Making Plans...

The image above is part of a drawdown of a design I call "Azteca," which refers to the indigenous people who founded the Aztec empire as well as to their culture. They flourished in central Mexico from 1300 to 1521 C.E., founding their capitol, Tenochtitlan, on the site that is now Mexico City. To me, the warm, vivid colors and the geometric motifs have the feeling of Aztec art. 

Architectural model, Mezcala, 1st-8th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art

(Public domain)

Coronation stone of Moctezuma, Xocoyotzin, 1503, Art Institute of Chicago

I'm thinking of weaving this pattern to create a tunic that derives from the art of the traditional Azteca women's tunic known as a huipil (pronounced wee-PEEL), worn by indigenous women from central Mexico to Central America. The garment's history predates Spanish colonization, with designs and weaving traditions pass down through the centuries. These designs represent a complex tradition of communication, with weaving and embroidery symbolizing the wearer's ethnic community and identity. Traditionally, huipils were woven in cotton on backstrap looms, such as the one seen below.

As for my plans for this modern-day huipil: I aim to weave it in 16/2 cotton and rayon/bamboo on my 32-shaft Louet Megado, with a width in the reed of 24.75 inches. I figure this gives me plenty of width to weave a rectangular shape that can be folded in half to fit an average-sized woman. Further, I want to decorate it with an inkle-woven band or two, maybe adding beads, giving it a look similar to the images below -- which are, by the way, from the wardrobe of Frida Kahlo.

In fact, I found a "Frida Huipil" sewing pattern on the website of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Here's the link: Frida Huipil V&A.

The design is a 4-color parallel threading, based on a design line that is basically Ms and Ws.

The tieup makes it a Jin pattern, and the treadling is an advancing point twill (with tabby shots in between the pattern shots, in keeping with Jin).

I would like to make this more of a garment for show rather than an everyday piece, so I may embellish it with beads and -- get this, real gold thread! (It's actually gold-plated, I guess you'd say, not solid gold, because that would be unaffordable.)

There is so much that weaving has to say, non-verbally but beautifully, to celebrate other cultures, traditions, and beliefs. Textiles awaken us to our connections and our individuality as well.

Now, off to the warping reel!

Thanks for reading.

The Huipil de la Malinche, one of the oldest huipils 

ever found, carbon-dated to the 1700s.

Echo... Echo... Echo on 8 Shafts

It all started with Handweaving.net, as I'm guessing it does for many of us. 

One of the easiest ways to create an Echo design is to look on Handweaving.net for patterns with advancing-point-twill threadings, such as Ms and Ws, Gebrochene, or Crackle. These threadings can easily be made into Echo designs, simply by clicking "Parallel Repeat" on the "Warp" drop-down menu in Fiberworks Silver and then interleaving a threading line that's parallel to the original threading, separated by an interval of half the shafts you're using.

A bit of weaving terminology here -- because I remember wondering what in the world "interleave" meant as I was learning to work with parallel threadings. I always thought it meant inserting a page into a book. Actually, in weaving, it's sort of like that: You insert a second threading line above the original threading line -- so that each parallel thread is "interleaved" between two threads in the base threading -- A/B/A/B and so on. 

In other words, if you take a simple 8-shaft point draw like this...

You can interleave it with a parallel threading that is 4 shafts above it....

This represents an interleaved threading that is parallel to the original threading (there are lots of variations on this, which I won't go into in this post). Typically in an Echo threading, the parallel threading line is half the number of shafts above the original design, as it is in the diagram above: Threads 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 have a parallel threading line that is 4 shafts above them on an 8-shaft loom. The overall Echo threading -- a.k.a. parallel threading -- is now 1, 5, 2, 6, 3, 7, and 4, 8. Then, when you reach the base-line thread on shaft 5, the parallel thread "above" it is on shaft 1. The reason: Remember that Echo is a technique based on twill, so, just as with a straight twill -- 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 -- the next thread for a straight draw is 1. (Because we don't have 9 shafts on our loom, you have to corkscrew around to shaft 1 in your threading in order to weave a continuous twill line.) 

Echo calls for two colors in the warp, one for each threading line. (You can also design Echo using 3 or 4 parallel lines, each with a different warp color, but again, we won't get into that.) Another key to this technique: Echo uses a twill tieup and, typically, a sett that is somewhere between that recommended for twill and that recommended for double weave. Also, Echo usually requires a weft that is about half the grist of the warp threads. These are not rules, just recommendations, helping to show off the warp pattern. (Echo designs are warp-emphasis designs.)

So here's where I began, with this lovely 8-shaft advancing-and-descending-point-twill design on Handweaving.net:

I really like the luminous quality of the chartreuse weft, defined by the grass-green color of the warp.

And simply by clicking "Parallel Repeat" on the Warp drop-down menu in Fiberworks (a feature, like networking, that is only available on Fiberworks Silver), I got this variation:

I confess that I tried hard to find the draft on Handweaving.net so that I could give you the number to look it up -- searching under "Twill," "Ms and Ws," "Point Twill," and even "green," but I couldn't find it! The site is so full of treasures, you could spend an entire day looking at drafts and saving the ones you like....

Anyhow, I decided that the above design was too stretched out width-wise, so I created a version in Jin (which is basically Echo with a tabby tiedown in the treadling) in order to balance the motifs.

I like the simple variation of colors in the warp: bright green and turquoise, with a weft of slightly lighter green. And then, while I was shopping at Convergence in July, I came upon a 4 oz. skein of chartreuse Tencel and a 4 oz. skein of hand-painted Tencel in a variety of blues (at the Eugene Textile Center booth, which was full of temptations). Both skeins were 10/2 -- perfect! And here's the result (another version of the photo you saw at the beginning of this blog):

Along with being one of the most environmentally friendly of all the weaving fibers, Tencel also has a great sheen to it, giving the fabric a gloss similar to silk. Plus it has considerable tensile strength (hence the name Tencel, I'm guessing).

Because I didn't feel like plying lots and lots of fringe -- which is a graceful accent to a scarf but takes a lot of work -- I wove a double-weave tube at both ends of the scarf. All you have to do is fold it inwards, iron it flat, and blind-hem-stitch the sides of the tube together. 

Here's the drawdown for weaving a plain-weave tube on an Echo threading:

I'm considering -- that's the operative word, "considering" -- writing a second book, this one about Echo, offering designs for 8 shafts only, as that's the easiest way to learn this technique and 8 shafts seems to be the number of choice for the majority of weavers. This pattern would be one of them and, of course, I will have to weave up another 11 projects before I even start writing the book. So, if this book gets written, it will be a while....

Thanks for reading!

What's on the Loom?

More accurately, what's going on the loom? At this writing, I'm in the process of winding on a painted warp for a Jin design on 28 shafts (one of the versions of the pattern is shown above). Here's where I am at the moment, looking at the back of the loom.

It's kind of an unusual warp: Has anybody heard of 24/3 unmercerized cotton -- with about 1% of black rayon thrown in? Who knew? It was a big cone in natural that I picked up at a guild sale. Figuring that the grist of 24/3 cotton was equivalent or close to that of 16/2 cotton, I wound a warp two ends at a time, alternating between the 24/3 unmercerized cotton in natural and a 16/2 unmercerized cotton in black. 

When I went to paint the warp, I painted the entire warp at once, natural and black together. The dye colors don't affect the black at all, so you get a two-color painted warp, effectively, that you can thread for Echo. I appreciate efficiencies like that.

Back to the design. I love broken twills (most of us do, right?), a category that includes the old German designs known as Gebrochene. I've posted on this subject before, looking at a 16th-century pattern affectionately named "The Earl." Margie Thompson, an expert on historic textiles, shared it with our guild in a talk some time ago, and she was kind enough to send me the original draft, which is for 14 shafts. (For more on "The Earl" and Gebrochene twills, see my blog post of November 17, 2020.)

How did I get from the elegant, almost filigreed 14-shaft design above to the more primitive, tribal-looking 28-shaft design at the beginning of this post? It's a technique that I teach in my parallel-threading classes, using an Ms and Ws twill as a design line for Echo. I start designing by uploading the original Earl drawdown for 14 shafts in Fiberworks. (You need Fiberworks Silver for these functions.) Then, you click on the "Warp" dropdown menu and next you click on "Parallel Repeat" to Echo the original design line with a second threading 14 shafts above it.

Step 2: You see that the original Earl treadling is tromp as writ, for 14 treadles. This would work for a 28-shaft design, but it would give you squashed motifs, not very appealing. All I did (again, to achieve the design at the beginning of this post) was double the number of treadles for the entire treadling (so that treadle one becomes one and two, treadle two becomes three and four, treadle three becomes five and six, and so on). In other words, if the original treadling went from treadle 1 to 14 and down again in a point-twill pattern, I doubled the length of the pattern, so the treadles go from 1 to 28 and down again. 

Step 3: Here's where it gets a bit more complicated. I started by designing Echo using a twill tieup for 28 shafts. This is what I got. Just a detail shot. I really don't like it at all.

What to do? As I like to say, "Keep Calm and Add Tabby."

Of course, Echo has its charms -- but Jin also has a lot going for it: nice drape, one-shuttle weave, floats never longer than 3 in warp or weft, clear pattern definition, the ability to stretch out "squashed" designs, and the potential to play with the tieup to add a bit more color and interest, without risking long floats. That's what you see in the drawdown at the top of this post -- and also in the design below which uses another treadling but a similar tieup. 

I like both designs, the one above and the one at the beginning of this post. What they share are tieups for what Bonnie Inouye calls "Decorated Jin." Below is what a classic Jin tieup looks like, with half the shafts raised and half down in an ascending-twill pattern, with tabby tiedowns in between:

You'll see that the motifs above are simple and distinct, basically two colors, light and dark. This drawdown shows only a detail so that you can see the tieup more easily. Now let's look at a tieup for Decorated Jin.

Here, there are different colors and the motifs have more interest. The difference is that I've broken up the 14 up/14 down ascending-twill tieup, adding a bit of plain weave. Now, I see four different shades: pale blue, medium blue, dark rust/blue, and royal blue. It's all in the details! 

I'm going to sample at least two Decorated Jin designs and, fingers crossed, find at least one I really like. But first, of course, I have to finish dressing my loom....

Thanks for reading!