Doubleweave Workshop

I spent Saturday & Sunday at a workshop the Southern Tier Fiberarts Guild sponsored. It was all about doubleweave. We had a small group – only 6 of us, so we were each able to get all sorts of guidance from Pat Edwards, our teacher.

Three of us were working on floor looms, three on table looms.
Here Joan’s warping up her little Mountain loom. The swinging beater was fascinating to me. Hinged at the top and moving free at the bottom, her hand applied all the pressure, not the beater itself. Interesting.

I rarely work on a table loom myself, but didn’t have a reasonable way to get my beloved floor loom to the workshop site. It’s sweet, small, and light, but doesn’t fold at all, so it’s pretty bulky. Carol was very gracious to loan me her table loom, but there’s nothing like working on a loom you’re familiar with. And there’s really little comparison in shed size between most table looms and most floor looms – floor looms have it beat hands down. Weaving puns intended.

Regardless of the loom used, each of us were working with 4 colors, warped in a straight draw. One side of warp was 2 colors, alternately warped ABAB. The other side was all 4 colors, alternately warped ABCD, ABCD. I wanted high contrast in my warp s I could see the impact of what I was doing, not colors that I necessarily liked or would use in other circumstances. My 2 main colors were a bright orangey-red and a basic blue. The other two were pink and dark purple.

With 4 harnesses, there are six color combinations for top & bottom warp colors. We used each of these combinations, using on of our two main colors for weft.

Carlyn chose colors that all look lovely together, not like my gaudiness.

In addition to the six color combination blocks, Pat taught us how to use doubleweave to weave hinges, tubes, and envelopes.

Doubleweave hinges allow you to make a piece that’s twice as wide as your loom. I’ve used this technique before to make some of my handwoven baby blankets.

Woven tubes come in handy. You can easily make bags & pillows, but if you’re clever and creative, you can do lots more. I’m going to think about a new cowl-hood design that’s tube woven.

I’m less clear on how useful a woven envelope is. Or maybe just less creative in my thinking. Regardless, it is an interesting technique.

After learning how to do those three structures, Pat taught us how to do doubleweave pickup. We each created a little design, called a cartoon, that we’d weave into the cloth. It’s very cool, in that what’s light on the front is dark on the back. Pat encourage us to keep it simple, to start with angles, not curves.

Here’s my second attempt at color blocks.

I kept messing up on the first, so just considered it all a learning experience, but DON’T need to take pictures of it. You’ll see at glance that my selvedges are a mess and my beat is uneven. You can pay attention to just so much at one time, and the purpos of this part of the workshop was to learn the doubleweave pickup technique, not to produce a finished product.

I did want to see if I could do curves. Tried my hand at the yin-yang symbol.

Again, not work of quality, but that wasn’t the point; learning was the point.
Val was quite brave, making a little running rabbit for her first attempt at pickup.

While we were all busy learning doubleweave in her cozy studio, Carol decided to weave some yardage using a combination of wool, silk, linen, and (I think) cotton. She plans to dye it in her beautiful natural dyes, then make it into a garment. She knows each of the fibers will take the dye differently, making for some interesting variegation. Whew! I don’t think I’d have the oomph to dye it – the undulating twill with those natural colors is too beautiful for me.

Once I get the handwoven hearts baby blankets off the loom, I plan to do some doubleweave double-width baby blankets in a sweet variegated cotton flannel I have. They’re always popular when I have them in stock.

Gotta go back & hit the couch – I’ve been battling the flu for a week, and it struck back today.

April 20th, 2011 

RIver Birch

This tree isn't sick. In fact it's quite healthy. My Heritage River Birch has exfoliating bark - it peels in layers. This spring it's showing an exceptional number of layers. Perhaps it's due to the long, cold winter we had??

This photo is part of my entry in to the V7N photographic blog challenge. Go to my new blogsite to see my other entries.

It's Still Snowing

This March is not meeting the old saying -- it came in like a lion and is leaving like a lion.

Still, it's really quite beautiful.

Want to know what I see as the upsides? Visit my new blogsite.

Weaving Napkins

 After finally figuring out how to draft a design in block theory, I spent a long time designing my actual napkins for the International Napkin Exchange. I wanted to do something with a sort of architectural feel to it, something that reminded me of Frank Lloyd Wright’s sensibilities. This sounded relatively straightforward to me. HAH!

I should know by now that it takes more skill to make a clean, attractive, simple design than one that’s crowded with activity. Frank certainly was a master of his craft, and I would certainly not call myself a master weaver!

So I spent hours drawing. First on graph paper, then on my weaving software. Then I realized that I didn’t have the graph paper design right, and I didn’t have enough graph paper to do what I wanted, so I went to Excel and created a grid that resembled the squares of graph paper. I spent hours getting the design that I thought I wanted, then went back to the weaving software.

Hmmm....still not right. The basis of a summer & winter pattern, which is what I wanted, is that what’s light on one side is dark o the other. To keep me happy, I had to like both sides of this piece. So back to the drawing board.

To add to the challenge, the napkins had to be a certain size, 18′′ to 22′′ square. So I had to have the right number of threads across both the width and length of the piece. Again, my obsessive-compulsive nature slowed my design time — I really wanted a pattern that was completely symmetrical, both left to right and top to bottom. And one that had a reasonable balance of light and dark on both the top and the bottom.

FINALLY I got a design that I liked, got the warp prepared and on the loom, and started weaving.

The above picture shows you both the top side and underside of the weaving, so you can see how the colors reverse themselves. It still amazes me that I can do this bit of weaving magic, particularly on my little 4 harness counterbalance loom. This type of weaving is possible by using two shuttles, one with your background color (white) and one with the alternate color (purple for the napkin below).

To make things look the way I wanted them to, I had to use two of my colored threads and one thinner white thread. If I were a spinner, I’d have spun those two or maybe even three purple threads together to make one fatter thread, but alas, I don’t spin. S I had to be satisfied with two threads and use my double shuttle for the purple, sending both through simultaneously.

I’m pleased with the way they’re weaving up. The warp is presenting some problems, however. The right side is substantially looser than the left. I’ve hung weights on it to even out the tension, but I doubt that this will be enough for the entire length of the warp. Time will tell.

March 16th, 2011

Second Wind Survey

I like taking surveys. Online surveys and telephone surveys. Political surveys and consumer surveys. I have an opinion about lots of things, and am happy to give them to people.

I hope you feel the same way. And that you love a bargain.

I’ve created a really short survey to get to know my readers and customers a bit better. And I mean short - there are only 5 questions, and 1 of them is optional. It shouldn’t take more than 2-3 minutes to complete it. Created with SurveyMonkey, your response is completely anonymous and confidential.

To sweeten the deal, I’ve built in an incentive. Take the survey and get a coupon code for 10% off any in-stock merchandise you order from my website! When you finish the survey, you’ll get the code, and you can use it anytime till the end of August.

What are you waiting for? Go take the survey!

Fishy Scarf

In my last post I showed a scarf that was a heart. This time it's a scarf that's a fish.

"Huh," you say? "Doesn't look like a fish to me," you say?

Go to my new blogsite to see why I think it's a fishy scarf.

When the student is ready...

...the teacher will appear.”

It’s a pretty famous Buddhist saying. And it just became real for me.

When I posted my 2010 wannas, one of the things I mentioned was that I wanted to learn new weaving techniques. And that I’d joined a Su Butler’s napkin exchange as one concrete strategy to help me do so. I’d already told Su that block weaves was one of the options for things that I’d like to try.

I hadn’t done any block weaving before. The last few times I’d looked at that chapter in Deborah Chandler’s Learning To Weave book, she may as well have been speaking Zubulian — I didn’t understand anything she was trying to tell me.

At the February Southern Tier Fiber Arts Guild meeting, I asked a woman if she had a good handle on block theory, figuring I could get the concept if someone was telling me vs. reading a book. Unfortunately, she didn’t.

A few days later I got the new issue of Handwoven, and there were designs in there that were similar to what I had in mind for the napkins. So I got out my graph paper and started drawing, thinking that was the place to start.

Hah! I couldn’t even replicate the design in the magazine, much less create one of my own! And I sure wasn’t any closer to understanding what the heck I was doing.

So I pulled out Chandler’s book again. I started reading. Still looked like Zubulian to me.

Then all of a sudden something clicked and those foreign characters start to turn into English! I went back to the graph paper again, and could actually draw something that made sense! And I understood that each of those graph paper squares represent 4 threaded heddles and 4 throws of the shuttle, and how to plan all that detail.

Amazingly, within about 24 hours, I got an email hawking a new book – delivered electronically in PDF format – all about weavin block theory.

I haven’t yet figured out how many threads I’ll need in the napkins, so haven’t begun to do the final planning yet, but I KNOW I can design what I want. Even more surprising to me, I know that there’s at least an 85% chance that the design in my head can be woven on my beloved four-harness counterbalance loom.

Sometimes life is sweet. I try to really appreciate it when it is.

February 12th, 2011