky blue, and yellow

10/2 cotton warp in burgundy, turquoise, yellow and sage

10/2 cotton warp 

in bright green, red, yellow, and orange

In preparing for the workshop, I spent a lot of time weaving up samples and coming up with rules for choosing 4 colors for your warp. Turns out, the above examples did NOT follow any of my rules and they worked out beautifully!

Anyhow, for what it's worth, here's the gist of what I came up with.

See the dark-gray square labeled "Tetrad" on the color wheel? My theory is that 4-color warps work best when you choose colors from each point on this square: in this case, starting from the top-left corner of the tetrad, olive green, then (covered up by the lettering on my color wheel) dark teal, then purple, then rust red/brown. Or you can change the value, moving up to the next level of colors on the wheel and, beginning again at the top-left corner of the tetrad: pale olive, light turquoise, lavender, and salmon/tan.

And then there are the color choices for your wefts, which are often counterintuitive. Khaki works well with all kinds of warp colors, as do olive green, navy, dark purple, and even black. One of the key takeaways from this workshop is that you have to move outside your comfort zone in choosing colors, because the end results are seldom predictable.

I started joking that I was going to rename the workshop, "You Can't Judge a Warp by Its Color." And it's true! Some color choices are unusual and wonderful: for instance, my host, Molly McLaughlin, hand-painted two warps in Kelly green, bronze, and black and beamed them together for her samples. After experimenting with a number of weft colors, she chose a dark purple, with stunning results.

Molly McLaughlin wove a 4-shaft pattern called "Op Art" 

using two hand-painted warps for her two warp colors.

Molly is a master weaver and dyer whose work -- creating weave-scapes using a Theo Moorman technique on hand-painted 240/2 silk warps -- has won many awards, including "Best of Show" for the 2019 Complex Weavers exhibit in Reno, NV. I had the good fortune of dyeing a silk noil warp under her guidance, and here's how it looked while still wet:

Looks like a watercolor painting of a lake shore in autumn...

Molly was concerned that my colors looked muddy -- and I responded that I like them muddy! I am very happy with the results and I learned a lot from her. 

Our friend Deb Kaplan -- another wonderful weaver who belongs to the Complex Weavers study group in fine threads -- joined us for our dyeing session. And in between, we managed a walk along the seashore near Molly's home in New Hampshire.

Now I know where Molly gets her inspiration!

Color and pattern are everywhere we look. And we respond powerfully to touch, to the textures in our weavings. What happened in New Hampshire is what happens when weavers get together and do what they love to do.

Thanks for reading!