Weaverly

Home Again

For an excellent commentary on the Inspired Design conference, see Stacey's blog.

Conference Continues

Today's Inspired Design conference sessions were a rich mix of excellent presenters. I was especially intrigued by the words of Tim Parry-Williams, who uses jacquard technology to produce seemingly simple (and very beautiful) cloths for boutique clothing, in challenging materials. When asked why he uses such a complex tool for interlacements as plain weave and twill, he explained that this is appropriate technology for someone who has to make small changes fast in the design process, such as converting a 2/2 twill to a 1/2 twill without rethreading a loom. Here's Tim making a strong case for patience and tenacity:

At the end of the afternoon sessions, we were treated to a tour of the Oriole Mill, where Bethanne Knudsen and her staff gave us a demo of her jacquard looms in action, and spoke of the joys and tribulations of running a small mill for custom weaving. Here's Bethanne explaining a fine point of yarn joins:

and more views of Oriole Mill:

This has been such a great conference so far. My head is spinning!

Conference Begins

The Inspired Design Conference in Hendersonville NC is off to a great start. It's wonderful to see old friends and especially good to see how many young faces are here—it makes me hopeful for my craft. This morning I heard Joanna Berzowska, Associate Professor of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University, lecture on work she and her students are doing with e-textiles—textiles that respond to stimuli of light, heat, touch, among others—and I learned about the concept of disruptive thinking—where practitioners of widely different fields of study—collaborate and interact. To see more of Joanna's work, be sure to check out this site. 

A scene at break time, and three jacquard weavers: Belinda Rose, Stacey Harvey-Brown, and Mary Burns.

Chair Finished

Just cut off the loom:

Chair, Again

A few more hours have been logged on The Chair. As you can see, there's a second iteration of the drawing, reversed and shrunk, in a less contrasty color. All this is layered with a photograph of yarn skeins hanging on a rack, and a pattern of circles, translucent. How will it all come together? Hard to tell at this point. When I cut it off and hang it up for photographing, that will be the Moment of Truth. There are about 100 more picks to go.

 

Last night we collected Stacey Harvey-Brown at the airport—she's visiting for a couple of weeks, and we will be attending the Inspired Design: Jacquard and Entreprenurial Textiles conference in Hendersonville, NC, together. Here's Stacey with her first mug of tea. 

More About Pattern Maker

I have a few things to add about the Pattern Maker filter in Photoshop (see yesterday's post). When you first open the Pattern Maker window, you will see the instructions, " To create a pattern preview, select a sample area in the image to use for the preview and click Generate." Do this! Whatever you select will be used as the raw material for the pattern. Select a generously sized area, to give the program lots of options. If you select just a very small portion, the program will only generate patterns based on the material in that selection. The final size of the tiles created is governed by the settings you enter in the width, height, and offset boxes, not by the size of your selection. 

Here are a couple more examples, just for fun. First, the original doodle. Then the pattern generated. Then the file with weaves added. Then the drawdown.

If you have Adobe Photoshop and you'd like to download the layered Photoshop file with the weaves added as layer effects, here it is:

Download 4weaves40x128 

Be sure to look at the layers palette, and turn layers on and off to see what's going on. 

And finally, here's a design sent by Ruth; she generated the original design with the Photoshop Pattern Maker, and added the weave files in Photoshop. I've added Ruth's wif file (RB patt gen draft.wif), with her permission, for you to download. Way to go, Ruth!

Download RB patt gen draft 

Photoshop's Pattern Maker

Photoshop (I'm using version CS3) has an odd little filter called Pattern Maker, and I've never been quite sure what to do with it. Today I started fooling around with it again to see if I could make usable patterns for dobby—my goal would be to start with a 4-color doodle and create repeating patterns that would fit into a 40x128 pixel matrix, which would then have weave structures applied.

Here's the starting doodle:

 

Then I applied the Pattern Maker filter (Filter>Pattern Maker) with the following settings: width 40 pixels, height 64 pixels, offset horizontal, amount 50%, smoothness 1, sample detail 5. By repeatedly pressing the Generate button in the Pattern Maker window, I generated lots of patterns, most bad, some good. I saved the following three:

With any of these, a 40x128 selection could be extracted and used as the basis for a dobby lift plan for 40 shafts. Here's an example created with the second of the three above patterns. It uses two twills, basket, and plain weave. You could do the same with other numbers of shafts. Give it a try!

Plain Weave Two Ways

While I'm slogging away on the mantles cloth, there is nothing compelling to show you. Indeed, I'm quite bored with the project. It's a good thing I'm not a production weaver. Once I get a loom warped and all the design kinks worked out, the weaving is painful to me. I get through it by listening to good stuff on my iPod, but really I'd rather be watching Law & Order, or balancing my checkbook, or doing anything but weaving yardage. 

So instead of whining any more, I'll show you these scans of plain weave, both of them 12x life size. The first is a cotton handkerchief, and the second is the sleeve of my flannel nightgown.

Strange Botany

I saw this amazing sight behind the pharmacy the other day. Click to enlarge.

Luckily I had a camera in my pocket and was able to bring the image home. Where it simmered and percolated and became this:

It still hasn't completed its metamorphosis. That will take a little longer. Hint: yarn is involved.

Four-Shaft Twill

My notes for this fabric have gone astray (New Year's resolution: keep better records), but it appears to have been woven on an 8-shaft block draft. However, if the fabric is turned 90º, it could easily be woven on 4 shafts, with the tan and black stripes in the warp and a single gray weft. 

The yarns were 10/2 mercerized cotton at 24 epi and 24 ppi.

Here's a close-up. Click to enlarge.