Response to Comment and Double Weave Beginnings

Detail of End and End Warp-Backed 12-Shaft Satin Study showing the one weft (blue) shows in all areas of the cloth

Often when I am posting to this blog I think "I am talking to myself--in a public forum--how narcissistic can I get!" but then I get private emails or public comments that encourage me to keep being public with my thoughts and activities. Sandra Rude, a weaver I have never met but who I greatly admire and know through magazine articles and her wonderful blog, has posted a comment to the last blog asking two questions. First she wonders if my column headers odd and even in my weaving refer to structures that raise the black (odd) ends and the white (even) ends. Yes, that is exactly right. It brings up the issue of labels and categories and talking to each other. When I start a class, I always spend the first hour going through my descriptive words, so that everyone in the room will share a common language. This sort of goes back to the discussion in a previous post about the word tapestry--a word that has different meanings to different groups of people. I like to keep my descriptions as close to conventional structural terms as possible, but sometimes, especially with complex structures, I find I have to wing it. Since I am "talking to myself" in my own studio, I try to write descriptive titles for structures that I will understand in the future. The truth is, I often forget myself, and probably remake structures because of this, so right now as I make these warp-backed, and now double weave, structures, I am putting notes into my notebook about what I am doing. That brings up the issue that I will have to remember the notes are in the notebook, and open it in the future....

The other question Sandra had was about weft and wouldn't using alternate colors in the weft create areas of solid black and solid white. I thought about that too, and that's when I started contemplating weft-backed warp-backed structures, which led me to conclude that I needed to design double weave structures to accomplish this. Below are two structures, the top one is a warp-backed structure and the bottom is a double weave structure. Note that the warp-backed structure is created on 24 ends (width) and 12 picks (height). Every pick of the cloth interlaces with both the front warps and the back warps. I have made the back warps pink so they will stand out for you to see. The back warps are interlacing as a 1,11 satin, and their raisers are placed so they are hidden by the floats of the front warp structure, which is an 11,1 satin. If I use a black weft, the areas that show this structure will appear solid black, but in the areas that use the structure that raises the white warps to the top, you will see the black weft. If I used a white weft, those areas will appear solid white, but then the areas woven with the structure below will show the white weft with the black warp.

2WarpB11,1satinOdd (which means to me, 2 warps weaving a warp-backed structure that brings the odd ends up to the top in a 11,1 satin; and the count of ends starts at the right, same as my loom, where thread 1 is on the right and thread 880 is on the left)

Now if you look at the structure below, which is for a double weave using two wefts (24 ends by 24 picks), you see that the pink raisers, which represent the back structure, only appear on the even picks. On those picks, all the warp ends for the top layer (the odd ends) are always raised, to keep them on top, but the back weft really only interlaces with the even ends (pink in the diagram). With this structure and variations of it, I will get areas of true black and true white if I use black and white as my weft colors.

2DW11,1satinOdd (which means to me, a double weave with two wefts, with the top warp, the odd ends, weaving an 11,1 satin; again the count of warp ends starts at the right with 1, odd, being on the right and 880 would be on the left edge)

On one of my 8-shaft Macomber looms I have a narrow warp set up end and end and I am handpicking images in it, interspersed with horizontal stripes. It has been on there, not progressing, for a long time. I wanted the ability to test 4-shaft structures in each layer, so the warp is not threaded in blocks. I use to love handpicking and brocade and the freedom it gives you to make any motifs, anywhere in the cloth--as long as you are willing to do this slow, laborious process. I would bristle when people implied it was tedious, because for me, it was this need to focus and pay attention to the cloth that made it interesting. I suppose I would be more tolerant of the process today if I didn't have a TC-1 loom that makes the handpicking unnecessary (though I can do it the TC-1 too as described in The Woven Pixel Chapter 14, Supplementary Brocading in the Warp and the Weft). I also think youth had a part to play--when I felt I had all the time in the world, I was more willing to watch my fabrics grow slowly. Speaking of youth, while taking a walk the other day I slipped on gravel and scraped my knee, just like I used to do as a kid. It still hurts, but I guess I am grateful that I can do anything like a kid anymore.

Hand-picked double plain weave on loom

Comments

I have been getting emails from readers who can't get their comments posted and I thought I would share this one with you, from Ruby Leslie, a well-known weaver who I have met since moving to Vermont. Commenting on the use of weft materials, she wrote:

"In the early '80's Dini Moes wove a plastic raincoat using saran wrap in the warp and dry cleaner bags in the weft. She wrote up the project in a Weavers Journal back then. I remember seeing the raincoat in a workshop with her when I was a new weaver, and was totally impressed with how unique it was."

I continue to weave place mats. The other morning I was up at the loom at 7:30 a.m. (unheard of for me) and wove two before going to water aerobics (me as Esther Williams). The other day I mentioned being concerned about finishing these mats. I have lots of cloth I have woven sitting in boxes which I intend to "finish" someday but pulling out thread and needle to hem them seems to be very difficult for me. I like weaving cloth that can be used with the minimal amount of fussing and finishing. I seem to be able to do knots, or machine sew a small zig zag, and I can spend days on tops and bottoms of the woven hangings, but the idea of a neat, crisp casing sewn around a place mat will not do for me. I want the selvedge edge to be neat enough to leave alone.

I am a rehearser. I get into bed and go over things to do, worry them into solutions. So I thought about the simple basket weave mat that I wanted, and finally considered using two shuttles. Which I did the other morning and the results were good. I always threw the shuttle on the left first (left to right), then with same shed open, I threw the shuttle on right (right to left), catching it around the first weft. You can see what I mean in the image below, and the body of the basket weave in the image below it. In this case, using two shuttles did make the yarn lie flat, side by side, just as I wanted it to be.

Another person who contacted me because of the blog is an old friend, Fern Devlin. In the mid-80's I did some production weaving for Fern, who creates beautiful scarfs. At first I made the mistake of taking her warps home and weaving them on my table loom. You build up a rhythm of work on that loom--hand up to change shed, hand down to pick up shuttle, throw shuttle, catch shuttle, beat, shuttle down, hand up to change shed--but you can't build up speed. It didn't take long before I was weaving for her in her studio on one of her floor looms. Fern has a very interesting blog, and she referred me to a post she did on a mutual friend, Ann Rosenthal. Ann has always had such a cleaver mind, thinking of games to create and solve in her weaving. I think she showed me how to swap out threads in a warp, and I used this idea in one of my mats the other morning. I wanted these thin black lines added to a white ground, to mimic the incised lines of some of Holly's plates. So I added two chenille black warps into the same heddles of existing warps, connected them to the front with T-pins, and weighted them off the back of the loom. It worked great and I am quite pleased with the results. Here is to old friends, how they continue to educate me. And here is to this blog, which is making new connections and renewing old ones, like a woven web of friendship.