A New Look for Atwater-Bronson Lace?

Can you believe this is the same structure as the May Towel of the Month?  Who knew Lace Bronson (aka Atwater-Bronson) could take on a three-dimensional look almost like a waffle?

To get this result, instead of threading 14 units of Bronson and one unit "turned" as in the May towel, I tried threading 2 units of the lace alternating with 2 units of the turned lace.  I wove similarly, 2 repeats of each treadling sequence alternately.

This is another sample, 2 units of lace threading alternating with 3 of the turned.  You can see that the fabric is not anything special to look at, under tension on the loom.

But what a surprise I had when I put the sample into water to wet finish them!  Had anyone walked into my kitchen they would have found me standing there grinning at the sink, almost bouncing up and down in delight.

The effect seems to be caused by the floats in the two directions all pulling the plain weave areas to one side of the fabric or the other when the yarns are allowed to relax in the water.

January's towel draft, and about the yarns

"Snowflakes are suggested by an all-white Spot Bronson weave." (Clotilde Barrett, from the original article, Weaver's Journal, Fall 1983.)

Here's the draft I promised, re-drawn since the old one was a bit fuzzy.  I hope this one's clear enough to work from the image.  Notice that Spot Bronson is threaded with every other thread on the same shaft.  This means you will need lots of heddles on the one shaft, and may have to move some from other shafts (unless you have more than four and can use some other shafts to tie up identically and work along with it).  The treadling is "as drawn in".  I've marked the center pick of the pattern, from which point it reverses.  You can use the threading sequence for the entire pattern.  Repeat as many times as needed for the towel length of 38".

Now, about yarns: I don't have any 40/2 or 20/1 linen in my stash.  When I looked to buy it, I found that would mean quite an outlay in dollars to do all the projects (most of them use these two yarns).  So although linen towels sound absolutely scrumptious, I'm going to try using some yarn I have already.  I have some 20/2 cotton that according to weaving books can be sett at 30 epi (the same as the article recommends for the 40/2 linen).

As an aside, in my search I could not find bleached linen in 40/2 or 20/1 anyway; I could only find half-bleached.  If anyone knows a source, please let me know!

So have you decided to try a kitchen towel in Spot Bronson this month?  What kind of yarn will you use?

May TotM - Weaving (Turned) Bronson Lace

Here's the May Towel-of-the-Month on the loom.  This is 40/2 linen warp and 20/1 linen weft, with stripes of 5/2 cotton warp and weft.

The "lace Bronson" (horizontal weft floats) and "turned lace Bronson" (vertical warp floats) are being used to put the thicker pink threads to the top side of the fabric, to accentuate the windowpane check.  I find it interesting that where the two lines of lace intersect, there is a little area of plain weave.

I omitted two picks before and after putting in the weft stripe, and I think it looks better this way.  Compare the intersection in the top of the photo with that at the bottom.  The one at the top is woven according to the original draft.  The one at the bottom omits the "extra" pick between the blocks in the treadling sequence, and omits one of the two picks on either side of that "extra" one.  So instead of adding a pick between the blocks, they are "sharing" a pick instead.  See how the plain weave area looks more square in the bottom intersection, while the top one looks like a vertical rectangle.

Here's the modified treadling sequence.  I think it must be the color-and-weave effect that makes me think this looks better, because now there is more plain weave in the horizontal direction.

January's towel of the month - weaving!

Yay!  all sleyed, ready to weave...

I raised shaft one, and checked that I had every other warp raised.  This was easy to see since I used a 15-dent reed: one yarn should be through each dent in the reed.  I raised all the other shafts (two through four) and all the other warps came up, looking similiar - one per dent.

Then I raised just shaft two, and checked that it was the pattern threaded for that shaft, in little groups of two: first six groups, then three spaced out, then five, then three...looked good.  Similarly with shafts three and four.  I tied up the treadles for weaving, and feeling smug that I didn't have any threading errors, raised the first shed to put in a header...and snapped a warp yarn. Presumably it was a threading error, but we'll never know since it came right out of the heddle it was in.  So I repaired it and started weaving.

I wove a couple inches of plain weave for my hem, then inserted a piece of rug warp that I'll remove after it comes off the loom, to make a line for my

hemstitching.

Then I started watching the pattern appear.  It's an attractive pattern with a square field formed by the five groups of 2s and 3s, and a sort of an oval leaf shape in a star pattern.  I was happily weaving along thinking how nice it was to weave something that went so fast, when I noticed the right selvedge warp starting to wear.  I was getting too much draw-in.  So I sistered in another edge warp, and "bubbled" my weft more to get the draw-in to lessen.

Plain weave in this threading is formed by raising shaft one (foundation threads), versus all the other shafts (pattern threads) alternately.  You can see by studying the tie-up in the draft that the "spot" in spot Bronson is formed by leaving one pattern shaft lowered while the other shafts continue to raise to make plain weave, causing the weft to float over the 2 or 3 threads that are on the lowered shaft.  On the reverse side, those warp threads float correspondingly as warp floats.  And between them are another couple of layers of threads of warp and weft left just passing across each other, not woven.  These layers of non-interlaced yarns tend to smoosh together and form the spot or bump that makes the pattern.

In her book Handwoven Laces, Donna Muller devotes an entire chapter to spot Bronson.  She discusses the difference in structure and threading from huck spots, and how to use this structure to design your own patterns.

Are you enjoying weaving along in spot Bronson?

Cool Linen Lace in the Light - June TotM Completed

June's Towel of the Month is in Lace Bronson (aka Atwater-Bronson lace).  In this photo it is backlit against an open window in the breeze.  I think it would make some pretty curtains, don't you?

And here's the finished hemmed towel, ready to go to another test kitchen.










How's your summer weaving going?  Do you have a project you want to get done in the long summer days?

January's towel - threading

Are any other weavers threading this yet?  This one was kind of tricky to thread.  I don't think I have ever woven Spot Bronson.  There are so many traditional structures I haven't explored - like the Summer & Winter summer weaving I did for the first time last year.

I complicated the threading process a bit because I did not have enough heddles on one shaft to be shaft 1, so I used shafts 1 through 4 as shaft 1, and used 5 through 7 as shafts 2 through 4.  I will do this to avoid having to move heddles, which I do not enjoy (to put it mildly).  I hope I did not introduce errors by being lazy.

Next step, sleying the dragon - uh, I mean the reed.

Who else is weaving Spot Bronson towels this month?

TotM - June's Draft

 

June's Towel of the Month, like May's, is also Atwater-Bronson lace (aka Lace Bronson), but instead of one of the blocks being turned, this draft uses two "normal" blocks of lace that are woven to make squares in an all-over lace pattern over the towel.

The threading goes like this: 4 ends of plain weave for the selvedge or border, then start the repeating sequence: 10 ends plain weave, 12 ends (2 units) of lace block A, 12 ends lace block B, 12 ends lace block A.   So the repeat has 46 ends.  Repeat those 46 ends 12 times (552 ends).  Then finish with 10 ends of plain weave to balance, and 4 ends of selvedge/border.  Total 4 + 552 + 10 + 4 = 570 ends.

The warp is bleached (if you can find it - I used1/2-bleached) 40/2 linen, and the weft is bleached 20/1 linen.

The treadling repeat in the Barrett article says to put 30 picks of plain weave between your lace block squares, but you might want to try 10 to make it the same "as drawn in".

May TotM Completed

The May towels are completed, and one will soon be on its way to its new kitchen-home.

Weaving this towel made me curious enough to try this structure (lace Bronson and turned lace Bronson) in another variant, and I got a surprising (to me) result.  More on that in a future post!

May TotM - Turned Atwater-Bronson Lace

The May Towel of the Month features a lace weave.  It has warp floats in a contrasting warp, and corresponding contrasting floats in the weft direction, forming a windowpane-check-like design overall on the towel.

The lace is "turned", then, because some of the floats are weft floats (in the "default" or "normal" lace manner), and the other floats are "turned" - in the warp direction.

The draft in the Weaver's Journal article looks to me to have a couple errors in it.  I hope I've corrected them in the diagram here.  I tried it out in the weaving software I have and it looks right.  We'll see when we start the weaving on this one!

Since I haven't seen anyone new joining in here weaving along, I'm changing my plans and weaving only two of each towel, one to give to a family member and one to keep.  Otherwise I'll end up with 24 kitchen towels, which would probably last the rest of my life.  I still hope you will join in the fun and try some of these towels, and try weaving them in linen especially.  I am having fun weaving with linen, and the fiber is so thirsty it dries off dishes without spots or lint and is quick to dry hands as well.

I'm a Cover Girl...

...or, well, at least my towels are.  There on the cover, I mean.  That's pretty darn exciting.  These Atwater-Bronson towels in cottolin are a project in this issue of Handwoven magazine, available from Interweave Press.

Also don't miss article contributions from friends: Trudy S. and regular contributor Susan H., and editing of this issue by Sarah J.

Towel of the month - January - Calculating & Measuring the Warp

As it turns out, I don't have white in the 20/2 cotton.  So I'll be using this taupe-colored yarn for my January towel.  It certainly won't be reminiscent of snowflakes as in the original article.  Oh, well.

The article says to weave the towels 38" long.  It's not real clear whether that means 38" worth of warp or to allow for takeup, so I'm hedging and adding 10% for takeup.  And I'll allow 24" of loom waste (this depends on your loom and your method of tying the warp onto the loom).  I want to make 3 towels, so each warp end needs to be 1.1 x (3 x 38") + 24" = 149.4" or about 150", or 4 yards 6 inches.

I'll be using my loom with a standard warp beam.  So I've found a path on my warping board that is 150 inches long, and I'm measuring the warp.  I plan to warp "front to back" so I am making a thread-by-thread cross at one end and a raddle cross at the other end.

Here's a picture of the raddle cross.  My raddle has 1" increments, so I have one inch worth of warp ends (30 ends in this project) in each group in this cross.  (Don't confuse this cross with the "false cross" that forms on the loop end!)  Here I've measured four inches wide worth of warp ends.

So are you warping your January snowflake spot Bronson kitchen towels yet?

Towel of the month

Happy New Year!  Here's wishing you and yours health and blessings in the coming year.  If you're a weaver, happy weaving, too!  A few months ago I came across an article by Clotilde Barrett in her Weaver's Journal that gives a project for each month of the year, all kitchen towels, each in a different 4-shaft weave structure, as a way to study each structure and end up with a useful sample at the same time.

I saved the article thinking it would be fun to make the projects starting in January, show my progress and stumbles, and invite other weavers to weave along.  Well, January is here, and because I have a piece going on the loom that is turning out to be very time-intensive, I'm not in a position to commit to weaving anything else this month.  But I'd still like to share the projects.  And who knows, maybe I'll need a break from the scary project.

So, the towel of the month for January is... Spot Bronson.  The vitals are:

Warp: 40/2 bleached linen
Weft: 20/1 bleached linen
Sett: 30 epi double sleyed in a 15-dent reed
Total number of warp ends: 561
Width in reed: 18.7"

I'll work up and post a draft and calculations, and I plan to at least post some thoughts on the project later this month even if I don't actually weave it.

You can find the full article and many other gems at Ralph Griswold's On-Line Digital Archive.