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Stashbuster Turned Taquete Towels

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I am slowly cleaning out my studio, going through my yarn, some of which has been on the shelves for literally more than a decade. We plan to pull up stakes next year and move to be near the grandchildren (yay!), and moving every last little cone of yarn doesn’t really make sense. To that end, I decided to finish up all the mini-cones of 10/2 cotton that I bought in the 90’s in a Turned Taquete Dishtowel warp. I supplemented judiciously with newer 10/2 cotton that I bought last year, but I did it! I can cross one more thing off my inventory list.

I designed a very simple Turned Taquete warp:

This is my standard straight draw threading. I alternated dark/light threads for the first block, then alternated light/dark for the next. The third block is back to dark/light. You can do that as many times as you want to get the width that you want. For the treadling, I go 1314 with a color, then I might switch to 2324 for another color, but you don’t have to. You could treadle 1314 for the whole towel, and just change colors without changing the treadling at all. Easy peasy.

For blogging purposes I took some informal iPad photos of the towels before they are cut apart and wet finished.

This is Destash Towel #1:

On all of these I was aiming for 1″ checks, but I wove them 1 1/4″ or so to allow for shrinkage. I had six colors on bobbins in a rotation that I repeated 4 times. My notes are bad on this one, but I think I alternated 1314, then 2324.

This is Destash Towel #2:

For this one I again used six colors in rotation. I wove each color on 1314, then 2324. I still ended up with 24 checks, but this time I would have 2 repeats of the rotation.

This is Destash Towel #3:

This one was more complicated, using 5 colors in rotation, but alternating them like this:

[color] a on 1314, [color] b on 2324, [color] a on 1314, [color] b on 2324

[color] c on 2324, [color] b on 1314, [color] c on 2324, [color] b on 1314

[color] c on 1314, [color] d on 2324, [color] c on 1314, [color] d on 2324

[color] e on 2324, [color] d on 1314, [color] e on 2324, [color] d on 1314

[color] e on 1314, [color] a on 2324, [color] e on 1314, [color] a on 2324

[color] b on 2324, [color] a on 1314, [color] b on 2324, [color] a on 1314

I was starting to do anything to keep the interest up….

This is Destash Towel #4:

Desperate to finish at this point. I just treadled 1314 for the whole towel, using 6 colors in rotation, repeated 4 times.

Destash Towel #5:

Oops, I had enough warp to weave another half of a towel, and save it for myself. It’s kind of a tradition now.

I treadled 2324 with just one color, going for the stripes.

Now I am moving on to all those odds and ends of 6 ply rayon for a stashbuster rayon scarf…

 

Jitterbug and Turned Taquete: Step By Step

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I’ve always been intrigued with this design.

I found it in the book A Handweaver’s Source Book: A Selection of 146 Patterns from the Laura M. Allen Collection, edited by Marguerite Porter Davison. It is the first pattern in the book, appearing on page 12. This pattern collection differs from most in that the draft is given in a shortened version and it is assumed that the weaver will be able to derive a useable draft from the information given. Certain conventions apply: a standard twill tie-up and tromp as writ treadling.

Meanwhile, I have been studying Marian Stubenitsky’s Weaving with Echo and Iris. I love the designs in this book, and I wanted to weave them, but I also wanted to understand how to take a profile draft all the way to a Turned Taquete draft. Not easy. Not intuitive. Also, when I try to get my head around network drafting, which Stubenitsky relies on a lot, my eyes roll up in my head, and I reach for a glass of wine.

In this post I will take you through the steps that (I hope) will get any weaver from a four harness pattern draft to an eight harness Turned Taquete fabric. (Disclaimer: I’ve only done the one design, so this process is only for the bravest of the brave. Expect setbacks. But persevere.)

First Step: Take the pattern and write it as a four block profile draft. Treadling is tromp as writ.

Second Step: Rewrite the four block draft as eight blocks. (You will need eight blocks to translate to eight shafts in order to interleave the threading.) Treadling is still tromp as writ.

Here is the eight-block threading, also known as the Design Line:

In her book, Stubenitsky devotes a huge amount of space to four-color threadings, but I was more interested in two-color threadings. I zeroed in on interleaved threadings that can be woven as Turned Taquete, see pages 195-199. Once the eight block Design Line is established, the next step in the book is to take the line and pair each end on a 1/1 network. Since I don’t do Network Drafting, I prefer to just say, Pair each end with its up or down partner without increasing the total number of ends. As I see it, this pairing of ends in the Design Line will create more of a flow in the design, easing the blockiness of it.

So this is the Third Step and this is what that draft looks like:

Notice that the tie-up is now 4/4 and the treadling is still tromp as writ. Here is the threading:

The next step is to interleave the paired threading at an interval of your choice. I decided on an interval of 4, but you could do 3. This is why we have weaving software. I went to Threading, Echo, and chose my interval, and then voila.

Fourth Step:

Now the number of warp ends has doubled, and has two alternating colors. Later I will change the black and gray to aqua and magenta. The weft will be lavender.
Fifth Step:
Adding tabby treadles to the tie-up (10 treadles are necessary here) and inserting tabby shots to the treadling draft. One repeat of the threading is 264 warp ends. One repeat of the treadling is 264 weft shots. I doubled the threading to 528 ends. One, because you really need to do that to get the full impact of the design, and two, because my warp was sett at 56 epi and I wanted more than four inches in width. Here is the treadling draft and tie-up:
This color draft shows the final result.
I was a bundle of nerves getting the warp on the loom and starting to weave. The warp is 20/2 tencel sett at 56 epi, and it took forever to thread the heddles. The tencel itself is a joy to work with and it wound on just fine. I wove a few inches and was so overjoyed that it actually worked that I forgot that I was weaving top to bottom instead of bottom to top. In addition, I am weaving the back as the front. Yikes!
I threaded the warp colors magenta/aqua instead of aqua/magenta. Turns out that makes a difference ; – )
A few photos:

I’m using 20/2 tencel as the weft, but I’ve been reading about projects with 30/2 tencel or 60/2 silk as weft. If I had used a finer weft, the pattern motif would weave with less length. I will wait and see what the final result looks like once off the loom and washed and pressed. That 30/2 tencel is kind of hard to find, and silk is really not in my budget.

I’ve got enough warp for a second scarf, and I will try a different color weft instead of lavender for that one. Meanwhile, back to the loom!

Theory and Practice and Weaving from Times Past

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Ok, I am working on a dishtowel warp and this is just a quick follow-up post to my last post. That post was all about how my Turned Taquete threading (which is actually just a straight draw) could be tied up for twill treadlings.

I’ve got enough warp for four towels and this is number three. And looking pretty good. As I explained before, threading stripes of solid color in between the stripes of contrasting color will ensure that the twill will show well.

*************

Now, on a completely different subject, I have begun “scanning” my slides of weaving from times past. I finished my Masters Degree in Craft Design in 1987 and began weaving and exhibiting for a period of time after that. I took many slides of my work, and have just finally begun the process of sorting these slides, and reproducing them digitally.

My gizmo of choice is this:

The Lomography Smartphone Slide Scanner works with my iPhone to capture the slide images quickly and easily. While not the super quality of the slide scanners I used to work with in my former life as a Curator of Visual Resources, the images I am getting are good enough and sometimes even great. I edit them in Photoshop, and upload them to Flickr. Some blog readers may have already noticed them on the Cooliris Flickr Wall on the right. More are coming!

And I will talk more about these weavings in a future post. For now I will say that I did a ton of work in boundweave with Summer and Winter threadings. Inspired by Peter Collingwood’s book on rug weaving, I called it polychrome Summer and Winter on opposites. Now everyone calls it Taquete. (Who knew?)

 

Turned Taquete Twill Variation [or] The Weave That Keeps On Giving

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I hope everyone had a good holiday and isn’t too tuckered out after all the festivities. On my to-do list for January: a blog post about my latest batch of Turned Taquete dish towels.


I decided on colors reminiscent of the desert, or clay pots (or something), so I called them Desert Sands. I did four, and I decided to try some variations with weft choice and tie-up/treadling. The results were suprisingly interesting and downright fun. The first two were like the one above. Changing colors and blocks in a sequence that I decided on beforehand, and I like those just fine.

But, I needed a change, so I decided to weave one towel using one color and treadling just one block. It wasn’t boring at all, and it was faster, since I wasn’t changing bobbins every inch or so. The result was the towel below. Suddenly, instead of checks, we’ve got stripes! And I do love me some stripes.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! I really geeked out on the fact that the towel stripes are completely reversible. Voila:
The edges were the only part of the color sequence that were a solid color. All the other threading blocks alternated either dark/light/dark/light or light/dark/light/dark. By treadling a single block with a single color, the alternate warp color, whether or dark or light, always stayed on the back. BTW, this happens with any of the towels that I weave, checked or not, but with the stripes my delight in the process went a little overboard.
I wove the last towel using the stripes idea with a different color weft, but with this one I decided to go out on a limb and try a completely different tie-up and treadling sequence. Because I could.
If you look closely at the edge of this towel on the right, you will see a zig-zag twill. That twill appears across the whole towel of course, but you only see it on the edge, because I threaded the edge with the sequence light/light/light/light (same/same/same/same). The middle stripes all aternate, so the twill is a bit more, umm, subtle.
Keep in mind that this version of Turned Taquete is threaded on a straight draw. Never mind the color sequence. Straight draw means you can tie up for twills and you can treadle any twill sequence you want. (Light bulb going off in my head!) However. The twill only shows up in the stripes that do not alternate colors. Check it out. I blogged about this Turned Taquete design earlier:
By inserting non-alternating color stripes in the warp, I was able to create a step-ladder effect in the checks. Now look at it with a twill tie-up and a zig-zag twill treadling:
I know, right? (The black sripes are twill too, but they’re black/black so you won’t see it.)
Now, let’s look at roughly the same drawdown in color:

You can really see the zig-zag in the non-alternating color areas. The fact that this is a straight draw threading, while seemingly simple, just upped the potential number of variations on one warp by a ton!

For all the four-harness weavers, it doesn’t make a difference if you do this on four or eight harnesses. I do eight, but I like to utilize all the harnesses on my loom for any project. Saves the dreaded moving heddles chore. So here is the same design on four harnesses:

You’re welcome!