I Never Sample …. Again

Posted on October 31, 2018 by iowaweaver | 2 Comments

Yep, I did it again. I sampled. Sorry not sorry.

Ahem, let me explain. In Marian Stubenitsky’s book Weaving with Echo and Iris there is a Turned Taqueté project of sorts using cotton chenille and 8/2 cotton together in the warp, and cotton in the weft (see page 199 -200). This is as close to a real project as Ms. Stubenitsky ever gets, since her book is more of a reference work than a how-to, but I was very curious how to make the mixed warp work with my now go-to weave structure.

My drawdown isn’t an exact copy from the book. If I had used her draft, I would have had 4-thread floats, and those are too long for rayon chenille. The chenille for the project in the book is cotton, which doesn’t pose as much of a worming risk. I took the zig zag profile draft, letting Fiberworks do its magic, and I produced a drawdown with floats no longer than 3 threads.

I own an over-supply of 1450 ypp rayon chenille, and finding ways to use it is kind of critical. The thing is, I needed to find a warp to pair with the chenille that is similar in weight and fiber. I eliminated 5/2 (too thin) and 3/2 (too thick). According to my handy Master Yarn Chart, somewhere in the world there is 4/2 cotton, and at 1680 ypp I thought that might work. But I really wanted rayon, so I asked Google if there was any 4/2 rayon in the universe, and I actually found some on eBay.

I took a flier on that 4/2 rayon, found that it was just what I needed, and painted the skeins in a colorway I use for 8/2 Tencel in my Etsy shop called Summer Melon. I paired Summer Melon with 1450 ypp gray rayon chenille and wound my warp. And yes, I added extra length for sampling. I sett it at 20 epi, and then started searching through my stash for a likely weft. I was going for thinner weft than I have ever previously used in Turned Taqueté. For drape. Because thinner weft is very often recommended for Turned Taqueté, and because I have stubbornly ignored said recommendations.

Here are my first efforts:

In the top sample I used 20/2 cotton in aqua for weft. I knew that was going to be wildly inappropriate, but I just needed a clear contrast for my next efforts. The next weft is some old dye-experiment 16/2 soysilk in a rust red. I felt that 16/2 was a size that was getting closer, but still no cigar. My gut feeling was that 8/2 rayon was really going to be the one, so I ordered some and dyed it oxblood red.

As you can see, the motifs are in better proportion. But here’s the part that I think is really significant with this mixed warp. Turned Taqueté depends on color contrasts for designs to appear in the weaving, and we have that here. In addition, there is texture contrast, which adds a whole new dimension to the structure.

After a gentle soak in Eucalon, I air dried, and the drape is very silky. Shrinkage after washing was pretty consistent for all three samples: a whopping 25%. The scarf warp that is left on the loom may be on the short side after it is all done, but I have all the information I need for future projects.

I think this is it!

P. S.

Posted on August 20, 2018 by iowaweaver | 3 Comments

The saga continues …

Recently I was researching the weaving pamphlets published by Robin & Russ Handweavers titled “Warp and Weft”. I have three issues and I wanted to find out if they existed online anywhere. As luck would have it, I found a blog that had links to that very series. (The blog belongs to Robyn Spady and it is chock full of lots of good information.)

The link she provided belongs to the On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving and Related Topics. If you haven’t been to this site, you really should. There is a plethora of weaving information, including PDF’s of long out of print documents. All for you.

So then, I thought, what if this site has Practical Weaving Suggestions too? And yes, kids, it does. It has PDF’s of many issues (not all), and it also has a chart of issues and years. I cross-checked the chart with my spread sheet and found two of my missing issues. So what did I do?

I downloaded them! I got “Imprisoned Sequins” by Mary M. Atwater:

And, I got Vol. XXII (c. 1952) “Planned Weaving for the Handweaver’s Wardrobe” by Marta Page, which, on the surface sounds kind of ho-hum.

But when you look further, you find the Fledermaus Shortie:

which has an oddly modern flair:

Unfortunately, actual instructions for weaving and sewing the Shortie are not in the issue, but instructions for ordering them (sans internet) are provided :-).

I wonder if any copies are still around …

May we also suggest . . .

Posted on August 6, 2018 by iowaweaver | Leave a comment

I wrote about the “Practical Weaving Suggestions” pamphlets published by Lily Mills in my last blog post. These pamphlets ceased publication in 1971 and they were followed in 1976 by a new series, also published by Lily Mills, called “Lily Weaving Suggestions”. These pamphlets started out, at least, in a more magazine–like format. They were in color and longer, most were 6 pages, with stapled binding.

The projects were more modern, some with a counter-culture vibe, some with a more fashion-forward bent. To wit: the issue with a cover model rocking a pair of handwoven denim “jeans” 😉 .

The designers changed with each issue, and many names are unfamiliar, although some are: Persis Grayson, Elmer Hickman, Mary E. Black, Sadye Tune Wilson, Sallie T. Guy, and Clotilde Barrett.

The Lily Weaving Suggestions series ran from 1976 through 1981, with an issue coming out quarterly. The long format eventually dwindled to the folded pamphlet style, and then stopped altogether (at least, that is as far as my collection goes).

I made a second spreadsheet listing all the issues and their contents for this Lily Weaving Suggestions series, and you can see it and/or download it here on ScribD. In addition, The spreadsheet list for “Practical Weaving Suggestions” is also on ScribD here.

In other news, we are closing out week 1 without a kitchen, and we are on the camping-out-in-your-own-house-and-no-way-to-cook diet.

I Love This Stuff

Posted on July 26, 2018 by iowaweaver | 5 Comments

I’ve been a collector of the “Practical Weaving Suggestions” pamphlets published by Lily Mills for a long time. These pamphlets go way back to the mid-20th century when weaving was often a cottage industry for homemakers. They provided all kinds projects and ideas, while at the same time marketing Lily’s weaving yarns. Sound familiar? 😉

Many very well-known authors of handweaving books wrote for Lily Mills, such as Mary Atwater, Harriet Tidball, Osma Gallinger, and Berta Frey. One pamphlet titled “The Profile System of Writing Drafts: How to Adapt the Same Design to Several Techniques” by Helen L. Allen and Osma Gallinger, a seemingly revolutionary concept at the time, was a very detailed transcript of a presentation made at a national conference.

The publishing dates for the early issues are unknown to me. They are labeled by Volume and Number, starting with Vol. I, No. 1, and continuing through Vol. XXVIII. Then a different number system begins with Vol. I-55. My guess? Volume I, 1955. The last issue in this system that I have is Vol. I-71 (i. e., 1971). I started a spreadsheet for this collection as a way of keeping track of what’s missing and what I have duplicates of.

I don’t remember the first time I found one of these pamphlets, maybe at a library book sale, but when eBay took off, I bought a lot of them. Then recently I bought another big batch (thank you, Facebook buying and selling groups!!!). They may be old-fashioned, but they are packed with weaving history and information, and even some very precious woven samples. Many are in very fragile condition depending on how they were treated for the last, oh, 50 or so years. Some have 3-hole punches for a binder. Some have name stickers. Some are just ragged around the edges, but aren’t we all?

Anyway, recently Interweave Press put out a call for submissions on the topic of multiple projects on a long warp. Well, I have to say that Lily Mills had that one covered more than a half century ago. And when I say long warp, we’re talking 40 yards (!). However, the projects are probably not to the taste of today’s weaver. Aprons, anyone?

In other news, I have a dishtowel warp on the loom, and looming (hahaha) plans for a full kitchen renovation. Luckily, I can weave upstairs, the cats will be boarded at the kitty hotel, and I can weave while pandemonium reigns.

Back in the Day [3]

Posted on April 12, 2018 by iowaweaver | 1 Comment

This is the third in my series of occasional postings about my earlier days weaving. This blog post was originally published January 2, 2016 on my first blog site, which is no longer in existence.

To review: My focus had been on weaving rugs in Summer and Winter Boundweave on Opposites (Taquete). This is a weft-faced weave of great flexibility using 6 blocks for design, woven on my 8 shaft loom. Each block can be woven independently or combined with other blocks, and up to 4 colors employed, a great advantage for designing.

I had decided to go small. Weaving rugs was just too costly and consumed too much space. My idea was to create small, rug-like pieces in cotton. I would sew them to good quality mat board and exhibit them in metal frames. I chose 5/2 cotton for warp and weft, and this turned out to be a good decision. For my first series I warped 5/2 cotton at 12 ends per inch and 10 inches wide. I figured 30 blocks, 5 repeats of a straight draw profile draft.

Here is a scan of my design for Magic Carpet #1:

My design method was pretty idiosyncratic, yet it worked well for me. I would make designs on the computer, using my (now) antiquated Apple IIe and the weaving software I was using at the time. Each design was from the same straight draw threading profile, but with a different tie-up. I took the designs and tie-ups, cut them into strips, and started arranging them until I liked the result.

Magic Carpet #1 was pretty awkward. I was just starting to see what the possibilities were. Not my finest effort…

Magic Carpet #1

Magic Carpet #2 was better, and the colors worked well. Notice the rather blocky paisleys at the top…

Magic Carpet #2:

Here is the scan of the design for Magic Carpet #3. The design strips don’t show it, but the threading profile shows I used only five blocks for the main design. The sixth block was reserved for a border on the sides. A solid border on top and bottom completed the color frame. I often added color samples on the side for each part of the design.

Magic Carpet #3:

If you squint you can see the “paisleys” in dark and light blue in the second design area from the top :-).

Magic Carpet #4 also has a border all around, this time of metallic yarn that was roughly the same size as 5/2 cotton. I used a lot of metallics as time went on…

Magic Carpet #4:

Black border on the next one.

Magic Carpet #5:

Magic Carpet #6:

Magic Carpet #7 with metallics worked into more of the design and no borders on the sides:

I really loved combining bands of design, working out color combinations, trying to balance both color and movement.

My next series focused on grids. But we’ll do that next time.

Back in the Day [2]

Posted on March 7, 2018 by iowaweaver | 4 Comments

This is the second in my series of occasional postings about my earlier days weaving. This blog post was originally published May 12, 2015 on my first blog site, which is no longer in existence.

We left off with my description of Taquete (or Polychrome Summer and Winter on Opposites) rugs. I wove these rugs on heavy linen warps sett 5 epi. For some rugs I used heavy rug wool that I ordered undyed. I then dyed the wool in small batches and created a whole range of colors that would blend together as I wove.

The rug pictured above is titled Plaited Rug #2, and was designed and woven in Feburary of 1988, following from the rug titled “Plaited Rug” in the previous BITD post. That first Plaited Rug was more straightforward. The blocks were all the same size, with only the colors changing. Plaited Rug #2 combines color progression creating a sense of receding space with stretching and squashing the motifs’ sizes. I exhibited this rug with the title “Flying Carpet”.

Here is a detail of that rug:

The profile draft for this rug was a straight draw, using each block twice. The design resided in the tie-up and the treadling draft followed an undulating twill. To wit:

Later that year, in December 1988, I did another one of these Plaited Rugs. The idea was pretty much the same, creating a sense of space with color blending and bending and stretching the design motif in various ways.

Here is a detail:

Here is a scanned page from my notebook showing the color gradations (which didn’t scan very well!) I used in my profile draft:

Eventually I decided that these kinds of weavings were too expensive both to make and to sell, and too cumbersome to store and exhibit.

I did some rugs with commercially dyed rug wool, and it was this one that set me on a path:

Ironically, that path was not to weave more rugs, but to weave small tapestries with cotton warps and cotton wefts. The technique, though, Taquete, would remain the same.
I called this rug Straight Draw Rug #1 (working title, not exhibition title). and it was the prototype for my method of design from quite a while after that.

More next time!

Back in the Day

Posted on January 3, 2018 by iowaweaver | 1 Comment

(This blog post was originally published March 11, 2015 on my first blog site, which is no longer in existence.)

In which I begin an occasional series of blog postings on the body of my work that began seriously in the late 1980’s.

Back in the day, I produced a lot of weft-faced rugs and small loom-controlled tapestries based on block weaves, mostly 6-block Summer and Winter, woven on my 8-harness loom. I could squeeze a lot of design out of six blocks. There would be a background, and for contrast, up to three other shuttles with different colors. I rotated the shuttles carefully, always keeping them in a certain order, and would change the colors out as the design progressed.

While I referred to the technique I used so often as “Polychrome Boundweave on Summer and Winter”, many now have replaced those six words with the very economical term Taquete. Woven without a tabby, the pattern blocks are woven on opposites, combined and defined by the weft colors.

The rug above is an example of this technique and was part of my Master’s thesis, written in 1987, titled “Computer Design in the Handweaving Process” at Iowa State University. (There is a scanned copy of my thesis available on-line now (sans pictures). You can find it here.) Titled “MacKintosh Variation #2”, this rug is one of several riffs I did off the design work of Charles Rennie MacKintosh, a Scottish architect working at the turn of the 20th century. I did two other rugs as part of that thesis. Then I graduated.

Another piece titled “Plaited Rug”, woven later that same year, and using the same technique, is shown here:

Here is a detail, which shows the color blending a lot better:

Here is a copy of the page from my weaving notebook, showing how I planned this piece:

The draft shown is a profile draft with 6 blocks. (Going back through my old records I am constantly amazed at how consistent my design ideas have remained!) My rubric was using a straight draw in the threading quadrant and in the treadling quadrant, and finding the design in the tie-up. I wanted to express the image of a plaited twill. I used at least two shuttles. When there was solid gray, I used two shuttles to maintain the same texture throughout. Mostly, I would alternate between gray and a pattern color, but there were times when I would need three shuttles, when there were three different color areas across the same row. Since this didn’t happen often, I guess I must have figured the overall look of the rug wouldn’t suffer.

I only have ten treadles on my loom, and the combinations of tie-ups were many more. I would have had to do a a lot of crawling under the loom to keep making changes (I think I’ve blocked that memory out…).

Anyway, this Plaited Rug really marked the beginning of the series of loom-controlled tapestries that I worked on for the next 8 or so years. I quickly shifted to a smaller format, from wool to cotton, from the floor to framed pieces. I have been scanning the slides of the work that I did, and am just beginning to appreciate the intensity and consistency of this body of work.

More to come! I’ll keep you posted 😉

More Towels … with a New Twist

Posted on December 16, 2017 by iowaweaver | 3 Comments

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. 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!

Blast from the Past

Posted on December 6, 2017 by iowaweaver | 5 Comments

(This blog post was originally published May 16, 2013 on my first blog site, which is no longer in existence.)

I wove the rug pictured below in 1988, right after I graduated with my Master’s Degree in Craft Design from Iowa State University. I did an in-depth study of block weaves and computer-aided design. At that time there were a LOT of different little micro-computers and weave design programs. I used a funny little program on an Atari computer to run a compu-dobby attached to a Macomber loom in the university weaving studio. At home I purchased a program for the Apple IIe called “Pattern Master IV” from the company that later became AVL Looms.

I used that program to design this rug, and wrote it up in an article for the long ago defunct weaving magazine The Weaver’s Journal. They wanted to publish it, but they ran out of funding and were never able to do so. So my article sat in a folder ever since then. I always liked my design and the rug I wove. I’m not sure if I still have it. But the design remains one of my favorites.

The rug itself is woven using boundweave on Summer and Winter. This is a weft faced structure in two colors of rug wool with a linen warp. The article (see below) has more specs.

I recently scanned the article to PDF and uploaded it to Scribd, where it is now available to read. But I warn you, there’s a lot of writing about designing double two-tie twills, which kind of made my head explode. Also, there’s a lot of stuff about working with Pattern Master IV, which you can feel free to skip over (after you stop laughing). The article is mainly valuable to me for the profile draft of the woven rug, which I can use in other weave structures. My old fave Diversified Plain Weave comes to mind…

https://www.scribd.com/doc/141871137/Two-Tie-Twill-Rug

Old Things (continued)

Posted on August 31, 2017 by iowaweaver | Leave a comment

In my previous episode I casually revisted an old project that I turned into armrest covers. The book from which I took the draft for that project named the structure “double two-tie unit weave varied by two weights of yarns.” You will recall that this book is Kathryn Wertenberger’s 8,12…20 An Introduction to Multishaft Weaving. Interweave Press, 1988.

Here is my simplified rendering of the unit structures from this draft. On the left is the front side view, and on the right is the back side view. This is a thick and thin structure, so the drawdown reflects that with the ultra-teeny tie-down threads on harnesses 1 and 2, and the ultra-teeny treadling on the tabby wefts:

In a seemingly unrelated sequence of events, I was sorting magazines and sorting books and making some choices about where to put them on some new bookshelves in my studio, when I was surprised to find the same project by Kathryn Wertenberger for Asian-style mats in a very early issue of the Handwoven Magazine’s Design Collections. No. 2 to be exact. Published in 1981.

In this early version of the project the fabric description is “Modified double summer and winter.” Same mat, same threading and treadling, but different tie-up. Here is my rendering of that draft:

I am inclined to favor the description of the structure as modified double summer and winter (as in the Design Collection magazine). But, I favor the tie-up in the book. So go figure. And don’t get me started on the epi (it is 20, not 21).

Just chalk all this up to ravings of someone who has been weaving so long that I’ve forgotten whole projects. To wit: I found notes for another project in this weave structure that I wove in different colors in 1991, seven years before the purple runner of 1998. Plus. I found another runner of the same design in yet another colorway in a box in the attic with some other woven items that I forgot about (from 1991-ish, I presume) that I have no notes for at all. Bad form. Really bad form.

Those who have both publications in their libraries, should take a look at both drafts. Then scratch your heads.

Technical details: I chose different yarns and setts for my runner projects compared with the published projects. My thin warp and weft was 40/3 cotton and my thick warp and weft was 5/2 cotton. I sett the warp at 32 epi, 4 per dent in my 8 dent reed.

Here is a quick photo of the project-with-no-record in my notebooks:

Thickandthin copy

There. Now it’s documented.