WeFF Report

SCHG's Weaving & Fiber Fest was a blast as usual. So many guild members chip in and help, it makes a fun fiber-filled day. Here are Karen F. and Karen L., modeling two tops I had in the fashion show.

The purple and blues one on Karen F. is in huck and huck lace.  The tops have sleeves that are open on top and are secured with a decorative button.

They have a side slit below the arm seam, on a diagonal that gives them a handkerchief-hem look. The green one Karen L. is wearing is in leno weave and has a nice drape.

Photos by Leslie Rodier.

And here's the display of the guild's annual challenge, whose theme was "Fruit". My answer were the towels that are all lined up in 2 rows on the rack. I called them "Fruit for All Seasons Towels", since they were woven in Summer & Winter (haha, get it? - groan!).

Photo by Candy Goodwin.

Seasons

For the change of season, a run of towels in summer & winter weave, just off the loom yesterday and through the wash...

February TotM Finale

 
Here is  February's Towel of the month completed, wet-finished and ironed.  While weaving these, it occurred to me that maybe the switch from treadling A to B and back again at the hem ends was so that the fabric would match on the back when turned under for the hem.  So I did it both ways.  In the towel on the left, the hem matches on both sides; in the one on the right, it contrasts.

You can see the difference in the two yarns I used.  On the right is the heavier yarn I started with, and on the left the 10/2 that I swapped in after weaving the first towel.

I didn't see any comments that anyone was following in February, so I'm keeping both these towels for my kitchen.  The third towel went to another test kitchen, this time that of my sweetheart (it was, after all, Valentine's Day).

February TotM - update

How are you doing on your February Towel of the Month?  Don't forget to reverse the pattern on the second half of your towel if you want your hearts to be a mirror image!

Weave along and get a chance to win the Towel of the Month!  You do not have to weave every month, just the towels that interest you.  If you are weaving along, please leave a comment to let us all know.  Put a link or url in the comment to a photo (on your Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, your blog etc.) of your work in progress. Deadline to post you r comment is midnight GMT Feb 28, 2014.

February TotM - Weaving and the pick-up

To weave February's Towel of the Month, see the tie-up and treadling in the diagram.  Weave using treadling sequence "A" (treadle 1,4,2,4...) for an inch.  Then use sequence "B" (treadle 1,3,2,3...) for one inch, then another inch of "A".

Now begin the pickup sequence:

a. Weave with treadle 1.

b. Treadle #5 but do not throw a weft shot.  Use a thin pickup stick or knitting needle to pick up threads according to the heart pattern.  Pick up 4 warp threads for each black square in the pattern.

c. Push the stick/needle to the reed.  Treadle #4 and throw a weft shot.  Remove the stick/needle.  Beat.

d. Weave with treadle 2.

e. Repeat "b", picking up the same threads.

f. Repeat c.

Repeat a through f for each row in the heart pattern.  Put an inch of treadling sequence "A" between each heart.  The article shows 3 hearts before reverting to plain "A" for the center section, but you could do more hearts to your heart's content.

Weave along and get a chance to win the Towel of the Month!  You do not have to weave every month, just the towels that interest you.  If you are weaving along, please leave a comment to let us all know.  Put a link or url in the comment to a photo (on your Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, your blog etc.) of your work in progress. Deadline to post you r comment is midnight GMT Feb 28, 2014.

February's Towel of the Month - the Pattern and Draft

Here's the draft for February's Towel of the Month.  Like January's towel, it is again sett at 30 epi if you are using the 40/2 linen.

The linen warps are threaded on shafts 1 and 2 and make the plain weave ground, so this structure is heavy on those two shafts.  Shafts 3 and 4 are only used for the cottolin pattern warp.

Turned Summer & Winter is "turned" because instead of a supplementary weft forming the pattern, it's a supplementary warp.  To weave, you only need to use one shuttle with the ground weft.  The supplementary warp is threaded in the borders, and sleyed in with the ground warp as indicated in the draft, so that the warp is double the density in the border sections.  The marks in the draft are if you are using a 15-dent reed.

With 4 shafts, there is only one pattern block; that is, the pattern area works together as a unit when controlled only with the loom.  There are only two things you can make it do using only the loom: weave the pattern floats on the front/top of the fabric, or weave the floats on the back/bottom side.  This is how the weaving will start out: weave the floats on the back for a while, then on the front making a red rectangle in the corners of the towel, then float on the back again.  Then we'll start the patterning, which is done with pick-up.  By picking up the pattern, we will cause select pattern warps to float on the front while the rest float on the back.

That's the basic flow of the draft; we'll go over it in more detail when we get to each step.

Weave along and get a chance to win the Towel of the Month!  If you are weaving along, please leave a comment to let us all know.  Put a link or url in the comment to a photo (on your Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, your blog etc.) of your work in progress. Deadline is midnight GMT Feb 28, 2014. 

February TotM - Hearts in Turned Summer & Winter

Are you ready for February's Towel of the Month?  It features the structure "turned summer and winter".  It has borders along the long edges, patterned with heart-shaped motifs for Valentine's Day.  Here's a fuzzy photo from the original scanned article in Weaver's Journal to give you an idea what it looks like.

This towel, like January's towel also calls for 561 ends of 40/2 bleached linen.  The pattern warp is red cottolin, and the weft is again the bleached 20/1 linen.  The sett is 30 ends per inch (epi) if you want to substitute a different yarn.  The warp ends are 380 in the center plain weave section, 60 in each pattern border (not counting the red cottolin), and 30 at each edge (plus 1 to balance if you like).

So let's get started!  Are you interested in trying turned summer & winter?  I have never done this weave before and I'm excited to try it out.  Next post will be the draft including threading, tie-up, treadling and a pick-up pattern for the hearts.

Weave along and get a chance to win the Towel of the Month!  If you are weaving along, please leave a comment to let us all know.  Put a link or url in the comment to a photo (on your Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, your blog etc.) of your work in progress. Deadline is midnight GMT Feb 28, 2014. 

A Blanket of Leaves

All finished!

Summer & Winter baby blanket - finishing results

I've wet-finished the baby blanket.  I just put it in the washing machine like I normally do my laundry, and then in the dryer on cotton setting.

The top photo is what it looked like before it went into the wash.

And the bottom photo is after.  The yarns really migrated and fluffed up, making it a much nicer fabric, and better contrast between the light and dark areas in the design.

Overall, there was 8% shrinkage in the length, and 9% in the width.

I'll post a final photo of the whole blanket after I'm done hemming and pressing...

Summer & Winter is a tied weave

Summer & Winter is a "tied" weave.  This class of weaves is called so because some of the warps act as "tie-downs" to keep the pattern wefts from forming "floats" that are too long over the surface of the cloth.

In this picture I've thrown a pattern weft without tie-down warps raised.  You can see the long floats that are formed.  This will not make a practical cloth; these floats would get caught and pull out of shape.

In this next photo, I've taken that "wrong" shot of weft back out, and thrown it again with tie-down warps raised correctly.  The pattern weft still sits on top of the lighter ground weave, but it is held nicely in place by the tie-down warps.

Summer & Winter creates a reversible fabric

Now that the fabric is starting to come down onto the cloth beam, I can give you a view of the other side of the fabric.  I am weaving it with the light, or "summer", side facing me as I weave.  Here you can see the dark, or "winter", side.

When woven in its tradtional manner, Summer & Winter typically has this characteristic, where one side is predominantly light, the other dark.  The white warp dominates in some places, forming the light areas.  Where the darker pattern colors float over the warp, the dark areas appear.

The dark/light feature is presumably where this weave structure gets its name.  Other structures can produce this reversible dark/light effect, but for some reason this one got the name "Summer & Winter".

Summer weaving - progress

More leaves (and hearts) are appearing on the blanket.

Summer weaving - no winter today

Finally!  Weaving is started on a baby blanket for a nursery with a woodland theme.  It has been hot ub Southern California, and I'm weaving this "summer & winter" blanket with the "summer" side up, which means the treadling is quite heavy.  Getting a workout while weaving isn't a bad thing, but if I do this structure with this many blocks again, hopefully I'll remember to do it the easier way.

I knew the leaf motif would be large, but its size still surprised me.  I may not get through all the different leaves I designed before I run out of blanket.

 

   

Summer and Winter Baby Blankie - threaded

Is it just me, or is the early morning light shining through heddles threaded in blocks a thing of beauty?

Maybe it's just because I threaded every one of those warps.  So anyway, we're threaded,

sleyed,

 

tensioned and checked.  Here's another cool picture of the wavy tabby shed formed by shafts 3 through 16.

This summer's "Summer & Winter" weaving continued - moving heddles

As I mentioned, I haven't done much weaving using the Summer & Winter weave structure.  This structure requires a lot of heddles to be on 2 of the shafts (the tie-down threads get threaded on these 2 shafts), while relatively few heddles are required on all the other shafts (these are the "pattern" shafts).

In fact, half of all the warp ends are threaded on the first 2 shafts; the other half are distributed on the other N-2 (where in this case, N=16).

So, before I get to the threading, now I have to do what I've decided is my least favorite task in weaving: moving heddles.  I will redefine shafts or reorder them before I'll move heddles.  I've found something to enjoy about all the other jobs.  Still looking for the spoonful of sugar this one.

Moving heddles involves removing the heddle frames from the loom, counting out heddles, unhooking the heddle bars and sliding the heddles off one frame and onto another that needs them.  Here are the frames removed from the loom and all piled onto a table.

Part of the job is done, and that's counting out how many heddles are already on each shaft frame.  Last time I moved heddles, I put a piece of masking tape with how many heddles were on each shaft.  Those are the pieces of tape on the left.  The ones in the middle are just the shaft number (1 through 16).

After getting enough onto frames #1 and 2, the task ended up being largely taking heddles off and storing them.  The inserted-eye-type ones have a direction that makes it easier to thread if they are sitting pointing the right way for your threading hook to go through.  So here I'm threading them onto some cord to keep them in order...

...and bundling them up with the cords.

On many of the frames, the heddles were all every-which-way, so I didn't bother threading them on cords.  It will just be extra tedious to put them back on, one by one in the proper direction, when the time comes.

It will be nice then to know they're all lined up in the right direction like soldiers.  Maybe then I'll take the time to clean the rust off the bars as well.

Leaves in Summer and Winter

I spent a little time and yarn sampling on my table loom, using the structure known as "Summer and Winter", and made these leaf figures:

I want to use this structure to make a baby blanket, since Summer and Winter is a traditional weave for coverlets and throws.  I did the sample because I don't think I've ever actually done a project using Summer and Winter, and I wanted to test out the weights of yarn I thought I would need before ordering more (!) yarn.  I am using 10/2 cotton as warp and the tabby weft, and 5/2 cotton for the pattern weft, which is pretty standard I guess.  I think it is working fine.  I can see, though, that I am going to have to pay attention and make sure I am consistent in how I treat the selvedges in the real piece.

This weave is called Summer and Winter because, as it is traditionally woven, one side of the resulting fabric is darker than the other.  The other side of this sample appears as a white leaf motif on a green background.  The portions of white are where the white tabby weft is showing more, and the green areas are where the pattern weft is allowed to float over more of the warps.  There are several different treadling sequences that can be used, each giving a different shape to the little pixelated units.  Here I am using a sequence that gives each dot of color a kind of rounded shape.