Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2016 i Handwoven

In November, I gave a program at the Portland Handweavers Guild (my home guild) titled “Behind the Scenes at Handwoven.” When I mentioned the special-request subject to Madelyn van der Hoogt, she said, “I always dreaded that topic because I never knew how much to tell.” I had to laugh because Handwoven is created by an outstanding team, and I’m proud to tell the world about them. I want to dedicate this issue to a very special member of that team, Lynn Tedder, our senior technical editor, who is retiring at the end of this year. Lynn began technical editing for Handwoven when Madelyn became editor in 1999. When Madelyn retired in 2011, Lynn helped train me and then a whole team of tech editors. I would never have made…

INVENTIVE WEAVING ON A LITTLE LOOM Syne Mitchell MECHANICSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA: STOREY. 2015, PAPERBACK, 352 PAGES, $29.95, 978-1-60342-972-6. Syne Mitchell, the brains behind WeaveZine online magazine, has returned to publishing with a truly incredible resource on rigid-heddle weaving. Though the sheer size of the book might intimidate some weavers—it clocks in at over 350 pages—Mitchell deftly walks weavers through each step of the weaving process. She makes no assumptions about prior knowledge as she clearly describes winding warp, warping the loom, and basic weaving in a way that even the greenest of beginners can understand. For those who need visuals, excellent photography helps to illustrate each step of the way. While this book would make an excellent resource for anyone wanting to learn how to weave on a rigid-heddle loom, it…

A few weeks ago, my friend Adrianne asked if I could teach her how to dress a distaff and spin flax into linen thread. We talked all morning about how flax straw is processed into spinning fiber, and then we spun her flax into the finest golden thread. Afterwards, I pulled out my collection of antique linens to show her the importance of linen in our textile history. We had a wonderful time surrounded by piles of tablecloths, sheets, pillow bolsters, hand towels, and show towels. I wish you all could have seen Adrianne’s face when I pulled out a dated grain bag that was made from handspun, handwoven hemp or linen. The 1866 date on the side of the bag reminded us of a time when carrying your wheat…

For me, 2014 was the Year of the Linen Towel. I wove one towel for each month of the year, following the patterns given in a 1983 article by Clotilde Barrett. I had a wonderful time trying out some weave structures I had not explored before, plus I ended up with a set of beautiful towels. I gave some away as gifts and kept the rest to use in my kitchen. (I expect they will last me the rest of my days.) Over the course of this yearlong project, I also gained confidence in working with linen. My selvedges improved with each passing month. I found that the linen did not want to be “bubbled” much in the weaving; the weft liked to be laid in at a fairly low…

I was flipping through some old magazines looking for easy patterns when I found, in the July 1983 issue of a Dutch craft magazine called Ariadne, two linen T-shirts knitted in what the Dutch call “lazy woman stitch” (dropstitch). I’m not much of a knitter, so I figured out how to do something similar in weaving, using spacers to produce open areas in the weave and a bouclé weft to keep the openings stable. [Editor’s note: The linen bouclé is available at YarnStories on Etsy; www.etsy.com/listing/172235860/boucle-linen-yarn-100-mixed-boucle-linen.] It’s a straightforward project, and the fabric has a nice drape, thanks to the linen bouclé yarn. Both shirts are European size large, woven in plain weave. The lacy parts are created using lightweight cardboard strips (business card weight will do). The shirts are…

Who is a “true” weaver? Is it someone who creates designs with graph paper, meticulously coloring in squares, or who uses a computer program? Someone who uses the drafts in Davison or Strickler’s books to create their own projects? Someone who weaves tapestries? Someone who meticulously follows the directions in Handwoven or someone who changes the fiber, color, or sett? Is it someone who can’t stop weaving on a rigid-heddle loom? There’s been quite a bit of discussion in guilds and on social media about who can and can’t be considered a weaver. Some of the conversation has gotten quite opinionated and divisive, almost like a political discussion. And I ask myself “Why?” I consider myself a passionate hobbyist who came to weaving through knitting. I love the feel of…

LOVE FOR NOV/DEC ISSUE I was not going to renew my subscription! Then the November/December 2015 issue arrived. It is the closest to perfection I’ve ever seen— the articles are informative and well written. “Understanding Overshot” and “Summer and Winter Spelled Out” are pieces that help me (and others) understand weave structures. I always look forward to Tom Knisely’s “Notes from the Fell” because they are interesting and fun and contain “Master Weaver” bits of knowledge that help guide weavers to obtain weaving perfection. Please continue to educate us so we can become better weavers. —Leslie A. Deardorff, via email I just received the November/December 2015 issue, which I enjoyed very much. I know that you have to cater to a wide range of readers, but for me the last…

Although I’ve purchased yarn from Bockens of Sweden for ten years, last fall I visited the factory for the first time. It was such a treat to see where all those boxes of yarn have come from: the dyeing room, the plying room, the packing room . . . Heaven! We were shown a new marled linen yarn made with one ply of bleached white and one ply of dyed black. My first order for marled linen was placed before we left, and these towels are a result of my sampling to see what colors would look good with the yarn. I chose to weave a block design in turned twill so that neither the weft color nor the warp color would overpower the other. I chose bright colors that…

A WHITE WARP PROVIDES A BLANK CANVAS TO EXPLORE COLOR COMPOSITIONS. In the spring of 2011, Susan Wilson taught her “Classic Crackle and More” workshop for my weaving guild, the Handweavers Guild of the New River Valley. My study group was fascinated and decided to continue studying crackle. The assignment was to design a project that started with a draft from the workshop. I chose the diagonal threading draft, put a 20-yard bleached white cottolin warp on my Glimåkra and started weaving . . . and weaving, and weaving! The white warp provided a blank canvas to explore color blending and texture. I used analogous colors, complementary colors, split complements, triads and tetrads, and finally, rainbow colors. I treadled classic crackle, polychrome, overshot, summer and winter, twill, and two-block lace.…

Summer and winter is the most basic structure of a large family of supplementary-weft pattern weaves. In it, the pattern weft floats are caught within the blocks by a set of warp threads that “tie them down” to the plain-weave ground fabric on both front and back. As a result, the pattern wefts in summer and winter never float over more than three warps, making it a practical structure for many purposes. Mary Atwater introduced summer and winter to 20th century American handweavers in the 1920s and 1930s after analyzing some antique coverlets from Pennsylvania. She named the structure summer and winter after finding the name in a weaving manuscript in the Pennsylvania Museum of Art, and she theorized that it was derived from the contrast between the side showing…

Weave structures that produce a fabric with small, regularly spaced holes are called lace weaves. In these weaves, the holes are caused by the way the threads interlace: some threads skip their plain-weave interlacement and float, causing others to slide together. The best-known lace weaves are Atwater-Bronson lace and huck lace. ATWATER-BRONSON LACE Atwater-Bronson lace gets its unwieldy name from Mary Meigs Atwater and J. and R. Bronson. The Bronsons (weavers in the 1800s) are credited with introducing spot Bronson, a non-lace weave (no holes!) with paired weft floats. Mary Meigs Atwater added a single warp thread on shaft 2 between the weft -float groups of spot Bronson, creating lacy spaces. The result is quite unlike spot Bronson and should probably be called Atwater lace. Atwater-Bronson lace is a block…

I was part of a dish towel exchange last year, and while deciding what to weave and share, I chose to combine two personal favorites: huck lace and cottolin. I set my loom up to weave huck lace in many variations, changing the tie-up as well as the weft color for each towel. My fellow guild members were delighted to receive such pretty dish towels. (The color and look would be pretty at our beach house, too. Maybe I need a set of my own!) Cottolin is is 60% cotton and 40% linen, making it great for dish towels because it is absorbent and it wears well dish after dish. I have chosen four different towel variations for this article. There are many more variations that you can weave with…

The four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony comprise one of the most famous musical motifs ever: “Da da da dah!” The bold tune, with its simple rhythmic pattern, is repeated in various ways, tying the whole musical work together. This is the power of simplicity. Following the great composer’s example, I designed a set of linen pillows around a single motif. With dice weave’s weft-float pattern over a plain-weave background, a small colorful square becomes the unifying theme. Dice weave, a simplified monk’s belt structure, has two blocks in this project and uses only one pattern treadle. Each pillow has its own variation of the motif produced by changing the length of pattern and plain-weave blocks. To keep the selvedge areas clear of long floats and easier to sew,…

Log cabin has long been one of my favorite patterns. I love the trompe l'oeil aspect of it: plain weave that fools you into believing it is a complex structure. I've woven what I consider traditional log cabin in the past, so I was intrigued by a draft in Oelsner's A Handbook of Weaves that uses one of the colors in the warp and weft to alter the stripe orientation, creating borders bracketing the horizontals and verticals that, at least to my eye, resemble woven ribbons. Log cabin is dramatic when woven with two yarns of high value contrast but for this shawl, I used a luxurious tussah silk/linen blend from Ancient Arts Fibre Crafts, in two colors with less contrast, Mineral and French Bordeaux, to create a calm and…