Moving Along

    My upholstery warp is finished. I've never done Echo weave before and now I like it! Echo is a network weave and the technicalities of how it works can be found in the Echo and Iris book published by Marian Stubenitsky. I borrowed it from my weaving guild library. It is an amazing book and after rereading some of the chapters I understand the weave structure. I used a draft that I bought from WEBS for a baby blanket and converted it to a dobby file. While I was weaving the upholstery I went back to the weaving program I have on my iPad to play with the design and I came up with some interesting patterns using the same threading. I also found a few errors and corrected those and then used the corrected lift plan on my big loom. The finished upholstery is very stretchy. It has four end floats and given the intended use, new fabric for my dining chairs, I decided not to use what I wove. It needs to be redone at a higher sett but I also want to talk to my upholstery friend and see what she thinks. So here are some photos of screenshots of the original drawdown, a variation by changing the liftplan, the cloth with an orange weft, and a green weft.

New Projects

New projects are underway. I put a new warp on each loom. Inspired by my nephew who has artistic genes and a great color sense I designed a warp for more chenille shawls on my 40" loom. I am intrigued with Japanese "Boro" cloth which was made of recycled Japanese indigo-dyed field clothing. It is basically patchwork and often had Sashiko embroidery accents. The colors of the Boro cloth are the various shades of blues produced by the indigo dye process, tans, and my fantasy of some gold threads. Using this palette I warped with black, various blues, some purple, tan and gold 10/2s cotton. It is a gorgeous warp. I now have enough of a supply of chenilles in darker colors and I also managed to snag some varigated chenilles off of Ebay. My yarn supplier no longer carries the varigated chenilles. The colors change along the length of the yarn and eventually repeat. Depending on the width of the warp you can get some very handsome and interesting patterns. I finished threading the loom yesterday so what remains is to tie on the warp, prepare shuttles, and weave.

On the 60" loom with the computer control I had a bit more work to do to put on a warp. I decided to try an "Echo" pattern which is better explained by how it looks rather than how the loom is set up to weave it. The idea was to try and weave some upholstery for my Danish Modern dining chairs. If I am sucessful than I can consider weaving the upholstery or my DM couch. I downloaded a baby blanket Echo pattern from WEBS and since I already have lots of cones of the requested yarn 8/2s cotton I could use that. The baby blanket pattern is a recipe so the details of the sett have been worked out. It may not be firm enough for upholstery but we shall find out. I put on six yards. All was going well despite the challenging threading sequence when I realized I needed to use an apron. The apron that came with the loom was rotten and already recycled. So ... I orderd 3 yards of 60" canvas and cotton webbing for the apron tabs and sewed up a new apron. In the meantime I bought a new cheapo laptop to run the weaving software and run the Compudobby, the computer loom interface. After my brother fooled around with that, got the CD responding, etc. new apron on, all lashed up , uhh.. then the tension system wasn't working ! Longer story made shorter I had forgotten how to set it up. This time I took a picture. So now to wind pirns and see how it goes.