warp, weft and …

The language of weaving gives you two names for your sets of threads: they can be warp or they can be weft. So, now that I am venturing recklessly into the world of triaxial weaving, I find myself a word short. My impression so far is that it is a more egalitarian world than traditional weaving, in that all three sets of threads are simply threads without any special title.

Having said that, they are in fact quite likely not to be threads at all, but flat two-dimensional ribbons or strips of cloth or paper. Or bark, perhaps.

As if I didn’t have enough to do I’ve signed up for my first Learning Exchange from the winter edition of Shuttle, Spindle & Dyepot. I couldn’t help it, she protests feebly, the lure of the three axes was too much for me. And now that I have my loom-weaving well underway it is time to get my brain — and my fingers — around the technicalities of this new discipline.

I must say that the instructions given in the magazine by Elizabeth Lang Harris are very clear and easy to follow. I won’t breach her copyright by repeating them here, but I do recommend them if you want to have a go yourself. There are a few ‘personalisations’ I have employed to make my life happier and more serene, namely:

1. The first two sets of strips are to be taped down with a 120° angle between them. This is made extremely easy if you happen to have a grid of equilateral triangles — like this template I pinched off my mother last weekend (thanks, Mum):

I chose simply to set the masking-tape ‘header’ on my strips in line with the triangle boundaries, so I haven’t even needed to use the handy hexagons — but they’re there if you want the reassurance of 120° in black and white. Once the first two sets are aligned, the third set of strips is inserted vertically:

2. When a three-way layer has been completed it is still quite open and not very stable, but it needs to come off the mat to make way for the next layer. I found the easiest thing to do was to cut off the strips below the masking-tape, then I could slide the layer safely to one side without jiggling anything.

3. Once you have made two layers and then woven them together with a third layer, well, you have quite a lot of ends:

In order to ‘finish’ my little paper mat I stuck sellotape along each of the six outermost strips — like that blue one at the bottom and the dark green one on the lower right, for instance — on both sides. Then I cut out an irregular hexagonal shape by following the middle of the pieces of tape. The result is that everything is stuck to something and I don’t have loose ends that I am accidentally going to pull on (horrible thought!)

Sorry about the flash on that last photo. I didn’t get around to the finishing until after dark…

So far I have made a grand total of two little paper mats. The second one took less than half the time of the first, and here it is:

It should be identical in structure with only the colours making the difference in the overall pattern. However, a little technical misunderstanding meant that (a) I had to re-weave one set of strips in my third layer, leading to (b) a left-handed rather than a right-handed weave structure. The distinction (I think - bear with me, please!) is that in a right-handed weave a strip coming from the right always goes over a strip which it meets coming from the left. A left-handed weave does the other thing. It is not entirely clear to me how one defines ‘right’ and ‘left’ in the triaxial world, but maybe that will dawn on me at some future time.

On the whole I am feeling quite chuffed with myself. That is, until I go and look here at the incredible weaving of Sally Shore or here at Tim Tyler’s woven spheres (do scroll down past the teething ring).

Back to the loom for some biaxial recovery, I think!

By the way, thank you to those who have taken an interest in my birthday wish list. Don’t worry: I have written the titles, authors and ISBNs down on paper and handed them personally to my long-suffering husband. Short of buying them myself I think that is about as far as I can go…

 

wish list

This week I finally got around to reading a couple of magazines that have been crying out for my attention: the May/June issues of Crafts Magazine and Embroidery.  My mother lends me her copy of the latter after she has read it; the former I subscribe to myself, although I’m having doubts about whether I want to continue.  For once, however, there was some significant textile content.  I’m fairly sure I hadn’t come across the hyperbolic crochet reef before, but it seems such a timely project that there is almost an inevitability about it: the resurgence of knitting and crochet, environmental concerns, art as a community undertaking — it has everything.  And it looks gorgeous.  If you want to ogle it and/or get instructions for joining in, then do visit their website.

Alas I do not crochet to any standard worth mentioning, but I am concerned about textiles and the environment, so the next thing that caught my eye was a review of “Sustainable Fashion and Textiles“, a new book by Kate Fletcher.  And not only the review, but a socking great excerpt from it as well.  According to the reviewer, Fletcher has “an encyclopaedic knowledge of textiles” and analyses them all for sustainability — not just considering the way they are grown or processed to make our yarns, our fabric and our clothes, but also the ways in which different fibres need to be cared for throughout their life-cycle.  Brownie points go to polyester, apparently, for its “low-impact laundering profile”.

Besides the fibre-y business, she also looks at how clothes are designed and made; and here I got a bit of a shock.  “As recently as two generations ago,” says Fletcher, “textiles and garments were made and maintained by those who wore and used them, yet few people have those same skills today.”  Two generations?  Oh heavens.  I know I passed a significant milestone last year but, given that my (very academic) school had us all doing needlework at least to the age of fifteen, that is a very ageing statement.

Anyway, speaking of birthdays, there’ll be another one along in a minute (well, a few weeks) and it’s time to help Stuart by compiling the all-important List of Acceptable Gifts for a Wife who Weaves.  Kate Fletcher’s book is now on it.

And so is “Rigmaroles and Ragamuffins” by Elinor Kapp, as reviewed in the aforementioned Embroidery.  The subtitle tells all: “unpicking the words we derive from textiles”.  I really don’t know how I’ve lived all these generations without it.  I hope it is as good as I want it to be.

 

inch by inch

In the last couple of days I’ve been following a conversation on the WeaveTech discussion group about the ways people measure their progress on the loom, and it is interesting to see the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches.  I think the discussion started when someone was looking for a source of cloth tape measures: some other contributors had suggestions, while some despaired of ever finding any cloth tape measures anywhere, and then various others chipped in to warn about the dangers of them stretching over time.  Before long there was a flurry of yard sticks, metre sticks, string, paper and fibreglass.  It delights me to see how the little things get us all excited.

As I mentioned once before, I use a length of paper tape from a till roll to measure my weaving on the loom.  There are several things I like about it.

• I can measure out the exact length I want to weave, allowing for take-up and shrinkage when the cloth comes off the loom, and then I don’t need to think about it again.
• If I have a plan in mind for colour or pattern changes then I can mark those on the tape as well to use as a guide while I’m weaving.
• If I’m making something up as I go, but want it to be symmetrical, I can note down what I do as I weave the first half and then turn the tape around to use as a guide for the second half.
• I can reuse the same tape several times if it is a “standard scarf length” for instance, but…
• ….there’s an even better use: I can file it in my sketchbook as a record of “what I actually did” on a project, which may be somewhat different from what I was planning to do.

I use two pins to attach the tape, moving one in front of the other as I progress.  Both ends of the tape hang free, but I tuck them through the guard on the breast beam so that they fall away from the treadles.  Yes, I have done the stepping-on-it-and-ripping-it-in-half thing.  It is hardly a catastrophe to have to stick the tape back together, but I worry more about the effect of the traumatised pin on my precious cloth!

Here’s a picture, as I approach the end of the wool-weft scarf:

The white paper you see on the cloth beam is an entirely different device!  It is a thick glossy page from an old calendar which I slip in under the apron rod to lie between the beam and the first wrap-around of the woven cloth.  The idea is that it smooths out the bumps which would otherwise be made by the texsolv cords — something that really bugs me.

 

weaving choices

Bradford has turned me in to such a sampling addict that I am sure I could weave the whole 6 1/2 yards of this warp just trying a bit of this and then maybe a bit of that… each weft choice leads on to another and sometimes it is very hard to bring it to an end.

My plan was: one warp, two scarves. One with a wool weft and one with a cotton weft. That is still my plan (phew). However the woolly plan has changed a bit since I love the way it is turning out on the loom and I would rather just full it gently than shrink it up and make it crinkly.

Having started my sampling with this agreeable shade of red…

… I decided that I preferred the second of those two samples, i.e. using two strands per pick rather than one. A bit more playing about and I have settled on one strand of this red (called “weinrot” - how nice to find on receipt of my order that it has a name and not just a number) and one of a darker shade which was already in my stash. I’m keeping them on two separate shuttles for weaving and here they are, taking a rest between pattern repeats at the beginning of scarf number one:

The first four picks, i.e. those closest to the camera, were actually done in the red cotton from the warp. I like to pull quite tight when I am hemstitching and didn’t want to deal with breakages.

The cotton sampling, on the other hand, is still heading for a crinkly destiny.

I’m afraid that the photo doesn’t look nearly as wibbly as the real thing, but at least it disguises the ghastly treadling error which is all too visible here:

I will have to work on my colour changes — it the confusion of what’s going which way that gets me skipping or repeating bits in the treadling. However, as I work on the plain wool version — and I’m about half-way through now — I am getting used to the pattern. There are two pink ends near the middle of the warp which are slightly offset with respect to the treadling and tell me very clearly where I’m at.

 

mini-drawdowns?

WordPress have just made a little change which is Rather Fun. WordPress bloggers can upload a wee picture — called an avatar in blog-speak — which appears whenever we comment on another WordPress blog. Bloggers who come and call on us from other blog systems may well have avatars in their own world, but they don’t show up in our world (a bit like daemons, maybe??) so their comments have always appeared picture-less.

However, at the weekend a new option sprang into life called an identicon. They were invented by someone called Don Park, whose original post about them is here. I haven’t explored the technicalities — and probably wouldn’t understand them — but the outcome is that everyone who comments here will be given a little nine-block image associated with their IP address. And they are delightful! Just like a tiny patchwork quilt or maybe a mini-drawdown: perfect for fibre freaks everywhere.

Treat yourself by having a look at these comments now they have been prettified!