Surprise Day Trip

Detail of 4-weft lampas by Bhakti Ziek

Isn't it lovely how each day has a different surprise. I was upstairs weaving a four-weft lampas this morning, very pleased with the results, when my phone rang. It was my cousin, Matthew Shubin, and he was near White River Junction on his way to Cornish, NH. Realizing he was probably close to us, he called to see if we could come to the concert he was playing at 2 p.m. at the Saint-Guadens National Historic Site. It is always nice to see Matt and Helen, and their dog Uma--and it was especially nice to sit out on the portico (we had our dog, December, with us) and listen to the Latin Landscapes Trio (flute, bassoon and guitar) playing while looking at the incredible view through tall flowers and soft rain.

Latin Landscapes Trio playing at The Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site

View from my seat as I listened to the concert

We had never heard of this National Site, but it turns out to be the only national park in NH, and a very interesting place for artists to visit. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a famous and successful sculptor (1848-1907) lived here many summers, and then full-time at the end of his life. He did the kind of sculptures you see in public spaces where a person is never just a person, but the embodiment of honor or justice or truth. As I mellow (sort of) I find I can enjoy work, that I wouldn't want in my home, for its own sake, and this new tolerance even allows me to appreciate what I am seeing. I especially liked the reliefs of Saint-Gaudens, which reminded me of the beautiful Assyrian reliefs I had seen recently at the Hood Museum. I think the way image is rendered in relief is similar to the detailing possible in a weaving. I was also drawn to Saint-Gaudens use of language in his reliefs.

Detail of relief sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens

The issue of ways of drawing that are appropriate to weaving has been on my mind. There are certain time periods whose style especially "speaks" to me. Safavid textiles and Ottoman textiles both have strong natural elements that are rendered particularly well for the elements of weaving. When I put on the 60/2 silk warp (though maybe it is 20/2, I am still not sure) I decided to try harder at achieving a quality that appeals to me. I pulled out my copy of Ipek: The Crescent and the Rose (a glorious book with beautiful illustrations of Ottoman weavings) and have been flipping through the pages, exclaiming about the beauty of these fabrics. (We lived with our books packed up for so long that just having them out on the bookshelves here seemed enough for awhile. Now they are starting to come off the shelves, showing up in different rooms, my choices and Mark's, intermingling and inspiring.) These textiles always have clean flat areas of color, often outlined by another thin line that adds to their crispness and clarity. There is enough detail to distinguish the motif (usually a type of flower) but not so much that it gets lost in the pixelation of warp and weft.

Ipek: The Crescent and the Rose

Detail of Ottoman lampas photographed from Ipek

So I am trying to work my imagery accordingly. Starting with digital images of my flowers, I am drawing on top of them in a new layer in Photoshop, keeping some lines of information, but not too much. In the image below you see the threads quite clearly, but this image is taken an inch from the cloth. When you see the cloth at normal range the threads blend into a field of color. I am using four wefts (one ground and three pattern). The ground weft works both as a 4/1 satin and a 1/4 satin, and the other three wefts weave as 1/2 twills, but because their binding warps are spaced further apart than the ground warp (ratio 3 ground warp to 1 binding warp), their floats are longer than the floats of the ground weft. (All of this is explained in detail in The Woven Pixel chapter on lampas.)

Detail of a 4-weft lampas by Bhakti Ziek

I am questioning the type of silk I am using for my pattern weft. I would prefer a softer yarn--a silk floss. I will have to do an internet search to try and find appropriate weft. I have lots of tightly wound silk on my shelves (mostly white--I always think I am going to dye it but....) which is good for warp, but I want pattern wefts that pack tightly but loft and cover when floated. The damask liserie that I wove at Lisio in 1997 had silk wefts with these characteristics. There are always two wefts working in this fabric, but the colors change as you move up the cloth so it appears as if there are more weft systems than two.

Damask liserie woven by Bhakti Ziek

Detail of damask liserie by Bhakti Ziek

One last comment about the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site: they have a small gallery called The Picture Gallery which is currently showing work by Claire Watkins, on view until August 16th. She has amazing work and one piece, Flock of Needles, really enchanted me. She has a group of threaded needles where the ends of the thread is attached to a wall, and the needles hoover in air near a moving magnet. They are like a family of fish gathered around bread. If you click on her name you can see this piece and some others.

June Beginnings

New toys--a mangle and a braid twister

It has been raining here and I keep reminding myself that in New Mexico we would have welcomed days of steady rain, but still I miss the sun. Mark and I drove to New Hampshire at the end of the week in the pouring rain to pick up an old mangle. This and the braid twister came to me via Edith House. She read that I wanted the braid twister on my blog and ordered one for me (maybe I should have a running wish list on the side bar). I was thrilled--especially since I had ordered one on ebay myself--my first and last attempt to use that site--and what I got was the head from a machine. Completely useless without the handle. I did check back and saw the ad definitely had the complete twister--and I could have lodged a complaint and sent it back. But that didn't make sense since the postage to/from the seller was more than the tool itself. Anyway, when Edith gave me this twister I felt like my story had a surprise happy ending. She keeps the list of looms and other tools for sale for the Vermont Weavers Guild and knew about this mangle for sale, so she put me in touch with the seller. I have been using tencel in my recent work almost exclusively, and seeing how Edith and Trudy Otis finished their tencel scarfs with the mangle enticed me to buy this.

Double Weave Comparison - front

Double Weave Comparison - back

I also finished the warp on my TC-1 and was able to cut off the cloth yesterday. I had forgotten I had woven a comparison weaving in double cloth--but there it was at the beginning of the roll. Because I designed the structures for light lifts, the back of the cloth is almost all warp-faced. Quite a contrast to the front. I wanted the back of my last weavings to show weft floats, so I created weft-backed double weave structures. Even saying that makes my head spin. The day I was making those structures I definitely thought I was having a complete mental melt-down. After awhile, it seemed like all structures were the same--and I still feel that sometimes when I look at my wall of studies--they all are about warp or weft floats--the differences are so minute. I wonder if I am being side-tracked by this level of detail. But then I think "weft-backed double cloth" and something comes alive in me. You can see a detail below of the back of one of the pieces I wove. On the front it has areas of warp-faced white and warp-faced black, and then areas of single wefts working with either the white or the black warps (though I don't think the warps are showing much since the weft floats are doing a good job of hiding them). On one of the weavings I did put an area of the back on the front. I will post images as soon as I finish them. I wove them face-down so the lifts would be lighter than if woven face-up. It is always a thrill to take something off the loom that you are hoping is weaving correctly but you can't see (well, I could have used a mirror) and find out it worked.

back of "weft-backed double weave"

I did weave a small sample of the weft-backed double weave that I can run through the mangle and see what happens. That will have to wait until I get back from Chicago in July. Meanwhile, here is the invitation to the exhibit, Into the Woods, curated by Dian Parker and Laurie Sverdlove, which opens at The Chandler Gallery in Randolph on June 6. The two of them have done so much work investigating artists in Vermont whose work would fit with the theme, compiling what will be an exciting show, and organizing everything to high standards. It is very generous of them to do this. Of course I am thrilled that both Mark and I will have work in the exhibit. The opening is from 4-6 p.m. That's my birthday--I think I will just pretend everyone is there to celebrate with me--celebrate the fact that I am alive and well and can think of things like "weft-backed double weave" which really is something to celebrate.

Comparisons

detail of warp-backed study woven at 60 ppi (though it says 70 ppi)

I just finished weaving a warp-backed study that will be a comparison between this type of cloth and a double weave fabric. Both structures use a 12-shaft satin as the root structure. The warp-backed study has only one weft, but sometimes I changed color. I began the weaving with a red 10/2 tencel weft, then changed to purple to weave a small "interruption demo" at the luncheon the other day. Originally I thought the cloth would weave at 70 ppi, and wrote that into the image (as you can see above), but in fact when I counted picks in the cloth, it was really 59.9 ppi. So I modified the image accordingly and wove it, again with red weft. When I measured at the end and did my math, it turns out that it wove at 57.61 ppi. Not a big difference, but i wanted to indicate it in my chart, so I added a "note" and wove it at the top, using purple weft to distinguish it (see image below). 

detail of Note added to warp-backed weaving stating true ppi of 57.61

I was thinking that if I wanted to add footnotes to my weavings with the correct data obtained from the actual weaving, I would have to rotate my images and weave them from top to bottom. It is fun to consider these possibilities, and decide what to do, like adding the top note, since I couldn't go back and unweave the original number 70. In the past I have woven a new strip and sewed it over the wrong information. I guess this is similar to someone having a tattoo that they no longer want, isn't it? 

I am going to be busy for the next two days tutoring. I want everything to go smoothly, so I am very nervous, and at the same time I am so excited because it is an unchartered journey and anything can happen. Each student coming to me is so unique, and it is a wonderful challenge to try and find what works for their needs. Right now, though, I am going to bake a cake for dinner. I have confidence that it is going to turn out perfectly.

Double Plain Weave

Top and Bottom of Double Plain Weave Study

I am high on double plain weave. Before doing a study of the double weave 12-shaft shaded satins, I thought I should do something with double plain weave. You know, start at the beginning. Thinking of my warp colors (you know by now, starting from the right, they are black, white, black, tussah; repeated to 880 ends total) I came up with 8 structures, all plain weave, none stitched. The top layers of each would be: black warp, black weft; white warp, white weft; black warp, white weft; white warp, black weft; end and end black and white warp, pick and pick black and white weft (giving horizontal stripes, i.e., log cabin); end and end black and white warp, pick and pick white and black weft (giving vertical stripes, i.e., the other part of log cabin); and these last two repeated using black and tussah warps. Then i opened up my copy of Paul O'Connor's book Loom-Controlled Double Weave and realized I had forgotten two. So then I made black warp, pick and pick black and white weft; and white warp, pick and pick white and black weft. 

I turned a digital image taken on a walk in the woods of West Brookfield, Vermont last summer into ten shades of gray and assigned the double plain structures to the colors. I knew that some would appear very similar, but i wanted to use all ten in the image. Then I wrote my data on top, and included little swatches of each color as well as images of the structures. I was so excited by the idea and with each weaving, it becomes clearer to me that this is shaping up into a series of weavings that I can call The Weaving Lesson. Isn't it wonderful when you can conceptualize what you are doing, and still keep doing exactly what you are doing, as you want to do, but now you have a construct that legitimizes it in a more respectable way? The Weaving Lesson: Double Plain Weave. Yes, I like that title.

The Weaving Lesson: Double Plain Weave - detail

Paul's book (if you haven't checked out his latest project, a CD made with Marg Coe called A Tale of Two Tieups, I suggest you do) and Ursina Arn-Grischott's Doubleweave on Four to Eight Shafts are both excellent resources for information on double weave. They are very different, published 7 years apart, one in black and white, the other in color. Read together they are sure to inspire you to try this type of weaving. Of course, there is also an excellent chapter (my unbiased opinion) on double weave in The Woven Pixel.

Right now I don't want to do anything except design in Photoshop and weave on my TC-1, but life (laundry, cooking, cleaning the house) is getting in the way. Tomorrow is Mark's birthday so today I am going to cook (mushroom/spinach empanada roll; pasta with scallops; salad; and a birthday cake). He doesn't want to celebrate his birthday, so tonight we are having a This Is Not a Birthday Dinner with the Sacca/Billings. Some friends have written that Vermont seems to suit me--and I think they are right.

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

Shaded Warp-Backed Satins

Warp-Backed !2-shaft Satin Sample

My neighbor Kelly Green stopped over today to see how the TC-1 loom works. I quickly made a small file in Photoshop to show her how the design process goes, then we went upstairs to the loom and wove this strip. She had never woven before, but had no problem starting at an advanced level. She also showed me a large quilt she is in the process of making--beautiful small hand-stitching. Maybe she wants to give up law for textiles. It really is my good fortune to have landed in this house in Randolph, surrounded by wonderful and interesting neighbors.

Yesterday there was a meeting of participants in the Vermont Open Studio Weekend. Since this will be my first year doing it, it was helpful to listen to the experience of others. Each artist is to have an educational component, and of course I will demonstrate the TC-1 loom. So it was also a good experience for me today to do this demo for Kelly. If all the people that visit my studio May 23 and 24 are as quick to understand as she was, then surely I will captivate at least one convert to weaving. 

I was also able to count the picks per inch in the little study (almost 60) so I could design the following weaving close to the correct aspect ratio. The advantage of a warp-backed weaving is that you use one weft and can have distinct areas of the warp colors--in my case there are two, black and white. So in areas that primarily show the black warp, each pick will have most of the black warps raised and only one of the white warps (and that usually gets hidden behind floats of the black warp and is not visible). Just the opposite will happen in areas where the white warps predominate. I started thinking about the combination of warp-faced and weft-faced structures in one study, and decided to try a series of shaded warp-backed satins. So using one weft color, I would get variations of it mixed with the black warp and variations mixed with the white warp.

Sample of Shaded 12-Shaft Warp-Backed Satins on the TC-1 Loom

I used a 12-shaft satin as the root structure for this study. The differences are often subtle but they are there. Maybe I will try this again with a 16-shaft satin and see if I can get a greater range of tonality. The sheen of the tencel is quite nice in the weft floats.

Detail of Warp-Backed Shaded Satin Study

I want to take advantage of the fact that my warp is end and end, and can cause a weft to look lighter or darker by using the light or the dark warps, and I want to use more than one weft color. I almost began to turn the warp-backed shaded satins into weft-backed warp-backed weaving, but realized I really am entering the realm of double cloth. I don't know why I have been avoiding it--it is the logical beginning with a two color warp--but I really didn't want to start there. Anyway, I think I am going to begin now. 

Studies Continued

End of Warp-Backed Studies

I just finished weaving the rest of the warp-backed studies. Actually, it also has weft-backed structures in it, which show up where the cloth turns from black and white into color. Where it says "weft-backed 9/1 satin" it should read "weft-backed 1/9 satin." I wrote it correctly in my notebook. I have to continue with these until I find something I like. You can see in the detail below that the top section combines both warp-faced and weft-faced structures. By using two wefts that are different in color to the warps, I have four areas of color. Although the dotting pattern of the two wefts is lively in the warp-backed structures, I am going to ponder how to have just one weft show. So stay tuned. I know my detailing of structures is not every one's cup of tea, but this mathematical game of possibilities really gets me going.

As I was weaving I was overcome with emotion at the fact that I could be working in my studio on my very own jacquard loom. By now I should know better than to say jacquard, since the TC-1 is its own entity, but as Alice and I said in The Woven Pixel (page 17), 

"It will be interesting to see if historians and other manufacturers come to a consensus on a name that will separate 19th century technology, the jacquard, from 21st century technology, the Thread Controller, the Unival, and other hand and electronic warp controlling mechanisms. Meanwhile, we will continue to use the generic term jacquard in this book."

So I guess I will do the same in my blog.

detail showing warp-backed and weft-backed structures

There was a college fair at the gym the other morning, and a nice woman from SCAD gave me a free notebook and pen. It is the perfect size for carrying around and I wanted a new notebook to start writing up these studies. I measured the cloth under tension on the loom, and now I will figure out the picks per inch for each section. Still, when I go to do a real piece, I will have to weave an inch and measure, and if necessary, resize my image. Doing this in Photoshop, as described in the book, is so easy. I still like having a sense of the correct ppi when I design, but these studies were all designed with square pixels. 

Notebook of data about the woven studies

Sampling

Sampling Compound Structures

I started weaving today. I think many weavers when confronted with an end and end warp (i.e., alternating colors of thread) would think double cloth, but I am beginning my tests with structures that show both warps as defined colors but use only one weft. My first four tests are of compound structures. Compound tabby and compound twill (usually a 2,1 twill) were used by Han weavers as early as the 2nd century B.C.E. You can see I just used the name of the structure as the image for each of the four tests. I realize my weaves show up in the opposite place than I expected because I made my structures thinking black, white, black, tussah going from left to right, but on my TC-1 loom, the first thread is at the right, and it is black, so my structures, from left to right, should have been designed thinking tussah, black, white, black. They are weaving correctly--I just need to rename them so I know which threads they bring to the top.

detail showing compound tabby below and compound 2/2 twill above

Then I started weaving samples of warp-backed structures. As in the compound weaves, the colors are showing up reversed from how I planned due to the warp color rotation, but I am getting the information I need. Each strip is 100 picks, so the fact that some studies weave longer than others shows that the picks per inch are affected by the use of twills or satins and which satins. I like the warp-backed cloth better than the compound studies. I will finish this tomorrow and then design some other studies. Chapter 12 of The Woven Pixel is called Compound Tabby, Compound Twill and Other Warp-Backed Structures. So if you want to know more, and you own the book, start at page 229.

Sampling Warp-Backed Structures

detail of study showing warp-backed 3/1 twill below and warp-backed 4/1 satin above

And here is proof--it must be spring in Vermont!

Threading Break-Time

I am almost done setting up my TC-1 with a new warp. I was worried about redenting from the original reed (30 dents per inch) to a new one (15 dents per inch) but when I started, I realized I could stand the new reed up in the top grove of the bar that sits at the top of the reed--and everything went smoothly. I have designed some warp-backed and compound warp structures and two test files and will begin there--as soon as I tension the warp.

Threading New Reed Sitting on Top of Old One

I had the best break-time reading a travelogue of my friend Chad Alice Hagen's recent visit to England. Since i don't have a Face Book account, I couldn't read her posts there, so she kindly sent the written pages to me through email. I had one window open to her account, and another window open to google maps and I was able to follow her journey. At the end I realized I could also click on pictures of the towns and see what they looked like. Chad is a brilliant artist/feltmaker/observer of life, and I returned to dressing the loom refreshed and energized. 

Coincidentally, my friend and neighbor, Sara Tucker, who writes a wonderful weekly blog, The Aggregator, for Conde Nast Traveler, had a post today about google streets, a new feature where you can see photos of the streets, with their buildings, and actually feel like you are walking down them. So once again I was back online, looking at maps, this time exploring Boston. This feature is new and not available for all areas, so I imagine it will be quite awhile before a small town like Randolph is added. Sara's blog always introduces an interesting topic, and then takes you in many directions through links, so a small paragraph can really encompass the world. I joke with Sara that she also happens to be my own personal trainer--she not only gets me to the gym each morning (days she isn't going, I just don't seem to have the will power to go on my own) but she has been terrific at showing me how to use the machines, do exercises in the water, and recently introducing me to exercises for my abs. I think for break-time I prefer her blog and the Internet.

Technical Information

I noticed that Alice Schlein has a post today about her beginning weft-backed studies. So it seems timely to post an image of the study I did after I completed Intertwined. Of course it would have made sense to do this study beforehand. You can see that I took the same area of design and repeated it four times. Each section had 208 picks total, and was designed thinking there would be 104 picks per inch (ppi). The bottom strip used the same structures I used in Intertwined. The one above that changed the ground structure to a 12-shaft satin that was not a weft-backed structure. You can see it caused the ppi to decrease, elongating the circle. The third study used weft-backed structures where the back wefts are all tacked by the same warp end, and the ground also tacks this way; and the top study uses the corrected incremental tacking and a variation of this for the ground.

Study to compare structures and picks per inch

The detail below shows an area in the first study at the top and a similar area in the last study at the bottom. The ground structures, which show the blue warp, are different structures, but the only difference in structure in the white/beige area is that the bottom structure had the ties slid over--as I showed in my corrected structure on March 29th. It was clear while weaving that the wefts could pack tighter, and this was proved when I counted ppi. At top the ppi was exactly 104, but the bottom study wove at 111 ppi. I think you can tell also that the wefts at top were moved out of line to adjust to the tacking points that were adjacent (see structures from March 27th post), where they lie smooth and horizontal in the bottom study.

. 

Top are original structures, and bottom are corrected ones

Today I wound the new warp--10/2 tencel, end and end (actually black, white, black, tussah). I use a warping mill and paddle when I make my warps. I have a small mill which I usually use, but today I used my big one since the warp is 14 yards--which is a very long warp for me. Tomorrow I will start tying knots--this warp tied to the old one on the loom. All day I have been fussing about the reed. Right now I have 20/2 tencel on the loom, 2 per dent in a 30 dent reed, but I think I will change it to a 15 dent reed and put 4 ends per dent. I am trying to think if there is some easy way to change reeds, but so far I keep coming back to tie the ends, wind the warp back through the old reed and then redent into the new reed. If you have a better suggestion, please add a comment or send me a personal email.

Warping Mill Using Paddle and 4 Threads Simultaneously

I was feeling lazy and wound directly from cones to the paddle, so I wound 4 ends at a time. This meant 220 times to get 880 ends. As soon as I began I regretted not doing 8 ends at a time, and I am sure if I did 8, I would have thought I should have done 12. Still one quarter the time was a big saving. I know that paddles can be a bit awkward at first, but once you understand and are comfortable, you never want to return to single ends. I have friends who work with multiple strands and make the cross by hand each time, but really, using the paddle is so much easier. I tried to take a picture to show you (below). It is just like a rigid heddle with eyes and slots. The threads in the eyes stay put and the ones in the slots can move up or down, creating the cross. (Sorry non-weavers, I did title this post "Technical.")

Paddle Making Cross

Look what I found out in my front yard!! A sure sign of spring. My neighbor has several flowers in bloom. Such joy to welcome a fresh season.

Sign of Spring

Sugaring Days in Vermont

Lily and Blossom from Turkey Hill Farm

As the temperatures creep up, the snow melts, and the sap starts to flow, you notice trees decked out with sugar buckets here in Vermont. We had a wonderful, very social weekend that included an introduction to sugaring. We started out yesterday morning with friends from Randolph and visited Turkey Hill Farm in Randolph Center. Besides watching their sugar making operation, and getting wonderful explanations about the whole process, we also bought fresh milk from their cows, Lily and Blossom. Since moving to Vermont I have been able to buy raw milk and make delicious yogurt, something I hadn't done since the '60s. It is very easy to do, and I will put my recipe at the end of this post. 

Michael Sacca boiling maple sap

Late in the afternoon we ventured out on muddy roads to visit our friends, Liz Billings and Michael Sacca, and their children (our god children), Issac, Susanna and Mario. I think I have mentioned this in the past, that living near them was key to our move to Vermont. They have tapped trees on their property and you can see Michael, above, boiling the sap down into syrup. It is quite an operation, and takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. 

Then we were introduced to a tradition that we can easily incorporate into our own lives--making fresh donuts and eating them, dunked into bowls of maple syrup, hot from the frying pan. You can see Mario, below, making the donuts and then he, Issac, Susanna, and Mark relishing them. It was definitely desert before main course last night--or maybe desert as main course. I think once a year is enough for this tradition. Otherwise it would totally undue all the good I am gaining by going to the gym.

Mario Sacca making Donuts

Donut Eaters: Mario, Issac, Susanna, and Mark

So I need to label this next part, Two Heads are Better than One! After posting the last entry, with the two weft-backed weave structures, I got a lovely email from Alice Schlein, my co-author of The Woven Pixel, pointing out that I had "put the ties of the back wefts immediately opposite the ties of the front weft...," which puzzled her since I am always saying something like "hide the tacking points behind floats of weft or warp." She thought I had a reason for doing this, but I had just forgotten to slide the tacking points over. So I am posting a corrected version of one of the structures here for you to see. I actually spent today weaving a 208 pick section of my weaving, Intertwined, four times, each time varying the structures--so I could count actual picks per inch, and see how the wefts packed down, etc. When I take it off the loom in a day or two, I will show you some details. I don't know why people think art and science is so different. I think they both are explorations of the unknown. By questioning and quantifying this information, I should be able to design future weavings with more ease.

4WB1,11satin2toTopOffset

Here is how I am making yogurt these days. I take half a gallon of raw milk and heat it in a pot to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Then I let it cool to 108 degrees and add 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup of yogurt from a previous batch, and whisk it up. Then I pour the liquid into two quarter gallon glass mason jars with wide lids. While the milk is heating and cooling, I boil water and fill a half-gallon mason jar with it and place it into a thermal zippered bag (I have one that I got at Trader Joe's). Then I put the two jars of yogurt in the bag, on either side of the hot water bottle, and leave it for the day, or overnight. So far I have made perfect yogurt, and I definitely prefer this method to my old one of wrapping jars in a sleeping bag and putting it out in the sun.