Fiber in the Hands of an Angry Spinner

Fine Threads Study Group 2012 Weaving Notes Jen Garrison Stuber

Pre-weaving notes:

I was inspired to join the Complex Weavers (and then the Fine Threads Study group) by Lillian Whipple’s article on WeaveZine, about weaving letters. The definition for the Fine Threads Study group is a thread that is “fine for you.” 10/2 is the finest thread I’ve worked with to date, this is my first run at it. Earlier this year, I went to Portland for a block workshop with Rosalie Neilsen, and started working with Summer and Winter when I got home, using a 5/2 UKI cotton for the background, and a 3/2 cotton for the pattern. This is my first project on my shiny new 12 shaft Spring, though I have worked on an 8 shaft Spring in the past. I wanted to use the 12 shaft so that I could produce 9-block letters (leaving shafts 1 & 2 for tie-down, and shaft 3 for a border).

Further, I decided to increase the complexity of my weaving by making the background a houndstooth in complementary colours, which I hope will be wildly live, but not vomit-inducing. It took a long time to decide on a block colour (I started with a brown, which ended up looking sadly matte, and also discarded a magenta and a wild teal). I’m not sure the houndstooth won’t get lost with the dots of the pattern thread running through it, and I hope I don’t hate myself for picking something that takes three shuttles. I also hope that I am a capable-enough weaver to make relatively decent selvedges.

CWG reduced to CW

Weaving Post-mortem:

The first major mistake I made was in not winding enough warp. Although I had figured the main project would only take a little more than a yard, and I therefore added two additional yards for loom waste and sampling, I did not calculate a number of mistakes, which included a miscalculation of how long “CWG” would be, a clerical error that resulted in making two sets of “cW” instead of “CW”, and the final undetected threading error that I wove all the way through. I was able to make 7 sets before I ran out of warp, thus allowing me to send the more perfect examples to the study group. I keep meaning to adopt the maxim, attributed to any number of religious fiber artists across the world (including Muslim weavers and Amish quilters) that “only God is perfect,” and therefore the errors are intentional– but that is not the case here.

Yes, I often weave while wearing owl jammies. Doesn't everyone?

The second mistake I made was using a countermarch loom with a skeleton tie-up that did not (and in several cases, because of triple-treadling, could not) account for all the shafts. In the sampling phase, I attempted to remedy this by use of make-shift sword like Thai backstrap weavers use (though in my case, I used a long stick shuttle), but I still caught a number of warp threads. In the weaving, I decided that lifting (or pushing) shafts into place while weaving was faster and more accurate.

But in addition to being annoying and slow, I think several of my errors were still the result of not having a clean shed. In retrospect, I should have tied up the upper-lamms on all the shafts except 1-2 for all the single-use treadles, and figured out some way to tie up as many as I could on the double-use-treadles. I did find Tim’s Rudimentary Treadle Reducer ( http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~timm/treadle/form1.php ), which was a great help with the original tie-up for “CWG” and unnecessary for the final “CW” variation, as I had enough treadles without reducing.

I am getting better at discovering mis-treadling as I weave, and I ended up doing a lot of un-weaving as I went, but generally not more than 6 picks (the scissors and I have become good friends). I have also concluded that weaving software, and not graph paper, is the way to go to document drafts. (Though I confess that drinking a beer while trying to draft with permanent ink pens is not the brightest idea).

All in all, I am pretty happy with the results, though, as I am about to commence cutting my cloth in preparation of sending it, I hold a bit of terror at that prospect. I plan to iron on an interfacing to prevent unraveling, and mount the samples with archival tape. Then, I plan to have a beer.

Spinning:

Amos, Alden. The Alden Amos Big Book of Handspinning. Interweave, 2001.
Boeger, Lexi. Intertwined: The Art of Handspun Yarn, Modern Patterns, and Creative Spinning. Quarry Books, 2011.
Boggs, Jacey. Spin Art: Mastering the Craft of Spinning Textured Yarn. Interweave, 2012.
Brown, Rachel. The Weaving, Spinning, and Dyeing Book. New York: Knopf, 1983.
Casey, Maggie. Start Spinning. Interweave, 2008.
Franquemont, Abby. Respect the Spindle. Interweave, 2009

Weaving:
[coming soon]

The Portland Handweavers Guild hosted Blocks Workshop in February with Rosalie Neilson, and when they had a few extra seats, they let the Spokane Handweavers Guild know. I had a mental block about blocks (pun only partially intended), and jumped at the chance. What fun the weekend was!

Rosalie Neilson Block Workshop

So, of course, when I got home, I set to work on what I wanted to make, scribbling and drafting, and making notes.

Draft and Cloth

I used UKI 5/2 cotton for the warp and the tabby weft, and UKI 3/2 cotton for the green pattern weft, sett at 16epi, which I think was tight enough, but I fear I need to beat a LOT more firmly if I have any hope of squaring up the project. I used a birds-eye/O tiedown of 1,2,2,1.

Front Pattern -- my crosses are longer than they are tall.

Front Detail

Back Pattern

Back Detail

Pre-wash Stats:
On-loom, the warp is 16″ in the reed.
Off-loom, the width is 14 7/8″.
Each motif is 4″ wide and 5 1/8″ long.
Sample = 14 7/8″w x 11 1/2″l, fringe excluded.
Washed on a hot-normal-light load in a Staber front-loader, with a cold rinse.

Post-wash Stats:
Each motif is 3 5/8″ wide x 4 7/8″ long.
14 1/2″ wide x 11″ long, fringe excluded.
Hot Ironed and air-dried.

More stats:
(In one inch of cloth length)

On loom . . . Off loom . . PPI
12 . . . . . 12.5 . . . . in pattern
16 . . . . . 16 . . . . . 5/2 plain weave
13 . . . . . 13 . . . . . 3/2 plain weave
08 . . . . . 09 . . . . . 3/2 + 5/2 in plain weave, separate sheds
10 . . . . . 11 . . . . . 3/2 + 5/2 (ie: 10 each) in plain weave, same shed

Come to the Spokane Weaver’s Guild meeting tonight at 6pm at the Orchard Crest Retirement Community, 222 S. Evergreen, Spokane Valley, just south of Target.

Saint Distaffs day, or the morrow after Twelfth day.

Partly worke and partly play
Ye must on S. Distaffs day:
From the Plough soone free your teame;
Then come home and fother* them.
If the Maides a spinning goe,
Burne the flax, and fire the tow**:
Scorch their plackets***, but beware
That ye singe no maiden-haire.
Bring in pailes of water then,
Let the Maides bewash**** the men.
Give S. Distaffe all the right,
Then bid Christmas sport good-night;
And next morrow, every one
To his owne vocation.

Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648)

* To feed (alternate spelling of “fodder” from the German füttern).
**In the textile industry, a tow (rhymes with cow, unless referring to cellulose acetate which sounds like toe) is a coarse, broken fibre such as flax, hemp, or jute. Flax tows are often used as upholstery stuffing, and tows in general are frequently cut up to produce staple fibre.
*** Petticoats
**** To drench or souse with water.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me:

Twelve empty bobbins,

Eleven top-Whorl spindles,

Ten bags of mohair,

Nine niddy-noddys,

Eight bumps of roving,

Seven shepherds shearing,

Six fluffy fleeces,

FIVE SPINNING WHEELS,

Four umbrella swifts,

Three silk caps,

Two English combs,

and a Spinster laughing out loud.

After nearly 8 years in the high mountain desert of Spokane, there are a few things I still haven’t mastered. One of them is finding the right amount of (less) flour in recipes. I mixed this dough the other day, and I knew, right then, in my heart of hearts, that it was too dry, but somehow I thought some magic might happen to it in the refrigerator.

It did not. I tried to roll it out this morning, and it split and crumbled and cracked.

Michael comes along, as I’m cutting the dough to salvage it into wedges of cookie, and says, “You know what might work great?” and I say, “No. I’m not doing that.” And he says, “I haven’t told you,” to which I reply, “I already know you want to take it into the shop and press it. This never ends well for my cookie sheets.” He’s giddy. He says, “You know you want to know.” I hand him a round of the dough. “Besides,” he follows up, with a glitter in his eye, “I already wrecked* the set of pans I’m going to use.”

Yup. That’s a pretty bad cookie sheet.

You’ll be happy to know that he protected the dough with sheets of parchment paper.

Working to get equal weight distribution — the first round had a high point.

Even better weight distribution!

The presser decided the bits that squeezed out needed eatin’.

Cookie dough, freshly pressed by a 12 ton press.

And presented to the baker, for cutting and baking.

*This refers back to an incident in the late 90s, when he decided to “dry” some pea gravel that he wanted to fill the legs of the doctor’s table he bought to use in his wood shop, so it wouldn’t wobble. He spread the pea gravel out on baking sheets, and set them in the grill. He managed to kill both pans AND a set of professional-grade oven mitts. Confronted with this, he said, “Gravel gets really hot — who knew?”

For the purposes of this explanation, let’s assume you are weaving some probably pretty-ugly cloth. The upper layer of your cloth is alternating orange and green yarn, and the lower layer is alternating blue and pink yarn. To make matters worse, you have loaded your shuttle with a thick, black yarn.  I am sorry to say that you have done this. I hope you will be more careful with your colour choices in the future, so you don’t end up with such ugly cloth.

Here are the ends of your warped threads:
For ease of conversation, let us assume that you have threaded the loom like this:

Orange threads in Harness 1

Blue threads in Harness 2

Green threads in Harness 3

Pink threads in Harness 4

You know that the 1-3 combination will give you plain weave for the top layer, and that 2-4 will give you plain weave for the lower layer.  To begin weaving the lower layer, you’ll need to raise Harnesses 1-3-4, leaving Harness 2, with the blue threads, down:

Then you will throw your first shot, or pick, left to right, from the center of your fabric to the selvedge, with that thick black yarn (oh, why, oh, why did you choose this colour combination?).

Your cloth now looks like this:  you have one strand of warp that is lying between the threads on Harnesses 2 & 4:

But in order to have cloth stay together, you’ll need to wrap the weft back around the other way — under the blues, and over the pinks.  So your next order of business is to raise Harnesses 1-2-3:This gets the top layer of fabric (orange and green) out of the way of the lower layer that you’re working on.  Throw your second shot, right to left this time, from the selvedge to the fold.

Your cloth now looks like this (though I see that you’re in a rush to start work on the upper layer of cloth).

Your next treadling combination will raise only Harness 3, the green threads.  You want to leave the lower layer of cloth down and out of the way of your weaving, and you want to place the yarn over the oranges threads and below the green ones.

At this point, you’ve thrown 3 of the 4 combinations needed to make this double-layered, plain-weave cloth:

The last pick, or shot, takes us under the Orange thread, and is done with just Harness 1 raised.  You’re still working above the lower layer of cloth (Harnesses 2 and 4), so you leave them lie.

Here’s the entire sequence, starting in the lower left corner, and ending in the upper left, after crossing the page, er, cloth, four times with that black weft thread.

The 70s called– they want their weaving back.

Though the magic of stop-action photography, here is an explanation of how double-weave works to create a folded piece of double wide, plain weave fabric.

Imagine, if you will, a cross-section of your warp. Here are 10 threads for shafts 1 and 2:

And a second set of threads, again 10, for shafts 3 and 4:

For the sake of clarity, we will make our left the “Fold-side,” and our right the “Selvedge-side”:

In order to weave the cloth, we will travel from the middle of the cloth, and work in tabby from the fold side to the selvedge side.

Because we don’t want to weave a tube, we need to follow our cloth on this layer, back to the middle (fold side) of the cloth:

Then we weave the other layer from the fold to the selvedge:

And back (selvedge to fold):

That is what the shuttle is doing: weaving two picks of each layer, from the fold, to the selvedge, and back. You can, of course, start from the selvedge end, and work toward the middle. Throw one shot of the lower layer:

Then one shot of the upper layer:

The return shot of the upper layer (so as to avoid making a tube!):

And the return shot of the lower layer: