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.

More Chenille Shawls

   I haven't posted to my blog in a long time but now it is time. I've moved. Before I moved I put a 26 yard cotton warp on my smaller loom. I wove off one chenille shawl and then, wasn't expecting it, I moved. I only partially disassembled my smaller loom and took my 60" loom down to the boards. I took tabby on my existing warp and marked it with a lease cord and carefully rolled it back on the beam. That beam was packed into a box and both looms disappeared into the moving van. A few months later my smaller loom was back in action and the warp survived and I was weaving shawls again. In total I have now eight shawls including the first one I wove, now gifted, and an interesting 40" piece that is sort of a cowel. I have four more to go with the fringe twisting that I do. I am very pleased with the result.

Bumberet

  I have some handtowels that I wove 30 years ago. They are finally disintegrating. They have been washed dozens and dozens of times. I chose a color pattern that came from a Handwoven magazine dedicated to using music to make designs. The pattern in the warp followed "the ringing of the changes" or how church bells are rung. Each warp color was assigned a "bell" and 1" stripes  followed a bell ringing sequence. The towels were then woven with 1" stripes following the same pattern. Even though these towels were not a regular plaid pattern per se they had a curious continuity. The pattern just looks right.
  Now my towels were shot and I had to weave new ones.  I decided to try a weave structure unfamiliar to me, Bumberet. It is very simple structure that can be done on four shafts and consists of units of 3 in the warp. The curious name of the weave is like so many handweave structure names that have long disappeared, like dimnity, serge, goose eye, ottoman and so on. The draft I followed was from a 17th century weaver's notebook. Since I have 16 shafts I spread the draft on twelve shafts and used the last four to run a thin basketweave selvedge. These were done in 8/2s unmercerized cotton with a warp color sequence generated by moi même, totally random.

Kundalini Turban Cloth

    I have a good friend who is a Kundalini yoga teacher. Part of doing Kundalini yoga is the belief that wearing a turban or some kind of head covering, preferably white, can improve one's practice. At the Kundalini workshops I've attended both men and women dress in white and most wear a head covering. There are various ways to wrap a turban and some of the more elaborate women's turban styles are many layered beehive-shaped affairs. Some are complimented with a center jewel and a vail.  For my friend I measured her smaller turban to get a general idea of the width and length. I then set up my loom to weave a gauzy doubleweave with a tabby border of various fine cottons (warp) and wove it out with a spun silk weft. The first attempt was "shortened" due to technical problems with the loom. The first length was barely 2 yards long, an insufficient length for a turban. It makes a wonderful warm scarf. The 2nd attempt is now weaving very well on the loom. If I have enough silk for weft I may get 5 yards or more.

The Seersucker is Weaving!

  I got my warp going, all threaded and sleyed. I was a bit concerned that the finer warp on the 2nd beam would not be tensioned properly. I had not used this beam on this loom. The difference in the amount of warp on the beam and the difference in how fine the cotton is makes is so as to not require additional tensioning. I am using 1/3 lb machine knitters cast on weights, two on the top beam, one on the bottom. The standard AVL counterweight disks one normally uses would be too much. I have made numerous math errors in calculating the sett and how each inch of the warp should be sleyed. I have some "left over" on the 2nd beam which is weighted off the raddle in the back to get it out of the way. These are the kind of problems that just happen. So I make notes about my projects and hopefully won't repeat my mistakes. I decided to use a wonderful cone of silk for weft and it look very handsome. As soon as I get another meter woven then I can transfer the woven cloth to the cloth roller on the back of my loom and I think it'll weave even better. I am also looking forward to changing the design with the Compudobby just to see what happens. Right now shafts 1~12 are weaving a twill and 13~16 are weaving tabby.

Seersucker

  Seersucker is a type of cloth with wrinkled stripes. According to Wikipedia, "The word came into English from Persian, and originates from the words "Sheer" and "Shakar", literally  meaning "milk and sugar", probably from the resemblance of its smooth and rough stripes to the smooth texture of milk and the bumpy texture of sugar." Most people think of it as the material used in summer weight clothing for men's suits or garden party dresses. I don't know of many handweavers attempting it because to do it for longer lengths of cloth you should put the stripes on a second beam. For looms that have a conventional friction brake everytime the weaver needs to advance the warp each warp beam has to be released, the woven cloth rolled to the cloth beam, and the tension restablished on both beams. With my AVL looms each beam can be individually tensioned and once the tension is set at the beginning of the warp no further adjustment is necessary. I know this works because I have done it on my smaller AVL but for that project I did not want to have one beam tensioned higher than the other.
  My current project is on the big lom, 42" wide, the sectional beam is loaded with a combo of 10/2s tencel and cotton, end on end. The plain beam has 12/2s cotton. You wouldn't think the yarn size was significant but the 12/2s cotton is much finer. The loom is threaded in straight draw, shafts 1-12 are for the cotton/tencel and shafts 13-16 are for the 12/2s. My sett is 32 epi. My loom looks like a disorganized mess because I have the threading cross from each beam hanging on their individual lease sticks. Cross-checking my threading is super important because if I make a threading error I have to fix the problem for both beams.