I'm Alice Schlein, a weaver in South Carolina. A few times a week I write about my weaving, Network Drafting, Amalgamation, bread baking, my morning walks, and whatever else strikes my fancy. Thanks for stopping by! Comments are welcome.
Network Drafting: An Introduction By Alice Schlein. Break away from the block. Curves for your dobby loom. Originally published in 1994, now available as print-on-demand from www.lulu.com.
Monographs
Echo Weave Based on the 1996 article in Weaver's, Issue 32. With brand new diagrams and high resolution scans of original fabrics. Pdf available for immediate download. $7. USD. Available from LoftyFiber.
A Crepe Is Not Just a Pancake 52 pages of text, b&w and color diagrams, and drafts for multishaft tradle & dobby looms. Many color photos of actual cloth. Methods for drafting your own crepe weaves. Annotated bibliography. Pdf available for immediate download. $21. USD. From LoftyFiber.
Lampas for Shaft Looms Class notes from Complex Weavers Seminars 2016, newly revised and formatted, in pdf form for download. A review of methods for designing your own lampas fabrics for treadle looms, table looms, and dobbies, eight shafts and above. Over 90 color photos of actual fabrics with drafts. Includes info on pickup lampas and a lampas bibliography. View on a computer, or print out one copy for your own use. USD$21. From LoftyFiber.
Amalgamation: Double Your Dobby
24-pages of text, diagrams, and color photographs, in pdf format for download. Create drafts for 8 or more shafts in half-drop or brick arrangements which would normally require twice the number of shafts. Related to network drafting, this is a technique for intermediate or advanced weavers with dobby looms or multi-shaft table looms. Includes guidelines for amalgamation with current weaving applications. View on a computer, or print out one copy for your own use. USD$21. Available from LoftyFiber.
I enjoy browsing for tablet weaving drafts on Pinterest. A prolific textile pinner is Silvia Dominguez, and here is a band I started this weekend based on one of Silvia's drafts. I inserted my own colors.
The first picture was taken in the evening, with artificial light, very warm:
This morning I worked with a challenge that turned out to be much more interesting than I had expected. I wanted to put text on top of a very highly patterned background, just barely making the text legible but not too legible. The goal was to make the observer curious and work a little to read the text. The solution I finally settled on was to add a narrow (4-pixel) border around the letters to isolate them slightly from the background. It did the trick.
The tablet weaving students are getting more comfortable with threading their cards. Penny finished her Egyptian Diagonals band. I love her subtle color scheme.
Carol started a threaded-in pattern a few weeks ago, and completed the threading in class today. Then she really took off!
Only a few inches a day unroll here; I am being kind to my body, stepping away from the loom frequently. But with persistence, it will get done. This was yesterday's birdseye view of the work in progress:
And this was today's:
Click to see a little closer. The light was unusually good this morning, so you may be able to see that the primary cloth of this lampas piece is basket weave.
And outside? Slowly the temperature is creeping up and when I went out to turn on the air compressor, it was quite balmy.
On Friday I made a big pot of borscht with beef, onions, potatoes, and two different kinds of beets. Unfortunately my guests didn't much care for beets and it was not a huge success. But they did like the homemade bread with fennel, so it all turned out OK. And Steve brought me flowers. Thank you, Steve. I am enjoying the flowers today as I eat borscht for lunch. I like borscht, actually.
The photos in the background are by Bruce. They cover one wall of the kitchen, and I get to enjoy a changing display 24/7.
At OLLI Sandy brought in her week's homework for tablet weaving class. She finished the entire band she warped up last week. It's gorgeous! Great color choices and perfect selvedges. She's now a certified tablet weaver (as well as an accomplished basket maker).
Ta da! I just finished registering online for Complex Weavers Seminars. It went smoothly. Trouble is, I wish I could have signed up for more than one seminar for each time slot. Sad face.
Every once in a while this placemat turns up in the laundry, and I stop and smile and remember. My weaving beginnings date back to my sixth grade classroom in Elizabeth, New Jersey; 1950 that would be. The teacher was Julia Loso. She had a 4-shaft Structo loom warped up in the corner of the classroom with the Honeysuckle overshot draft, and every sixth grader that year had the opportunity of weaving a placemat, carefully following the draft. This is my placemat. Weaving it was such a thrilling experience that I knew that some day I had to have a loom of my own and be a weaver. Thank you, Julia Loso (And yes, I did go back to Elizabeth and found Mrs. Loso and thanked her personally, when she was long retired and in her eighties. She actually remembered me).
The fringes on this mat are nearly all worn away from repeated launderings. Weavers, take note. Hems are better than fringes on items that will be washed frequently. And then…and then there is the signature a little unsupervised two-year-old inscribed with indelible marker pen. Also a bit of history.
If you'd like to weave your own Honeysuckle mat, here's the draft.
A few more inches today on Slashes. Many interruptions, but progress is being made.
Yesterday our class was reduced in size because of illness. Penny & I had the classroom to ourselves! Penny had made a lot of progress over the weekend; she now knows all about S and Z threadings, and her threaded-in band is coming along nicely.
With so many handweavers now enjoying the benefits of weaving on jacquard-type looms (TC-1 and TC-2 from Digital Weaving Norway and the Jac3G from AVL), it seems like a good time to remind you that The Woven Pixel (see sidebar), first published in 2006, is still available as a free download from Handweaving.net. TWP is a collaborative effort by Bhakti Ziek and myself, and is a manual for designing for jacquard and dobby looms using Photoshop®. It encompasses over 360 pages and has chapters on the history of jacquard as well as detailed chapters on double weave, taqueté and samitum, lampas, weft-backed structures, warp tapestry, and others, as well as hundreds of illustrations and diagrams.
The CD that came with the original printed version is not, however, included with the free download, but is still available from Bhakti or myself as a digital download for $100. USD. It includes over 1400 Pattern Presets for all the structure described in the book, and is an invaluable timesaver. If you'd like to purchase the CD, please email me and I'll send payment instructions.
And if you're enjoying the free download of The Woven Pixel, please consider making a donation to Handweaving.net for their wonderful work in making free weaving resources available to all of us.
The story I was starting to tell here has disappeared during a Firefox crash. I don't have the heart to rewrite it. So I'll briefly say that the weather has been conducive to cocooning and not going out among people (except for the tablet weaving class, of course!). Spending much time at the loom(s), reading, and playing Scrabble. I did manage to put my X on the double letter square last night, but that's the best that can be said about my Scrabble game. Loom work is slightly better. Here's a demo project I worked on while the students were rewarping their looms yesterday. I finished it this morning.
The Endless Dobby Warp has been sitting idle for far too long. But during the hiatus, something seems to have clicked and this new draft is cheering me up.
The warp is a networked twill in a random mixture of red & green cottons, and the wefts are green cotton and black tencel. Click to enlarge.