Twisp of Fate

I am off to Seattle today, to attend the Seattle Weavers’ Guild meeting and participate in the 30th Annual Show & Sale.  I have put a link in my sidebar, as well.  It takes place this week, Oct 28-30 in Bloedel Hall of St Mark’s Cathedral.

I am amazed at how much time it took to inventory everything, create and attach tags, etc.  And I don’t even have that much stuff – a variety of shawls, rag rugs and my new plaited twill scarves.

I will be helping out at the sale on Friday Oct 29th – hope to see a few friendly faces there!

Blogging is lagging behind actual events these days, but I am trying to keep on top of it!  Right after we got back from our road trip, I plunged into a 3-day workshop at my local guild’s room (Methow Valley Spinners and Weavers).  That was the weekend before last.

And what a grand time we all had!  We were lucky to get Ruby Leslie from Vermont to teach us her workshop titled “The 3D’s of 3-D: Deflection, Differential Shrinkage & Doubleweave.”  It was all about how to get texture into our weaving, but it being Ruby Leslie, there was also a lot of color!

Ruby with 2 sides of the deflected doubleweave sample

It was taught in a round-robin format, which means each of us warped and prepared a loom for one of the samples, wove the initial sample, and then over the 3 days everyone got a chance to weave all the other samples on the other people’s looms.  This was the first time I have participated in a round-robin, but it went very smoothly and we were all done by the morning of the 3rd day, leaving time for cutting the samples off the loom and a wrap-up.

Ruby was extremely organized and a great teacher.  She had wound our warps for us and sent them ahead of time with very explicit instructions.  The workshop handouts were also well-organized, with lots of information packed into them, but she went over everything very thoroughly, so together with the actual samples we have all the information to move forward with any of the weave structures we explored.  Some of the weave structures were set up on 2 looms (perhaps with some minor variations) which helped avoid bottlenecks as we moved through all the weaving.  I can’t recommend her highly enough as a teacher and all-around great person to be with.

Ruby was the keynote speaker at the ANWG conference in Spokane in 2009 (Association of Northwest Weavers Guilds biannual conference), where she also taught a 3-day workshop called “There Must Be 50 Ways to Use Your Color.”  I blogged about it back then: my half-day class, and her samples in the classroom.  I still hope to take that workshop some day!

We’re getting ready to go on a little fall jaunt, so I have been tearing around trying to finish things up, take care of work responsibilities, get ready for events that happen right after we get back, etc.  Not much time to blog!  But here are the four plaited twill scarves I wove earlier in the week:

They will look a lot nicer once the fringes are twisted and they are washed and pressed.  But I am happy with them!  The two on the left were woven with tencel (in Moroccan Blue and Adobe).  The two on the right were woven with rayon chenille, and I particularly like the one on the end.  When it is moved around in the light, the pattern shifts in an almost irridescent manner.

I finished the 3 scarves that I last blogged about here.  These all had the same 5/2 pearl cotton warp, using 5 colors in sequence, with blending at the edges.  The threading, tie-ups and treadlings came from Chapter 10 in Carol Strickler’s book, A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns (Interweave Press, 1991).  This is the chapter on Plaited Twills, and I used the threading called “double 2-tie” which has every other thread on shafts 1 and 2 (alternating) and the others running up from 3 through 8 and back down again in a twill-like fashion.

Like almost every new weaving project I attempt, it was definitely a learning experience!  I initially threaded it at 20 epi (ends per inch), 2 threads per dent in a 10-dent reed.  After sampling (shown in my initial post), I wove the first scarf with a dark red rayon chenille, using the tie-up and treadling for #370 on p. 103 of Strickler.  This one used all 10 of the treadles on my loom.

It came off the loom stiff as a board, and I was bummed to say the least.  So much for my “best guess” at sett.  Lesson 1: weave the sample, take it off the loom and wash it to see what the final fabric will be like, before proceeding.  There were other problems.  The little workshop loom (Macomber model CP) has a known problem of having the tie-up hooks jump off the lamms, disconnecting the treadle from the frames it is supposed to raise, and creating havoc with your pattern if you don’t catch it.  For some reason, this kept happening with the leftmost treadle only.  I thought I caught it each time, but when I took the scarf off the loom there were 3 shots that obviously were not in pattern.  I must have lost one of the 5 tie-up hooks on treadle 1 without realizing it (just before the rest of them imploded).

After washing and pressing, the scarf is still a little heavy and stiff but acceptable.  Magic really does happen in the water!  Here it is, pretty pattern but flawed…

Moving right along, I re-sleyed the warp at 16 epi (2 threads per dent in an 8-dent reed).  Then I changed the tie-up and treadling to #377 on p. 105 of Strickler, and changed the weft to 2 strands of black 10/2 tencel wound together.  This one used only 8 of the treadles so I was able to leave the 2 at either end out of action.  I only had a couple of problems with the tie-up hooks this time around, and was able to catch it each time.

I really like this pattern, and the scarf came out nice and slinky after washing.  The only problem was, I could tell partway through that I had tension problems in the warp and there were a couple of warp threads in the middle that were much tighter than the rest.   You could really feel it as a tight area when it came off the loom.  I had tried a new warping method this time (Warping on a Shoestring, booklet and video from Nadine Sanders) and obviously I need some practice.

Fortunately, after washing the effect mostly disappeared.

For the third scarf, I pulled the remaining warp off the back beam through the heddles and reed, and then re-wound it with proper tension.  Then I wove the scarf with the same pattern #377, but using a dark red tencel this time around.  This is a great example of how the interplay of color of weft with warp creates what I think Ruby Leslie calls “optical color blending” – the stripes looks like different colors in this scarf than in the one using the black weft.

I really like these plaited twills and will probably do more of them later, using different materials.