Designing Deflected Double Weave on 8 Shafts

Woven by Amy Parker, the sample above is an 8-shaft design I call "Quilt Squares" because the motifs reminded me of traditional quilt designs. Amy wove this sample for a recent workshop I taught at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center -- and I love the colors she chose! She even blended some of her green and pink yarns, using two slightly different hues of 20/2 cotton together. This way, the yarns weave as 10/2 cotton but the colors have greater depth and interest.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. This blog post is about designing with Deflected Double Weave. So I'll walk you through how I went about designing the Quilt Squares pattern on Fiberworks.

First, here's the drawdown.

Looking closer, you see that the threading for the big motifs looks like this. (I'm assigning the letters A, B, C and D to these blocks, which correlate with the diagram below this one.)

THREADING

         A                B          C           D       

Translating the threading above to a block diagram -- better known as a profile draft -- would look like this, using the same letters for the blocks (A, B, C and D). 

PROFILE DRAFT FOR THREADING

      A               B          C          D       

A profile draft is a silhouette or a summary of a threading or treadling, giving you a basic shape that can be translated any number of ways. (As an English Literature major, I can't help but think of synonyms for the words "profile draft" -- such as code, key, shorthand, you get the idea.) Looking at the profile draft above, each square on the grid represents two ends -- one threading unit -- in the threading draft. So starting from the right-hand side of the profile draft, the first square represents shafts 1 and 2, as does the second and the third square. That means the first three squares -- block A -- are threaded 1-2-1-2-1-2, as you see in the threading diagram. The second block in the profile draft, block B, would be threaded on shafts 3 and 4. There are only two squares -- again, two units -- in block B, so the threading there becomes 3-4-3-4.

Deflected Double Weave is a block weave, making it very easy to design based on a profile draft. Once you know what each square in the profile represents, you're good to fill in your threading. 

The next step for me was to assign different colors to the different blocks in the threading, like so:

Blocks A and C are both a melon color, blocks B and D are orange, and then, in the middle of the motif, I added purple in the three blocks of A. 

Next, I went to the "Treadling" drop-down menu in Fiberworks, selected "Weave as Drawn In," made sure that all of the boxes were checked for "Draft," "Colors" and "Thickness," and clicked on "Copy Exactly As Drawn." So now I had my treadling and my weft colors.

Of course, because I had no tieup, the results looked like this, entirely unweavable:

Which brings us to perhaps the hardest part of designing Deflected Double Weave: deciding on the tieup. One way is to use the most minimal tieup there is for Deflected Double Weave, a kind of framework in which every treadle lifts one shaft for every four shafts in the threading. (For 8 shafts, it's a 1-3-1-3 twill tieup.) Here's what that looks like.

And here's what the drawdown becomes using this tieup. It will certainly weave up as Deflected Double Weave, but we still don't have the motifs we want.

I have to confess that at this point I can't quite remember how I decided on the tieup, because sometimes I just play with the blocks one by one to see what works and other times I just plug in a familiar Deflected Double Weave tieup. 

Suffice it to say that there are clear rules for Deflected Double Weave tieups. To begin with, you are always working with just one block in your tieup, which means four squares. (Right? Go back to the threading diagram above and recall that each block weaves plain weave, which is the basis for Deflected Double Weave. And with plain weave, there are four possibilities for the two shafts in each block: shaft 1 up, shaft 1 down, shaft 2 up, shaft 2 down.)

Below, I've outlined one of the tieup sections in blue:

In this case, shafts 7 and 8 will always be down on treadles 1 and 2. That's one option. Another option would be to lift both shafts on both treadles, as you see here outlined in red for shafts 3 and 4.

A third option is to weave plain weave, which looks like this, outlined in orange for shafts 7 and 8.

There are 4 more options, used less often, which look like this:

These are useful when you want warp or weft threads to alternate in floating over or under a block, in that way embracing or containing floats. 

Anyhow, I played with my tieup and came up a very classic Deflected Double Weave plan (the tieup that appears in full above). I'm happy with the results. What's more, I plan on using my "Quilt Squares" draft as one of the options in the next workshop I'm teaching: "Designing with Deflected Double Weave" at the Teleraña Fiber Arts Guild in Phoenix, AZ, February 15-17. I'm looking forward to it! 

Teaching Echo -- and Playing with Echo -- at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center

This is the playing part: for more on this draft, read on.

Let me start by boasting about my home guild, the Weavers' Guild of Rochester. Mind you, Rochester, New York, is not a big city, with maybe one million people in the entire seven-county region. Nevertheless, we have a large and dynamic weaving community. This includes our guild, with nearly 200 members, and our Weaving and Fiber Arts Center, featuring dozens of classes each year in weaving, knitting, felting, dyeing, lace-making, kumihimo, shibori, and lots of other fiber-art techniques.

The Center, as it's known, began in a small one-room studio in January 2002 and now includes two spacious rooms, one for dozens of looms and one for off-loom classes and meetings. Here are a couple of photos, to give you an idea.

More important are the scores of talented fiber artists who come to learn, create, and share. Give them some tools and some yarn and these folks are good to go!

Case in point: Just this past weekend, I taught a workshop there, "One Warp, Many Structures: An Exploration of Extended Parallel Threading." And sure enough, everybody produced skillful, beautiful samples. Here are some photos.

This above is a 12-shaft Echo design woven by Mary Ann Proia on 10/2 cotton with two colors in the warp, terra cotta and sage green, and three different weft colors. My favorite is the blue on the bottom. This photo shows the sample after it had been washed, which added texture to the pattern.

This is an 8-shaft Echo design woven by Marianne Antczak on a warp of gold and beige. The weft colors changed the appearance of the fabric dramatically: a green weft appears on the top and a soft purple weft is on the bottom.

Above is the same 8-shaft design in Echo (top of the photo) and in Double Weave (bottom) woven by Lee Donely. Her warp yarns were also in brown and tan 10/2 cotton.

Judy Fox wove a 4-shaft Echo design using fuchsia and black 10/2 Tencel as warp yarns. The bottom section uses a turquoise weft and the middle a yellow weft. The top portion, seen only slightly, features a Turned Taquete version of the same threading, woven with a green weft.

The workshop is designed so that you can weave five structures on the same threading: Echo, Turned Taquete, Shadow Weave, Rep Weave, and Double Weave. In the photo above, Nancy Kanniainen has woven Rep Weave on a warp of 10/2 cotton. The center section has warps of olive and teal and the outer borders have warps of teal and sage green.

Above, Amy Parker chose three different color sets for her 8-shaft warp: from left to right, green and navy, beige and purple, and salmon and cranberry. The bottom part of the sample is Rep and the top section is Double Weave.

And then we got to playing, looking at Marian Stubenitsky's book, Weaving with Echo and Iris. Specifically, we wanted to design a pattern of circles, as she shows on page 96, that called for no more than 10 treadles (the design in the book requires 32 treadles because it's Double Weave).

So, this is what we came up with, working together (this is the draft that appears at the beginning of this post, but I've enlarged it). It's not Double Weave, so you need just 8 treadles. (I call this draft "Circles Designed by Amy," because Amy Parker was so good at pointing out just what we needed to do, step by step, as we designed this as a group.)

We started with a profile draft.

Then, using FiberWorks PC, we created an "Advancing Repeat" that repeated 5 times, advancing one shaft up each time, in the "Warp" dropdown menu that listed "Repeat in Threading." It looked like this:

Very cool, yes? Next step, we completed the profile design by adding a straight draw for a tieup and "tromp as writ" (weave as drawn in) for the treadling, but inverted. Using FiberWorks, you can simply draw in (using your mouse) the first curve of the treadling profile, making sure it's exactly like the first curve of the threading profile, but inverted. Now you click on "Repeat in Treadling" under the "Treadling" dropdown menu and in that box, click on "Advancing Repeat" and insert the number 5 in the box that asks for the number of repeats. Here's what we got:

You see the different circle motifs? That's because of the advancing repeat, which shifts the threading patterns up.

Then we decided to do a simple block substitution using FiberWorks. Under the "Tools" menu, we clicked on "Block Substitution." We chose "Classic Weaves" and then "Crackle -- Twill Form." And with that one click, this is what we got.

After changing the warp colors to alternating blue and green (threaded ABABAB, etc.) and then changing the weft color to coral, we had with the colorful design shown at the beginning of this post. Most excellent! We were all very happy!

Except for one problem, immediately noted by Debbie Fister: The motifs are HUGE. Each one is about 170 ends wide. Even if you were threading your loom at 40 epi (not unheard of for 10/2 cotton in an Echo threading), that's more than 4" wide per motif. Something to think about. 

I went home and went back to the drawing board (in this case, the weaving software program) and came up with another, similar design with motifs that were just shy of 120 ends each. So that's 3" wide at 40 epi. And I could show you all the steps in how I got there....

But that's another story for another time ;o) Thanks for reading!

Bhutanese Textiles with Wendy Garrity -- at the New Weaving and Fiber Arts Center!

A detail of Bhutanese kushutara weaving

Luckily, for those of us who love textiles, we can travel the world without leaving our homes. Last week at the new Weaving and Fiber Arts Center (more on that later), Australian Wendy Garrity took us to Bhutan. 

Her presentation focused on the gorgeous fabrics known as kushutara, woven on backstrap looms by Bhutanese women in their homes. Pictured above: Garrity at the start of her presentation  -- before we remembered to turn the lights out! Her blog is called "Textile Trails."

Kushutara (supplementary weft brocades, also spelled kushuthara and kishutara) resemble embroidery but are hand woven -- often on looms that are built into the walls of the weaver's home. They have a discontinuous weft, as you see in the details below (front and back of the same fabric, respectively).

And they are gorgeous! Weavers use continuous weft-pattern designs called sapma and discontinuous weft-pattern designs called tingma. Garrity explains tingma this way: "The discontinuous supplementary weft patterning consists of sapma (inlay) and thrima (twining)." These techniques are all woven in brilliantly-colored silk in seemingly random color palettes. The results are what Garrity refers to as "eye candy."

So here, for your viewing pleasure, is some of the eye candy she brought along to show us.

As so often with textiles, photos don't do justice to the real pieces. The work in this last photo, for instance, has an eloquence and complexity that is hard to convey secondhand -- mainly because the full yardage in all its glory has a tremendous variety of colors and patterns. For this reason, Garrity urged us to view all of her fabrics from a distance as well as up close.

And I have yet to mention the new, larger home for the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center. What an expansive, bright, loom-filled site! Here are a few photos, to give you an idea.

The new location, just around the corner from the old one

Looms to the left of you... 

Looms to the right... 

And table looms at just the right height!

This fall, at the new location, I will be teaching beginning weaving and advanced beginning weaving (kind of a contradiction in terms, but you get the idea) as well as a natural-dyeing workshop. For more information, you can check out the courses as soon as the new listings are posted, which should be by mid-August.

Thanks for reading! 

Deflected Double Weave for Collapse Fabrics

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, "It ain't over till it's over." This phrase is true not just for baseball, but also for achieving texture in your fabrics. You plan and warp and weave and cut off -- but the fabric isn't finished until it's finished, because it looks entirely different after washing.

Here's an example. Below, the fabric on the loom.

And after washing -- after "fulling" by agitating and scrubbing by hand with soap in hot water, to be exact.

Now THIS is cloth with character! Lots of wriggling shapes, thanks to "differential shrinkage," in which one fiber (wool) shrinks while the other (cotton) doesn't. And lots of strong color, thanks to deflected double weave.

I wove this on my trusty little 4-shaft Structo loom, pictured here.

I have always wanted one and finally purchased one this year. I took it on a trip to Chicago -- and simply packed it in my suitcase. Portable weaving studio!

For those who are interested, the pattern is an adaptation of one designed by Madelyn Van Der Hoogt, featured in the January/February 2007 issue of Handwoven magazine. I altered the threading slightly and substituted 18/2 Superfine Merino by JaggerSpun for the white sections and 20/2 pearl cotton for the black.

Here's the drawdown:

All of this was in preparation for a workshop I recently taught at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center. The idea was to use an 8-shaft pattern, threaded with 18/2 merino and 20/2 pearl cotton, and create a sampler using lots of different treadlings. The sett is very important for collapse fabrics. For differential shrinkage, you want a loose sett for the yarn that will shrink and a normal (plain weave) sett for the yarn that will not shrink. So I set the merino at 18 epi and the cotton at 36 epi. Same for the picks per inch: I wove the wool at 18 ppi and the cotton at 36 ppi.

This is what the main pattern looked like, before washing.

And here's what it looked like after.

Lots of interest and bold graphic designs. I apologize for the lack of color in these samples -- this blog is named "Random Acts of Color," after all -- but I wanted to create samples that very clearly illustrate what was going on. Deflected double weave is an easy structure to understand, once you get the basics down.

Again,  for those who are interested, here (below) is the draft for the threading and tieup.

The sample above was woven tromp as writ -- but if you're interested in the different treadlings I gave people in the workshop, here they are. (The blue horizontal lines are there simply to visually separate the different treadlings.)

Weave it up, try lots of different treadlings, and remember, it ain't finished until it's finished!

Coming in March: 3-Day Collapse Techniques Workshop at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center

Above: scarf woven in cotton and wool using differential-shrinkage techniques,

deflected double-weave sample after cloque shrinkage,

pleated scarf woven in twill blocks with overtwist weft

There's still time to register for my three-day workshop on collapse weave, March 13-15 at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center in East Rochester. We'll be weaving samples on our own looms, in a round-robin setup, so that everyone will go home with fabric in number of collapse techniques. Topics will include differential shrinkage and cloqué, deflected double weave, weaving with S and Z twist yarns, weaving with crepe and overtwist yarns, weaving with stainless-steel-blend and other specialty yarns, and using weave structures to achieve a collapse fabric.

You can register on the Weaving Center website, available here.