Here we are at the end of the year, and I just have a few loose ends to tidy up.
You might recall that this was on the loom a couple of months ago. It is my version of the Vlak-in-Vlak-in-Vlak pattern. If you still haven’t gotten a copy of that pattern, I gave the link to purchase it in my last post. This is not my original pattern. I’m just a satisfied customer.
After that was done, I wove a batch of Circles and Checks towels on my 8 shaft loom, and they are in my Etsy shop. Here are some photos of those beauties:
Next, I want to give a special shout out to Bradley Rohr. He has an Etsy shop in which he is offering for sale variations of my Circles pattern in Wif form and with PDF pattern instructions. Bradley has very kindly given me credit for the original pattern. Always appreciated!
Sales from his Etsy shop raise money for Ukraine. According to Bradley, he and his husband have been able to raise nearly three thousand dollars this year for the UNHCR Ukrainian refugee relief, as well as one thousand dollars for direct support to people in Ukraine for food, diapers, boots for soldiers, etc. This is a great cause, and the patterns are well written and provide endless entertainment!
I wove samples each pattern at the end of my towel warp (see above), and here is a taste:
Just when I thought I might never stop geeking out on woven circles, along comes a new obsession. This one is harder to get my head around. It is imprecise. It takes a lot of technical deep diving. It hardly ever turns out the way I picture it. But it is so intriguing that I can’t stop. Won’t stop.
Weaving words.
Here is the drawdown for my first weaving since back surgery. Mind you, I haven’t even wound the warp yet. It has taken me pretty much the entire recuperation month to get this far. But soon, I will be winding a warp for towels on my 16 shaft Ashford. You are looking at front and back, upside down:
I got inspired for this when I was going through the tutorials in Alice Schlein’s book The LiftplanConnection: Designing for Dobby Looms with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Along with all the other chapters (including one one circles!), she has a chapter on weaving text. Granted, this technique works better with 24 and 32 harnesses, but it is still possible with 16.
Without going into too much technical stuff, it is necessary to have installed a set of pattern presets in Photoshop. Working with layers, the presets are copied into designs on a grid, foreground and background. When finished, the grid represents a liftplan that can then be pasted into a weaving program. Thanks to the Complex Weavers’ lending library, I was able to gain access to the preset library from the book The Woven Pixel by Alice Schlein and Bhakti Ziek.
I also consulted an online tutorial by Margaret Coe, which was much less comprehensive, but still helpful, and began using Photoshop Elements in addition to Photoshop 2020.
You can see already that this is a fly by the seat of my pants operation. Photoshop 2020 does most of what I want very well. Photoshop Elements picks up the slack. (This is much like my relationship with Fiberworks and PixeLoom. They each have their strengths.)
I plan to wind a prototype warp and weave a couple of towels for myself. Glad to be about to be weaving again! FYI, I am slowly opening up my Etsy shop to other items besides the digital patterns. Yay!
Yesterday I was noodling around the Long Thread media site looking for some Loom Theory downloads I purchased a few months ago, and I came across this:
I think it’s fairly recent, and you can find it at this link:
I don’t know if I quite agree with the use of the word “fad”. I prefer obsession or passion, if you will 😉 . However, the nice thing is the wif downloads from this little article are free.
So, if there is anyone out there who still doesn’t have the wif and is pining for a great weaving project, this is the place to go.
This is the first towel, for which I used only a dark blue weft.
This is the second towel, for which I used only a light weft:
And the underside:
As you can tell, I’m big into the checks. And there a few different ways I can play this. I have four more to go, so my next move is to plan number three.
I alternate days weaving on the 8 shaft, and days weaving on the 16 shaft looms. I am well into the second ever warp on the Ashford, this time weaving scarfs in 8/2 rayon threaded to a sixteen shaft straight draw.
This is the first one, now off the loom:
This is the second one, an undulating twill:
This is the third one, just started:
I am still struggling with the warping, and decided to order a raddle kit for next time. The warp sticks provided are very thin cardboard and I decided I really don’t like them, so will switch to wood warp sticks. Plus I will figure out a better way to weight the warp as it is wound on.
I do enjoy the slower, more focused pace that the table loom requires. And I am dazzled by all the pattern possibilities. One of my goals with this loom is to explore more ways to weave circles, a design motif with which I am perpetually obsessed.
I decided to put my Etsy shop on indefinite Vacation Mode, thus avoiding a lot of unnecessary trips to the post office. However, I will be adding to the inventory, so whenever I feel safe enough to go out more, there will be lots of new stuff.
And, I am reading Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety, her first novel, although it wasn’t published first. It’s loooong, and I love her style, and it focuses on characters in France before and during the Revolution. I thought the title was entirely apropos 😉 .
So, the blogosphere and socialmediasphere for weavers and fiber folks has been swirling with the scent of waffles. So to speak. I’ve been catching glimpses of Waffle Weave in from four to eight harnesses and more, in towels and blankets and more. I was intrigued. This is a weave that has stood the test of time, and is ready to be called back into production.
I couldn’t remember if I had ever tried Waffle Weave, but thought I should give it a try as towels, so I looked at my weaving references. The best version I came up with was from my trusty Mary E. Black’s New Key to Weaving. She recommends 8/2 unmercerized cotton sett at 24 epi, and I concurred.
Waffle Weave starts with a simple zig-zag twill threading and treadling, but the tie-up includes floats of increasing and decreasing lengths so that square cells are formed, creating cushiony, squishy pockets of warp and weft. The more harnesses that are used, the deeper the pockets get. For towels, which may get a lot of use, the length of floats should probably be kept to a minimum. The repeat for a square is 6 ends, so 24 epi makes a neat 4 squares per inch. I’ve seen directions for Waffle Weave towels that call for 20 epi, or 3 1/3 squares per inch, but thought the floats would then be too long for my comfort zone.
Pro tip: Notice that I started and ended the threading on harness 3. That was because I wanted to keep the warp float to a minimum length on the outside edges. I also used floating selvedges (always!) and added a touch more width to account for extra drawing-in.
The resulting towels, which are going in my Etsy shop btw, are fluffy and pillowy and sure to be hardworking kitchen friends.
Funny story. Last September I was finishing up (as in hemming) a batch of towels for my Etsy shop when Handwoven editor Susan Horton emailed, inquiring if I would be interested in submitting a project. The theme of the issue is long warps, and they liked the idea of weaving both circles and checks on the same warp.
What could I say? I sprang into action, taking quick iphone photos of the towels.
They loved the colors and designs and suddenly I had another Handwoven Magazine publication. My last one was in 2013, with a Diversified Plain Weave Circles Scarf in cotton and rayon chenille which you can read about here. So it’s been a while. But it’s still fun.
Fast forward to the present. I revisited this draft and decided to weave a batch of towels using a color palette themed after the Pantone Color of the Year Living Coral.
If you start deep diving into the whole Pantone color thing, you can find web sites that take the current Color and create palettes with coordinating hues. I chose a few colors, and then tried to match them with available 8/2 cotton colors from Maurice Brassard. That seemed to work pretty well.
Brassard’s version of Living Coral turned out to be Saumon, in the lower left hand corner. A little too light, but good enough.
Here is the finished set of towels. I treadled each one a little differently. I think they represent the Living Coral palette quite effectively.
So I wove up a batch of my Circles Turned Taquete towels recently. It kind of went in fits and starts. My notes tell me I began in October. I had ordered a beautiful palette of cotton yarn in what I called “Beachy” colors, and I was, like, game on. Â But change was in store…
Change #1. This is 8/2 unmercerized cotton and it was a brave new world of warping and weaving for me. Previously, all my cotton dishtowels have been woven with 10/2 mercerized cotton. But I had come to think that 8/2 unmercerized cotton was really a better choice for towels. It’s easy to find, comes on smaller cones so you can order more colors, and the weaving community seems to have come to a consensus on its appropriateness for the end result. I was a little twitchy about unmercerized vs. mercerized though. Mercerization is a process that renders it more willing to accept dye, improves color and sheen, but renders it less absorbent. Unmercerized cotton colors are perhaps less bright, but the cotton itself is soft and more absorbent, making it ultimately the better choice for hand towels or all sorts.
Change #2. I picked a group of eight colors and wound my warp. This is a new size of cotton, so I had to choose a different sett for my warp. I chose 24 epi (after checking around the interwebs for a bit to see what others were doing ;-)), which meant that I needed to order a new reed! OMG! I haven’t order a new reed. Ever. But It had to be done. So that pushed my timetable back a ways.
But, once I got going, it was smooth sailing. 8/2 cotton wound on the loom like a dream, and was really easy to weave off. I wove four towels in the circles design and two towels in my checked variation.
Here’s a photo of the two different varieties still on the loom:
And here’s a group portrait of all six after they were washed, and hemmed, and ready for their closeup:
I’m ordering more greens for another batch of towels, probably in a design that doesn’t involve so many dots. Everyone needs variety!
I’ve had a dishtowel warp on the loom for months. Oh wait, was it only April? That’s not that long…. sigh.
I wound enough warp for six towels, the most I’ve planned for, ever, because I’m not exactly a production weaver. More like a see-where-my-whims-take-me weaver. But, my pattern seems to be that my measuring/estimating skills are not quite up there with the professionals. That last towel turned out to be a placemat. But I love it anyway…. 😉
Truth is, just about all, OK all, of my dishtowel warps have just enough left over for a small mat. My collection is growing.
This warp was threaded in my Circles draft for Turned Taquete. I alternated natural color 10/2 cotton with different color stripes of 10/2 cotton from the stash. The idea was to use up some cones, and I did that. I threaded 32 epi.
Here are a couple of shots of the group:
As you can see I produced dishtowels with the original circles treadling and dishtowels with the checked treadling. I used the 10/2 natural cotton as weft for two of the towels. Then I switched to checks.
As in this drawdown:
I alternated natural and brown on one. On the second I rotated natural, tea rose and camelia.
Then I went back to circles and wove one with all mauve. The short number six was woven with all camelia.
Quite a cheerful bunch, I think. Next up, I will get them photographed and in my etsy shop. It’s a good thing, because I am currently all out of dishtowels and I need to stock up!
iowaweaver 