Twisp of Fate

My 3-day tapestry weaving class with James Koehler was intense but rewarding.  He normally teaches this “Introduction to Tapestry Weaving” as a 5-day workshop, and tried to cover all the bases for us in 3 days.  This made for some long days but we got through a lot.  We each wove a sampler that would look something like this when done:

James Koehler's tapestry sampler

He brought his full range of yarns (which he dyes himself) so we had a lot of colors to choose from.  I went with a “southwest” color scheme:

my sampler underway

At this point, we had warped our looms using his (very cool and new to me) method, woven a header which allowed us to practice laying in the yarns with “bubbles” of slack to keep it from drawing in, did a twined edge and hem with the cotton warp, then a wool hem and soumak turning row.  Then we practiced 3 kinds of vertical joins before moving on to angles.  Later on we did a curve with a smooth outline, variations of hatchure, and the beginning of color blending techniques.  That’s pretty much where we ran out of time.  I finished my sampler at home this morning and have it off the loom.  Once I do all the finishing, I will post a picture.  It has its problems, but hey!  it’s kind of handsome and my first tapestry.

Most of my other pictures look like this:

clasped weft, move #1

Hopefully these will help me remember the details of some of his methods, which are pretty hard to describe in words.

Since Ruby Leslie’s 3-day workshop (“There Must Be 50 Ways to Use Your Color”) was being held in the conference room on the main floor of our dorm, I was able to visit and see what they were up to.  I must take this class some day if she offers it again at a conference.  I think the basic idea was to take a color scheme and explore what you could do with it using different materials (cottons, tencel, silk, silk/wool) and different weave structures.

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The main event for me on the second day of the conference was an all-day class with the keynote speaker for the conference, Ruby Leslie.  She is a production weaver and had many beautiful scarves and many, many samples that showed her experiments with weave structure, yarn choice, and color.

2 samples in a "Fiesta" colorway

The above samples show how the perception of the other colors and of the overall piece is affected by switching the position of the yellow and blue-green yarns in the warp.

She is teaching a 3-day post-conference workshop called “Lost in Translation:  There must be 50 ways to use your color”, which if course I now wish I was taking in addition to the tapestry workshop.  I must clone myself.

Here are some color wraps she had made for the hands-on workshop, showing the color progressions to be used in a series of warps:

I will probably wrap up this blog series when I get home from conference.  Have a great week!

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Last week I finished three more of the overshot table mats.  I made two of them a little longer, so despite the fact that I had put on extra warp, I ran short on the third one and could only do three repeats of the pattern instead of five.  However, it works great in the center of our dining table, and I love the colors, so I am happy with it.

Blue/green colorway (the short one):

Blue/Green colorway using the 8-5-3-2 treadling sequence

And here is the Purple series:

Purple color sequence, treadling 1 to 12 and then back to 1

I also did one in greys and browns, using the 8-5-3-2 treadling, but unexpectedly sold it to someone at the guild meeting in Omak last Saturday.  I had just finished hemming them that morning, and hadn’t taken pictures yet.  But she said she would send me a digital picture, so hopefully that will happen.

So now I am moving on to rag rugs on the big loom (a 48″, 4-harness Macomber), and will keep doing scarves and other fun things on the little loom (a 20-inch, 8-harness “Baby Mac” from Macomber that I bought used last spring for a workshop loom).

I hadn’t put rug warp on the big loom since I bought it 2 years ago, and started this whole weaving adventure.  The woman I bought the loom from had woven rugs on it exclusively, and she came over and helped me set it up the first time.  It turned out she put on enough to weave about 35 rugs, so that is all I did for the first 8 months!

The loom has a sectional warp beam, so you wind on 2-inch sections at a time from spools on a rack, through a tensioning device that is mounted on the back beam.

I was a little daunted by doing this by myself, but it actually went OK with no major snafus.  Fortunately I had taken pictures of some key steps from last time, and I have a good booklet (“Sectional Warping Made Easy” by Russell Groff).  It took me about 5 hours to beam the warp, and another 5-6 to thread the heddles, sley the reed and tie on to the apron for the first rug.  I am going to make them 28″ wide this time (they were 26″ last time) and put on somewhere in excess of 50 yards, so that should make a lot of rugs!  Good thing, because I have a lot of material that I bought from Sheila with the loom, and from Pendleton mills over the last 2 years.

I have woven 4 rugs so far this week, but won’t take pictures until they are really done (hemmed and washed.)

Other than that – it’s spring in the Methow!  We have had rain on and off, which is bringing the grasses and wildflowers on the hillsides out even better.  There should be some beautiful spring hikes coming up…

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Just a quick post to show pictures of the completed overshot table mats:

First 2 overshot mats using John Madison threading

I like these so much I am going to do a couple more before I take this warp setup off the loom.  A purple series for sure, then maybe blues and/or natural colors.  Maybe next week.  This week I got out the electric drumcarder and have been carding up a bunch of spinning batts.

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The Methow Valley Spinners & Weavers Guild has a “challenge” project every year, usually a particular type of weave structure, and everyone who wants to participate comes up with a project and we all try to learn something new together.  The deadline is the second meeting in April, and we each provide copies of our own project sheet to the group This includes the threading, tie-up and treadling diagrams with the “drawdown” that gives a visual picture of what the cloth should look like, and specifications of the threads/yarns used, the size before and after finishing, whatever we learned, etc.

This year’s challenge is Overshot, which is often associated with traditional American bedspreads and coverlets.  The structure of the cloth is plain weave, provided by the warp and a similar sized or slightly smaller tabby (plain weave) weft, alternating with a usually somewhat larger and softer colored pattern weft that floats over the surface (thus the term, overshot).  The warp and tabby weft are usually white or cream color, with a coordinating pattern color.

But of course, I have to be different, so I used black for the warp and tabby, and dove into my box of miscellaneous Shetland 2-ply for a variety of pattern colors.  I have at least 50-60 colors in this box, left over from knitting Fair Isle type sweaters, or bought as sample colors for designing sweaters.

I also became engrossed in a wonderful, out of print book by Helene Bress – The Weaving Book: Patterns and Ideas.  I picked this up about a year ago online, managing to find a copy that wasn’t too outrageously expensive.  Let me tell you, it is worth it.  I decided to try her ideas of graduating color and size changes of the pattern blocks, using a traditional pattern from Marguerite Porter Davison’s A Handweavers Pattern Book : “John Madison” p. 156 in the chapter on Large Overshot.

The warp is 8/4 cotton rug warp in black, tabby weft is a 75% wool, 25% mohair on a large cone with about 27 wraps per inch, so a little finer but in the same ballpark as the warp.  The pattern weft, as I said, a variety of colors of Shetland 2-ply jumper weight from Jamieson’s and Jamieson & Smith mills in the Shetland Islands.

These will be large table mats to be used on a small rectangular coffee table in our living room.  I will put up pictures when they are finished, but here they were underway on the loom:

Testing the pattern to be sure I had the threading right:

John Madison test, using treadling I from M.P. Davison

Mat number 1, treadling a twill sequence, but varying the number of pattern shots for each treadle in the sequence 8-5-3-2-2-3-5-8 then repeat (a Fibonacci series), and alternating colors from dark to light back to dark within that sequence.  One sequence in golds, then another sequence in olive green/browns, then repeat.  Varying the number of pattern shots for each treadle makes the overall pattern undulate.

John Madison mat 1, gold and olive, Fibonacci treadling sequence

Mat number 2, treadling as twill, using Treadling II for “John Madison” from Davison’s book, which goes from 1 to 12 and then 12 to 1 in increments of 1.  Alternating colors from light to dark back to light within that sequence, using 10 shades of red (I used the same bright shade for the 3-2-1-1-2-3 part of the sequence).  I started the mat with 6-5-4-3-2-1 and ended it with 1-2-3-4-5-6 to put the brighter colors at each end and the darkest colors and largest blocks in the center.

"John Madison" mat 2, treadling II from M.P. Davison, in reds

I still need to darn in ends, wash and press, and hem these, but should have pictures by the end of the week.

Off to Wenatchee today!

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