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This and That

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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.

Here are photos of my finished scarf. I wove it in 8/2 rayon, and the structure is Turned Taqueté on 12 harnesses. I love wearing it.

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!

Here is the link to his shop: https://www.etsy.com/shop/BradsWarped. You can get a pattern pack of 6 patterns, or you can buy them individually.

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:

Until next year!

Palate Cleanser

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In September I was weaving text and getting up to speed with my Tempo Treadle setup. When I finished the Bon Appetit mat, I was pretty dissatisfied with how it turned out. If I’m honest, 16 harnesses is really not enough for a good rendering of text in weaving when using 3/1 twill or broken twills as the foreground and background. The letters aren’t scaled up enough for clarity, and it kind of all turns to mush when it is washed. Sigh.

So I needed a change of pace, a palate cleanser, if you will, and the stars aligned quite nicely when I decided to turn my attention to the pattern called Vlak-in-Vlak-in-Vlak. This pattern is woven in Summer and Winter. It has been floating around the interweb for a while. It’s very intriguing. But it’s hard to find it. Links to it are good for a while and then they don’t work anymore. Years ago, somehow I had managed to find a Dutch language copy of the pattern and printed it out. That’s the first part of the story.

The second part of the story is a posting by Bonnie Inouye on a Ravelry Warped Weavers forum on Drafting Turned Taqueté. In 2020 she whipped up a short tutorial and drawdown using just part of the Vlak pattern in Turned Taquete using 12 harnesses. I became obsessed with working this out myself using her method, and I finally was successful. For those interested, this is the link to that posting. (You have to be a member of Ravelry, BTW. Scroll down the page until you find a posting titled “Creating TT drafts with blocks or Images”). The point of this exercise was to draft a Turned Taqueté design with clean lines separating the elements, rather than moving along a diagonal or a curve.

So I was a busy little bee for a while, working on the draft, working on the colors that I ultimately chose. Eventually I came up with this draft:

And I posted it on my Facebook page. People seemed to really like it. I was really excited. I started weaving, and it looked really good. I began thinking that I might work up a pattern for it that I could put in my Etsy shop.

However, I knew that at some point I would have to contact the designer of this wonderful draft. Who turns out to be Ineke Elsinga of the weaving studio Tissien in Haarlem, Netherlands. I emailed concerning my use of her weaving draft, and she kindly informed me that the pattern is copyrighted. Also, it isn’t free. She sent me the link for purchasing the pattern and I did so. The website for Tissien is in Dutch, so when accessing it, it works better if you use a browser, like Google Chrome, with a translation feature. But even if you go to the website, the pattern link is hard to find. So, if you would like this pattern, which costs 15 Euros, here is the link that will get you there:

https://tissien.nl/#!/Vlak-in-vlak-in-vlak-pattern-woven-in-summer&winter-EN-translation/p/306531328/category=21408636

Further, the pattern is for personal use only, for making items for gifts or oneself. Commercial use is not allowed. If you publish or exhibit something using this pattern, the following line must be used in full: Design © 2011 Ineke Elsinga – http://www.tissien.nl. This copyright ownership is clearly stated on the first page of the pattern and when purchasing the pattern.

I’m just glad that I can weave it for myself. And it makes a lovely break from the frustrations of weaving text.

Placemats Again

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Back toward the end of last year I was planning a Turned Taqueté circles placemats warp in Mid-Century Modern colors. Meanwhile I got a special order for the circles placemats in blues before I could get my act together, so that went on the loom first. Once finished, I did something I’ve never done, but have been tempted to do for a little while.

I tied on a new warp to the old warp. And aside from a couple of tying mistakes (don’t ask) it worked very well. And because I tied on to the old warp, I was able to eke out one more placemat than I thought I was going to get from the warp. Pretty cool!

Here they are still on the loom:

Here are the finished placemats, now residing in my Etsy shop:

The warp is 5/2 cotton, sett at 24 ends per inch, and the same width on the loom as my ubiquitous dishtowels. It was fun working in an entirely new colorway. I seemed to be in a rut in that regard, so a completely different style concept was very welcome.

The warp that I tied onto is still in place, waiting for my next project, which will be dishtowels. And how great is it that the towels will be the same sett and width as the placemats?

On Circles

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I’ve been weaving a lot of circles lately. Thinking it might be time for a another blog post. And trying to decide on a snappy title, something to do with circles. I found some circly phrases on Google: circle game, full circle, circling the drain, circle the wagons, magic circle. Nothing spoke to me. So I went with a title that hinted of treatises. Very dignified, no?

I have just finished another dishtowel warp. The Turned Taqueté draft is such a classic by now. I see lots of examples of towels on Instagram and Facebook, and the multitude of color combinations and treadling variations are wonderful. In my last blog post I hinted at a new variation that I was working on, but, sadly, I was disappointed once I committed to trying to weave it.

But this last warp does have a new and improved aspect that I would like to share, albeit very subtle.

This is the draft as it was published by Handwoven magazine last year. Each circle depends for its roundness on the repeats of treadles 2414 or 1828. This draft presupposes a warp of 8/2 cotton sett at 24 epi. But. Sometimes I found myself beating a bit harder and finding my circles somewhat …. compressed.

I found that by adding a half unit in each of the circled (treadling) areas, that is, starting each area with a 1 and ending with a 1x, that the roundness and predictability of roundness vastly improved.

And, it turns out this is a much easier sequence to remember.

This is the other circles warp that I’m weaving right now on my Ashford. It is a 16 harness point twill draft and comes from the collection called Thrilling Twills by the late Ingrid Boesel from Fiberworks. The possibilities are endless on this kind of draft. Change the liftplan (or tie-up) and you have a piece that is entirely different.

As soon as I started my adventures on the table loom, I realized that I liftplans were essential to making any kind of progress when weaving.

[A liftplan is a treadling scheme which is particularly useful for floor looms having a direct tie-up, one shaft per treadle; for dobby looms, mechanical or computer; and for table looms. The tie-up part of the layout is either empty or appears as a straight diagonal line.]

I am a very visual person, and as it turns out, I find that liftplans are infinitely better for visualizing a weave design. Consider the Turned Taqueté draft in liftplan mode:

While I would never attempt to weave from this on my treadle loom, someone with an 8 harness table loom would find this a very snappy alternative, no?

My journey into weaving theory has included a deep dive into the book The Liftplan Connection by Alice Schlein. This is a manual which teaches how to use Photoshop and pattern presets to design for dobby looms. Liftplans! My version of Photoshop is a very up to date Photoshop 2020. But with persistence I’ve been able to take her tutorials using a much older version and make them work. Mostly.

Circles Fad

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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:

https://handwovenmagazine.com/join-in-the-circles-and-checks-weaving-fad/

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.

Stay safe!

A Tale of Two Warps

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It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Worst: well, no need to explain that. Best: unlimited weaving with no end in sight! Woohoo!

On my eight shaft loom I’ve got a dishtowel warp in 8/2 unmercerized cotton in blues and greens, and I threaded it for Turned Taqueté according to the ideas I was exploring in my last post. I threaded a straight draw following a light/dark color sequence all the way across. I used a two-block profile draft from Jakob Angstadt. The first block is on harnesses 1-4, and the second block is on harnesses 5-8. The design is symmetrical, and I am keeping to color combinations of dark/dark, dark/light, light/dark and light/light in treadling.

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 😉 .

Turned Taqueté: Eight Harnesses and Beyond

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Ever since I got my 16 harness Ashford table loom I have been doing a lot of mining my weaving library for drafts of over 8 harnesses. Most of my books are of the 4 to 8 harness persuasion, although I have a few books that go into the 8-32 harness stratosphere. Most of my books I’ve had for decades. I have Weaves A Design Handbook by Eleanor Best (1987). I have 8/12…20 An Introduction to Multishaft Weaving by Kathryn Wertenberger and the two-volume collection of patterns by Jakob Angstadt. I also have the newer books by Marian Stubenitsky.

Those books are fine, but probably the most precious part of my library is my collection of Weaver’s Magazines. There were 44 issues published, and I have all but the first four. Whenever I sift through my stack, I always see new stuff, and this time I was struck by all the 16 harness projects that were included, and was just so grateful that I have kept these magazines for all this time.

In particular, I found three magazines with articles on Turned Taqueté projects. The above issue #42 Winter 1998 has an article by Alice Schlein for a project for a 16 harness reversible rug with an advancing twill threading and a one-shuttle Turned Taqueté liftplan (treadling). And what is the pattern? Circles!!

The next issue 27 Spring 1995 has an article by Lucille Crighton which shows how to use Turned Taqueté with three different threading sequences on 16 harnesses for some really creative patterns using different textured yarns.

This issue #12 Winter Quarter 1991 has an article by Betsy Blumenthal titled “One-Shuttle Wonderful” and it was a revelation. It is a thorough explanation of straight draw Turned Taqueté from 4 harnesses to 16 harnesses. (She did leave out 8 harnesses, but I’ve got that covered. Read on!)

Blumenthal starts out on four harnesses on a straight draw, very much like my first forays into Turned Taqueté. Two pattern blocks are possible by changing color order from A=DLDL to B=LDLD. She then zooms up to 16 harnesses, on which four pattern blocks are possible on a straight draw threading, with no color order changes. A=DLDL(harnesses 1234), B=DLDL (harnesses 5678), C=DLDL (harnesses 9,10,11,12), and D=DLDL (harnesses 13,14,15,16). As in standard block weaves, any 4-block profile draft may be used here, and woven with one shuttle. Tie-ups provide for combinations of all dark on top, all light on top, plus each block separately or in combinations on top. I was doing a happy dance.

But what about 8 harnesses? I scaled back and came up with a 2-block threading and tie-up that provided for all dark sections, all light sections, and sections with light and dark, or dark and light.

I’m already planning out new ideas for towels. So. Much. Fun.

Turned Taqueté Circles Published!

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Big news chez iowaweaver! My Turned Taqueté circles draft has been published by Handwoven Magazine in their May/June 2019 issue. I received an advance copy yesterday, and the digital version is available on the Interweave website as we speak. (There they are: in the left hand corner looking all cute.)

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.

Turned Taqueté Tea Towels – Déjà vu All Over Again

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I wrote my first Turned Taqueté blog in October 2012. Where does the time go? People starting noticing that particular blog post and the one following. But. It took some time before someone on Facebook kindly informed me that one of the weaving groups there was all over that blog post and weaving Turned Taqueté towels like gangbusters. So, what did I do? I joined the weaving group on Facebook. And a few others ; – )

Above, photos of the very first tea towels.

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.

Next up: Living Coral Turned Taqueté Circles towels. Of course!


Mixing It Up

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On the loom

My experiment sample with mixing rayon chenille and 4/2 rayon yarn in a Turned Taqueté warp turned out well enough, but I felt that it needed one more iteration. I wanted to try that mix with 1450 ypp chenille weft to see if the drape couldn’t be improved. I had barely enough painted 4/2 yarn for another warp (100 warp ends for 5″ width), but I thought that would be just enough for a fun little project before diving into more dishtowels for the new year.

underside on the loom

I found a ball of 1450 ypp chenille that I had dyed Red Wine. It was just enough. I wove like the wind. I have the treadling order for the Circles draft imbedded in my brain and it went pretty fast.

After it came off the loom I gave the scarf a good soak in Eucalon, squeezed it out well, then tumbled in the dryer until it was good and dry.

Here are two views of the finished scarf showing the texture and color contrasts created by the different colors and types of yarn. The scarf has a nice drape. And I like it the best.

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