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!

 

Go Big and Bold or Go Home: Some Thoughts on Colors and Yarns for Echo Designs

8 shafts, 4-color Echo pattern

Over the past couple of months, I've been weaving up samples for an April workshop with the New Hampshire Weavers Guild. I've learned some great lessons, mainly in terms of choosing colors and yarns that optimize the look of 4-color Echo.

(Some background: 4-color Echo uses 4 different colors in the warp, each on its own parallel threading. You can read all about it in Marian Stubenitsky's Weaving with Echo and Iris. Here's just a sample of how it may be threaded.)

Anyhow, my takeaway from all this sampling: Go big and bold or go home!

First I'll talk about going big -- that is, yarn grist (a.k.a. weight and thickness). The sample at the top of the page, on 8 shafts with a 4-end parallel threading, is my favorite of everything I've woven so far. The warp is 10/2 pearl cotton and the weft is 20/2 pearl cotton.

For comparison, here's a similar pattern on 16 shafts.

16 shafts, 4-color Echo pattern

This too was woven on a 4-color warp, using different color combinations for each motif. However, the warp yarns are much finer, in 20/2 pearl cotton. (The weft is silk sewing thread.)

To me, the second piece isn't as successful. There are lots of reasons, but the simplest is the difference between the 10/2 and 20/2 cotton warps. The 20/2 cotton is too fine a yarn to display the Echo pattern strong and clear, while the 10/2 cotton provides a much better display. I'm not saying that this is a binary choice, because I do like the 16-shaft version using 20/2 cotton -- but the heavier yarn defines the pattern better. 

(The challenge, for me, is the hand of the fabric: I really prefer the lighter weight of the 20/2 cotton fabric. For garments like long vests and tunics, it's not as heavy as a fabric using a 10/2 cotton warp. But I won't belabor the point! That's just the way it is.) 

And what about going bold -- that is, in terms of color? 

I could write a book on this (so many people have), but the point I want to share is that your warp colors are barely half of the story. Weft and pattern can make huge and surprising differences in the look of your fabric. And the more colors you have in the warp, the more surprises you may have in your results.

So let's look at choosing colors for 4-color Echo. (This is better termed "polychrome Echo," because we're not looking at a straight vertical in the fabric for each warp color, but rather an interplay of warp colors as the pattern shifts. With polychrome weaves, what you see in the warp is not what you get in the weaving.)

Choosing colors for polychrome Echo is counterintuitive: The colors in the warp may not look at all harmonious to you, while the end results can be beautiful. Take a look at the color diagrams below (these thanks to Widewalls, an online art gallery and magazine based in London, which you might want to check out for its excellent article on color theory, "Color Theory Basics You Need to Know"). 

For a four-color Echo warp, your best bet is to choose a square color scheme (the example in the bottom right corner of the diagram), with each of your four colors taken from the corners of a square drawn on the color wheel. The rectangle color scheme (the top right example) would also work.

And here's what I did in my samples. For the design that appears at the top of this post, my warp was 10/2 pearl cotton in yellow, orange, purple and turquoise -- which is a square on the color wheel (start at yellow, move three blocks counterclockwise to orange, continue three blocks over to purple, and then three blocks over to turquoise).

And you can see the colors as they emerge in the pattern (above): first orange, then yellow, then turquoise, then purple. (That was the color order for my threading.) The weft was 20/2 pearl cotton in turquoise.

As for the second sample -- this one, using 20/2 pearl cotton for the warp...

I wanted to try a color sampler, so each motif has a different set of warp colors. The first, on the far left, uses lime green, turquoise, red, and royal blue -- again, not quite a rectangle on the color wheel, more like a trapezoid, but I like the way it works. The second motif uses very subtle colors: teal blue, dark turquoise, olive, and brass, and it doesn't hold a lot of interest for me. The third motif uses pink, fuchsia, purple, and royal blue and, although the pattern is relatively distinct, I find the colors too sweet for my taste. The last motif, on the far right, was really just a shot in the dark: I used beige, gray, black, and tan in the warp just to see what these neutrals would do. And the results are... neutral.

I'm so glad I did this analysis, because in the future I will have some rules to go by in choosing colors for 4-color Echo. Then again, maybe I will have some rules to break.

Thanks for reading. And happy weaving!

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!

Baby Wrap in 16-Shaft Echo and Jin: On My New Computer Loom!

Echo, which is a border at the beginning and the end of the wrap

A detail

Great news! I have a new (to me) computer dobby loom: a 16-shaft Toika Eeva with a 40 cm weaving width. This Scandinavian beauty came to me by way of my friend and fine weaver Hedy Lyles, who enjoyed this loom but was moving up to 24 shafts.

Here's Eeva, getting dressed. 

A view from the back of the loom

I wound a warp of 10/2 Tencel, 1187 ends, 8 yards long, so that -- at 40 epi -- I would have a weaving width just shy of 30" and plenty of length for sampling before I weave up a 5-yard-long wrap. 

Because I've been teaching a lot of workshops on 4-shaft, 8-shaft, and 12-shaft Echo (and other structures you can weave on the same threading, using different tieups and treadlings), I decided to expand my repertoire to 16 shafts. Here's just a section of the Echo design, based on an advancing point twill in both threading and treadling.

I can't really show you the entire drawdown because it's too large to reproduce on this page. Anyhow, it gives you the idea: I broke up the pattern line in several spots because I like the abrupt shift, almost giving the impression of stripes.

The wrap will be Echo for just 24" on each end, with Jin filling up the center. I did this for two reasons: 1) I love the variations between the two structures and 2) the Echo pattern has warp floats of as many as 5 picks while the Jin design, by definition, never has a float of more than 3 picks. So I figured that the fabric woven in Jin would be just that much stronger and more durable when it comes to supporting an infant.

Here's what the Jin design looks like (again, only a portion of it, as the entire design wouldn't show up well at all in this narrow space). Because I'm showing you just a portion, the design looks asymmetrical -- but the pattern is symmetrical.

And here's what the Jin design looks like on the loom:

The other side of the fabric (maybe a bit harder to see)

I find that there is a bit of a learning curve with a computer loom. For instance, if I have a misstep on the pedal that controls the treadling, it's hard to instruct the weaving program to go back. At least for me it is: sometimes the computer wants to loop around and I find myself right back where I started, having to unweave. And then you have to tell the computer to unweave. It's a tricky conversation, at least until I get the hang of it.

The upside is that the weaving goes much faster and is less physically taxing. This is especially helpful with a 20/2 cotton weft, which I'm weaving at about 30 picks per inch.

And another advantage: those 16 shafts! There is a lot to learn and a lot of designing to do and I'm looking forward to it.

Back to the wrap itself: One of the things I love about Echo and Jin is the color dynamics. I deliberately chose an unlikely combination of warp colors -- burgundy and turquoise -- because I knew from experience that the weft alters the overall color of the fabric in surprising ways, often producing the iridescence that Marian Stubenitsky covers so well in her book, Weaving with Echo and Iris. For the weft I chose an orange/coral color, sort of a cantaloupe, because it warms up the warp, so to speak. Below is a photo of samples of different-colored wefts, with the cantaloupe-colored weft at the very bottom of the photo. 

This is a very special project for a very special new person in our lives: Our first grandchild, Owen, who is now almost 3 months old. I think it will look good on him, don't you?

How to Design 8-Shaft Echo Using Fiberworks

Just finished: this sample above on 8 shafts, in preparation for my workshop at Convergence this July. (For details, click here and scroll down to the eleventh listing.) I'm using 10/2 pearl cotton in the warp, sett at 36 epi, with a 20/2 pearl cotton weft (in black). I like to call it "Many Rivers" because of the vertically flowing design.

In this blog post, I'll try to outline the steps it took to design this in Fiberworks. No easy task, learning how to do this! But it's so worth it: While weaving most any pattern can be a delightful journey, it's a great pleasure to create your own designs and then weave them up to see exactly what happens. I encourage you to try.

So here goes! (Note: I have a Mac, so keep in mind that the commands in Fiberworks may differ slightly for PCs.)

STEP 1: Create a design line

Using the "Draw Freehand" button, I designed curves that change in shape and size. Try it! Any rounded forms will do for starters.

STEP 2: Create a networked threading based on the design line

Click on the drop-down menu under "Warp" and then click "Redraw on network." A box will appear and you want it to have these settings: "No reduction," "Straight Twill" (under "Style of Initial"),  "4" (under "Height of the Initial").  (You do not need to enter anything under "Set Result to X Shafts.") Then click "Apply" and "Accept." Voila! You've created a networked threading.

Notice how the curves in the threading, based on a twill structure, follow the curves of the design line. If you want to learn more about network drafting, the definitive book is written by Alice Schlein.

STEP 3: Create an extended parallel threading

Again in the drop-down menu under "Warp," this time click on "Parallel Repeat," then "Extended Parallel," "Shafts Shift by 4," and then "Apply."

This threading may look at little strange if you're not familiar with extended parallel threadings. (For more on this, read the first four paragraphs of my blog post here.) But look carefully at the threading and compare it with the threading in the previous image: The first and second warp threads in the earlier image are on 1 and 2. In the second image, the extended parallel threading shown above, the first warp end is on 1, followed by its "echo" four shafts higher on 5. The second warp end is on 2, followed by its "echo" four shafts higher on 6. Echo threadings are in two parallel lines. Corkscrew twills are based on this concept as well. The threading goes round and round.

STEP 4: Assign colors to your extended parallel threading

In the "Warp" drop-down, click on "Fill Warp Colors." In the next box, set the colors for "AB," then drag the colors you want from the color panel into boxes A and B. Then click "Replace."

Why use two different colors? As each thread in the original networked draft is followed by its echo or parallel, so you have to distinguish these parallel patterns by using different colors. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the echo! So the colors are always A-B-A-B, etc. (In Marian Stubenitsky's book, Weaving with Echo and Iris, she often designs with as many as four different colors on four parallel threadings, for the beautiful effect that she terms "iridescence.")

STEP 4: Create a twill tieup

That's a simple twill repeat, rising, with 4 shafts up and 4 shafts down. This means that, for any warp thread and its parallel (for any pair of purple and black threads), one is up and one is down at any given time. This is the 4-shaft interval for the parallel threading, allowing the patterns to play one against the other.

STEP 5: Decide on a treadling pattern, based on a twill

For the treadling, I usually "draw" it in by hand, using the "Draw Freehand" button at the top left. There are lots of other ways to do this, but it's my preferred method.

I chose an advancing point twill, with a pattern of 1-2-3-4-5-4-3, 2-3-4-5-6-5-4, etc. I love the way the "points" in the treadling seem to sparkle in the drawdown! But there's a problem: there are long floats in the warp. If you can't tell just by looking at the drawdown, it's a good idea to check: You do this by clicking on the "Tools" menu, and then clicking on "Float Search." You can search for floats of any number in both warp and weft -- but Bonnie Inouye suggests that, with Echo, you don't want floats of more than 5 ends or 5 picks. That's a lot, particularly if you're using threads that are as thick as 10/2 cotton or thicker.

STEP 6: Change the tieup, if needed, to reduce the number of floats

This means that you will have to add more variety in the tieup, so there are more tie-down threads in the warp. You may have to play with the tieup a bit to see how it works and what you like.

So that's the how-to. Hope it's clear enough to get you started. And then, if you're really ambitious, you can begin designing other patterns using different tieups and treadlings. For instance...

STEP 7: Bonus! Add tabby for Turned Jin.

This is a structure that automatically eliminates floats of longer than 3: Jin! Just by adding tabby to a 4/4 tieup for an extended parallel threading, you can create a Jin design. (It's not TRULY tabby, but rather a half-basket weave, but that's another discussion for another time.)

In any event, here's how to do this: Under the "Treadling" drop-down menu, scroll to the end and click on "Insert Tabby." What you'll get is a form of tabby -- but you'll have to adjust it so that treadle 1 lifts shafts 1, 3, 5 and 7 and treadle 2 lifts shafts 2, 4, 6 and 8. It's always a reward to see the design nice and clear and neat -- which is why I love Jin.

Here, in conclusion, is a detail of the back side of my Echo sample, which is quite different from the front, pictured at the beginning of this post. Thanks for reading!