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!
A reader sent me an email recently asking where to find an overshot version of the Jitterbug pattern. The only place I know of where it is published is in A Handweaver’s Source Book, edited by Marguerite Porter Davison. The pattern is credited to Bertha Gray Hayes and looks like this:
The threading is written in a kind of short hand which must be expanded. The tie-up is assumed to be written according to overshot rules, and the treadling is assumed to be written “as drawn in”.
I had already put the pattern into a design line and profile draft when I was doing it in Turned Taquete.
So I took the profile draft, and using the block substitution tool in PixeLoom for 4-shaft overshot, I transformed the design into overshot.
I had to adjust the weft thickness to thick and thin and add a tabby. But it seems to be a rough approximation of the Jitterbug idea. (P.S. It might be upside down. Not sure. Not sorry.)
Overshot patterns can be scaled down so that the floats are not so long. Weaving it in fine threads sett closely together would also mitigate the long floats issue. I am aware that Hayes wrote a book about overshot miniatures, and that this pattern may be published there in an easier to weave version. If anyone has the book, and it is in there, please let me know!
I am willing to email the Wif file to those who might want to try it out.
I am on the other side of my back surgery and everything is fine! No pain! I just have to wait a month before I can resume regular activities.
Just a quick post to announce the arrival of my new pattern in my Etsy shop. This is Turned Summer and Winter Dots or Checks Scarves. It is written for 8 shafts and the dots require 11 treadles (10 if you retie one, which is only needed for the beginning and end), while the checks require only 7 treadles. I wove these in Dragon Tale 8/2 rayon from Earth Guild, sett at 24 epi. Other yarns suitable for that sett will work just as well. You receive a PDF for an 11 page booklet, and two WIF files. You can link to my shop with the button on the right.
It was a slow process getting these scarves off the loom, as I am experiencing a considerable slow-down in my activities due to low back pain and sciatica. Further testing revealed L4/5 nerve root compression for which I will be having surgery next week. Wish me luck!
When I last signed in I promised an 8 harness version of the 9 harness Turned Summer and Winter Dots pattern. That was, like, months ago, I know. I worked it up, and put it on the table loom. I also had some yardage on the floor loom, 6 yards of it, and I also developed a nasty case of sciatica. So, what with one thing and another, time passes, and eventually weaving happens. I present to you, Turned Summer and Winter Dots and Checks for 8 harnesses!
I used 8/2 rayon for warp, pattern warp, and weft, sett at 24 epi. The background is undyed and the pattern colors are my own space dyed colors in the Iris colorway. I adjusted the colors to line up in three different sections, which meant leaving a lot of warp on the cutting room floor so to speak. This was a first for me, and I learned stuff. The colors I chose to align might have been slightly different, but the experiment worked well enough and it was pretty fun seeing the changes as I wove.
The difference between the 9 harness version and the 8 harness was side to side spacing between the dots. You can weave as much space vertically as you want, but the horizontal ranks are as close as they can be.
As a refresher, here is the 9 harness version. There is a 2 thread space which was threaded on the extra harness.
Compare with the 8 harness checks version. No space.
My plan next is to weave the 8 harness version on my 8 harness treadle loom using all commercial yarns and put together a pattern for my Etsy shop. So, stay tuned. I hope the next version doesn’t take so long!
No supply chain issues here, folks. I am running a Black Friday sale on all of my handwoven scarves in my Etsy shop. From now until November 26, there is 25% off my scarves, some of which are pictured here:
To visit my shop just click on the link on the right! Cheers!
Here is my latest turned draft: Turned Summer and Winter Dots. Dots as opposed to circles, which are really nothing more than big dots. It’s all a matter of scale. 😉
The origin of this draft began in the January/February 2015 issue of Handwoven Magazine with the Summer and Winter with a Twist Polka-Dot Towels by Linda Adamson. This is an 8-shaft draft with a tie-up that requires a whole lot of treadles, with the best case scenario being that you just keep re-tieing (if you don’t have 18 treadles on your loom!). I’ve always wanted to try this draft, but the tie-up was a road-block. Naturally, I thought turning the draft might be a solution.
The first time I turned the draft I got a 10-shaft result and I thought “cool!” and immediately put a warp on my Ashford table loom. This black rayon chenille with the multi-color dots was my first try. It worked great. But. I was about 75% finished when I realized that shaft number 3 had not been threaded at all. This wasn’t my error though. Fiberworks just left it out when it turned the draft. So…. I ran the optimize draft function (might have been in Pixeloom, I can’t really remember) and that reduced the draft to 9 shafts.
This 8/2 rayon scarf is the 9-shaft version. It worked just fine as you can see. Notice that the dots are treadled with more repeats in the center. Scaling down widthwise due to yarn thickness caused me to scale up lengthwise. Dots are fussy like that.
I’m not sharing the draft yet, because I’m hoping to edit the draft to 8 shafts. I very much like the 8/2 rayon. I sett it at 24 epi, and each dot is 16 ends wide including spaces between them.
Lest you think that all I do is weave circles: I have some woven yardage in my future, which I will use for sewing some pants. I will be using up odds and ends of 10/2 cotton in colors that play well together. I’ve also been weaving a selection of rayon chenille scarves for my Etsy shop.
For literally years I have provided my Circles Turned Taquete Towels draft for free to folks who visit my blog, and I have been happy to do so. The time seemed to be right to take it on the road, so to speak, and get a little return on my investment. I published my towels pattern in the March/April 2019 issue of Handwoven Magazine. You might think that I made money on it from that publication. But you would be wrong. Handwoven was on the verge of bankruptcy at that point, and it went down without making good on many payments to their content providers, including me.
So. This is my way of getting a little bit back, and if you have enjoyed using my towels pattern, perhaps, you might be interested in purchasing my placemats pattern. My Etsy shop is linked on the right hand side of this blog entry.
When we last touched base I was busily working on a draft for Turned Summer and Winter Dukagang Style in a circles design. The fabulous Tippy was going through her quarantine after radioactive iodine treatment. She no sooner got sprung when she went back into cat confinement because of an infected abscess (don’t ask where) and she had to wear the cone of shame and she didn’t handle it at all well. But she is healed and healthy now and all is well.
Finally, I got back to weaving, and this is what I have to show now. The first draft is the final one derived from my profile draft (see previous post), and the second is the cut back version. The first one wove ovals, as one would expect.
The second one, which looks like turned ovals, actually wove circles. Yayyy!
I chose 12/2 Tencel for ground and pattern warps and for weft, and hand painted all of it. The ground warp was all dark purple, and the pattern warp alternated between purple/space dyed Ferns and purple/space dyed Caribbean. (Ferns and Caribbean are colorways that often appear in my Etsy shop, BTW.) I sett the warp at 32 epi and wove with purple on one shuttle throughout. This worked very well on my table loom, because, on a table loom there’s enough to worry about with the levers and the iPad, etc. At 32 epi, each circle was 1.875″ wide. With finer yarns sett at 36 or 48 the circles will naturally shrink to dots. 🙂
So, the big reveal:
The front and back are visible here, and we can see the vertical emphasis of weaving Dukagang style. The scarf is very light in feel, and notice that you can see through the cloth, giving a lacy quality to the whole fabric.
Next up, you might think I am done with dots, but you would be wrong. Stay tuned!
These are Summer and Winter scarves that came off the Ashford loom recently. I used 12/2 tencel for warp and tabby weft, and 6/2 tencel for pattern weft. I like them a lot, and I really enjoyed weaving them, but I had issues. For one, weaving with two shuttles. Not a fan. For two, the drape is good, but I thought it could improve. Turned Summer and Winter could theoretically solve both those problems. Two shuttles to one shuttle. Horizontal floats becoming vertical floats.
This is the profile draft I used for this project:
Ten blocks when using Summer and Winter for block substitution becomes a 12 harness weave in classic Summer and Winter style. (Keep in mind that the ovals result in a graphic representation that includes tabbies and doesn’t account for thick and thin yarns in the weft. When weaving, I shortened up everything to achieve actual circles 🙂 .)
The weaving program will turn the draft for you, resulting in the following. I know this is very tiny so I’ll just tell you that when turned, the draft morphs to 22 harnesses. Too many for me! (Again adjustments to the treadling might have to be made, this time to lengthen the ovals.)
Not to be deterred, I did some research in my journals and magazines and found two articles that were really helpful. Nothing in my books though. Apparently turning Summer and Winter isn’t really a popular topic, though it really should be. Because…..
What if you could turn a design without actually rotating it? What if you could do it without needing more harnesses? What if you could improve drapability, not needing two weights of warp yarn (with the possible necessity of a second warp beam)? I found the answers to these questions in two articles, one in Weaver’s Issue 29 Fall 1995 by Ingrid Boesel, and one in Complex Weavers Journal number 72, May 2003 by Bonnie Inouye.
In her article “How to Start at the End of a Project and Work Backwards” Ingrid Boesel describes the evolution of a turned classic style Summer and Winter fabric woven on 16 harnesses. The crucial nugget that hooked me was that she used the same weight of yarn for ground and pattern in the warp. By alternating dark and light in the warp and using a twill (closer) sett she created the contrast needed for the pattern design. Boesel used a skeleton tie-up to keep the number of treadles in check. And, she used a different type of tabby.
Bonnie Inouye’s article in Complex Weavers Journal, titled “Turning Leaves”, describes how she developed a fabric for turned Dukagang style Summer and Winter. Her challenge was that she had a design for maple leaves that she wanted to weave in turned Summer and Winter, but if she turned the design the leaves would be oriented incorrectly. It took my quarantine-addled brain a goodly while to work through her process and finally come to understand it, and when I did I knew that drawing from Boesel and Inouye was exactly what I needed to make my “turned” Summer and Winter Circles without actually turning them. (Because, think about it, you don’t really need to turn a circle do you????)
So. I opted for Summer and Winter treadled Dukagang style in the block substitution program. Dukagang style uses one harness for the pattern in the tie-up, as opposed to Classic Summer and Winter which uses two.
I used my weaving program to turn the draft and this resulted (with some modifications):
The modifications being: Now the warp colors alternate light and dark. The weft color is also light. The number of harnesses is still the same. The pattern harness is still only number one. But, this is big: the tabbies are now what Inouye calls “pseudotabbies.” With these changes, the weft floats become warp floats. Drapability is improved. Only one shuttle will be needed.
Observe and compare:
Ingrid Boesel’s fabric also made use of “pseudotabbies” although she treadled it in classic Summer and Winter style, and interestingly, lengthened the floats for even more drape. I have produced the same results in classic S&W with a skeleton tie-up and pseudotabbies. So I can experiment with Dukagang or Classic. (Fist pump!) I will use 12/2 Tencel in both warp and weft, setting it at 30 ends per inch.
Right now my loom room is all in a jumble because we have to accommodate one of our cats in a kitty infirmary as she lives through the aftereffects of a radioactive iodine shot due to hyperthyroidism. Once she’s out of quarantine I will be experimenting with this new “Turned” Summer and Winter on my Ashford loom.
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?
iowaweaver 