Weaverly

The Serpentine Path

Every day I try to weave a few feet on the Tribal project, a double plain weave. The cloth is snaking around the breast beam, over the knee beam, under another routing beam, then to the back of the loom, over another beam, and then down to the cloth storage beam. I love this part, when you can see the cloth front and back, and get a sense of its journey from warp beam to cloth beam. For some reason this makes me think of the folk song John Barleycorn. Humor me.

By the way, that's my old gram scale on the windowsill. I don't use it much these days, since I've eliminated the dye area from my studio. 

Chasing Shadows

The afternoon sun cast the following tree shadows on the grass just outside my studio door:

The lacy pattern appealed to me. I snapped a photo and took the image into Photoshop, where I applied thresholdiing:

That was too busy for me, so I went back to the original image, applied a 5-pixel Gaussian blur, and then thresholded it again:

Much more interesting! I cropped a section from the center, reduced it to 40x40 pixel size (nearest neighbor method), and took the result and mirrored it vertically, to get this:

I then added weave structures, à la Woven Pixel, 

and then mated this with a point threading for 40 shafts:

It barely resembles the original photograph. You never know where these exercises will take you.

Geometry

I've spent an entertaining morning trying to work out the geometry of pouches; specifically, I want to be able to construct a lined pouch totally on the sewing machine, with zippers, and with all the raw edges enclosed, inside and out. This is impossible, unless I leave a tiny part of the lining seam open so that I can turn the finished bag inside out; this opening is sewn by hand at the end of the construction. It's also important to remember to leave the zipper open! Guess how I know this.

 

I'll also have to do some tweaking so that the secondary seams fall at the fold lines, not right smack in the middle of the face or the back. But progress is being made. Janet wanted to know what I was going to do with 100 zippers, and I told her that at the rate I was going I might use them all up in ten years. That might be true.

Meanwhile, the primary goal (making a dent in my handwoven fabric stash by sewing pouches) appears to be receding. It's like eating an elephant one bite at a time.

Fiber Is Good For You

Here are some scans (about 8x after you click on them) of the gorgeous spinning fiber I bought last week from River's Edge Weaving Studio. It's a blend of 75% merino, 10% banana fiber, 10% bamboo, and 10% soy. The local wag wants to know if I'm going to put milk on this and eat it for breakfast. Very funny.

I think I'll just enjoy it the way it is for a while, before I actually spin it up into yarn.

Another Pattern Generator

Any other fans of random pattern generators out there? I found this one today, and it has possibilities for dobby design. Unikatissima has constructed this online generator for cellular automaton patterns. I think it would require a bit of tweaking in order to be used for dobby patterns, but here's what I've managed to do with it.

First of all, it requires that the width of the pattern is an odd number, so in order to generate usable dobby designs, I ask for an even number in the height field, then turn the pattern 90 degrees after it is generated. Then I have to do a bit of fussing with the pattern in Photoshop to reduce it to single pixel size (potchkying, if you will).  

But having said all that, here are a few 24-shaft designs I came up with. 

…and with weaves added (as layer styles):

 

Introducing New Jacquard Class

On August 10-13, 2009, I'll be teaching an introductory class in jacquard weaving at my studio. Welcome reception Sunday evening, August 9. I'm calling this class "Pixelmania" to emphasize the connection to the techniques in our book, The Woven Pixel: Designing for Jacquard and Dobby Looms Using Photoshop®. Pixelmania will be limited to four students. 

I've been thinking about this class for a long time, and am now ready to launch. Students will bring their own laptops with Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) installed. We'll spend the first day or two on the basics, such as becoming familiar with layers, pattern presets, color indexing, etc., and we'll build our own personal libraries of weave structures. From there we'll move on to interpreting our imagery in weavable form, and then the actual weaving. Every student will have the opportunity to weave at least one file on my TC-1 (jacquard) loom, which is prewarped and waiting!

Some of the structures we'll be exploring are samitum:

…and weft-backed satin:

 

…and shaded weaves:

Would you like to dip your feet into the exciting world of jacquard?

Then join us in Greenville, South Carolina for four days of intense study and weaving. 

For more information about Pixelmania and an application form, click here.

Entertainment

Weaving is my passion and I'm deadly serious about it. But knitting is what I do for entertainment. I knit in the evenings when I'm listening to music, or in the car, or when sharing a glass of wine with friends. I enjoy small projects that use up bits and pieces of handspun yarn and make a dent in my button collection, such as these tiny pouches. 

They are from an ingenious pattern by Rita O'Connell: the Buttoned I-Cord Pouch. As Rita describes it, "This pouch was designed as a project to help you experience the versatility of I-cord." The construction is really clever: it starts with a flap knit sideways, then the I-cord is knit integrally around 3 sides of the flap (the buttonhole formed as a loop along the way), continuing in a ring which forms the "lip" of the bag. Then the body of the pouch is picked up from the i-cord ring and the flap, and knit circularly to the desired length, where it is kitchenered. It only takes an hour to make, and is such fun.

All Rolled Up

A boring but necessary part of getting woven hangings ready for exhibition is the finishing. For this batch I've elected to do simple hems—no fancy stretching and mounting—and the hanging rods have already been prepared. This is mindless work, but not unpleasant. I'm listening to a good book on my iPod (The Practice of Deceit, by Elizabeth Benedict), and the day has flown by. I've got about two thirds of the hangings mounted and rolled up, waiting for their labels. 

Stitching

Some of the "missing" horizontal lines have been restored with embroidery, and now Aviary looks more like the original drawing. 

I've also done some extensive stitching on this triptych, in chain stitch and colcha stitch, and here are the results. Click to enlarge.

Colcha stitch as used here is widely spaced, but it's also a wonderful stitch for covering large areas of a design quickly, with most of the embroidery yarn coming to the surface of the fabric.

Tribal Beginnings

The new 2-color dobby warp is tied on and ready to go. This is the same setup as the one I used for the torah mantles, but the effect is quite different. I will be weaving double plain weave at 30 epi, with 16/2 cotton yarns; each plain weave layer will be 15 epi. The fabric looks sleazy on the loom, but will shrink up nicely after washing, and produce a drapable cloth. 

I had woven the same design ("Tribal") in 8-end satin on this threading when the warp was cottolin, and it looked like this. Same design, different structure, different yarns, different hand.