Innholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2019 i Handwoven

WHEN YOU LOVE WEAVING and your job is about weaving, it’s hard not to take it with you when you go on vacation—even when that vacation takes you to two of the most gorgeous and interesting places you have ever been: the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone National Park. I was prepared to enjoy myself with my sisters and our husbands, but was totally unprepared for the absolute splendor of the mountains, the ever-present yet somewhat elusive wildlife, and the otherworldliness of the geyser areas. As a weaver, I was intrigued by color combinations created by minerals and organisms in the hot pools, the patterning left by decades of calcification, the way the sunlight hit the river in the afternoon, and the scruffy pelts of bison. We stayed outside the park…

Woven lace is usually created using one of three weave structures: Atwater-Bronson lace, Swedish lace, or huck lace. Each structure has specific traits in terms of overall appearance, number of shafts/treadles required, and the ease with which unique designs can be created. Swedish lace shares one feature with Atwater-Bronson lace (window-pane-like lacy holes) and a different feature with huck lace (the capacity to easily produce contrasting warp and weft floats). This article explores the steps for designing multishaft warp-float and weft-float Swedish lace. PART I OF THIS ARTICLE (The Draft, November/December 2018) gives the steps for creating contrasting warp and weft floats in both Atwater-Bronson lace and Swedish lace. In Atwater-Bronson lace, this requires more treadles than in Swedish lace, and the resulting warpfloat blocks are slightly off set from…

I RARELY DESIGN A PIECE WITH A SINGLE YARN of a single fiber, preferring instead to mix and match yarns and work with blends. This is especially true on the rigid-heddle loom. Seeing how different yarns react to and with one another is always satisfying—it’s also a fun challenge. When mixing a variety of yarns, I start with one anchor yarn to hold the piece together so the design doesn’t become too busy. The bulk of my designing happens during the warp layout. When direct warping a rigid-heddle loom, I can get a clear sense of how the warp will look. Sometimes I end up replacing some warp ends with different yarns. The best-laid plans don’t always turn out as originally intended, but that is part of what makes designing…

THIS SPANISH MOSAIC DOUBLEWEAVE SCARF IN JAGGER SPUN’S ZEPHYR is a woven memoir of my travels. In the spring of 2017, I traveled to southern Spain. The Andalusian region is abundant in history and beautiful sights. Greek, Roman, Moorish, Byzantine, and Christian cultures influenced Spanish architecture and arts, including ceramic tile making. Over the centuries, Spaniards mastered this art that beautifully showcases their rich culture in pattern and color. These bright enameled tile mosaics—old and new—were almost everywhere in Andalusia! Impressed by this colorful artistry, I wanted to capture the essence of Spanish tilework in my weaving. I decided that deflected doubleweave would give me the mosaic effect I wanted. I took a slightly unconventional approach by surrounding my deflected doubleweave areas with “frames” of plain weave, both warp- and…

IT SEEMS THERE IS AN ENDLESS STREAM OF BABIES THESE DAYS: if not your own, there are nieces, nephews, grandchildren, and children or grandchildren of friends or extended family. For all of these babies, a handwoven baby blanket is a wonderful way to welcome them. Diversified plain weave is a sturdy fabric that works well for items such as baby blankets—there are no floats for tiny fingers to catch on, and it can withstand heavy use. Diversified plain weave uses two sizes of thread in both warp and weft, and that allows for patterning such as this blanket’s hearts and blocks motif. For the thick warp and weft, I chose Brown Sheep Company Cotton Fleece, a blend of 80% cotton/20% wool that can be machine washed, making the blanket that…

COVERLET DEAR FRIENDS AT HANDWOVEN, When I picked up my recent copy of Handwoven (September/October 2018), I was blown away when I turned to page 18 and there was a picture of my coverlet! I had donated it to the National Museum of the American Coverlet in Bedford, Pennsylvania, because I’m 89 years old and I wanted it to have a home. I was pleased and surprised to see the article was written by Tom Knisely. I have known him since he was a young man working at The Mannings, where I used to go for weaving lessons. It was at that time that I came to know Handwoven, which had since transformed from the earlier Interweave. There were some mistakes in the information about the coverlet that I would…

THIS INSTALLMENT OF “NOTES FROM THE FELL” has gotten me thinking about which blends work well and which don’t. For example, if prompted to list three of my favorite non-textilian blends, they would be as follows: • My grandchildren. They are the perfect blend of their parents and possess only the best traits of their mothers and fathers… mostly. (You know what I mean, right?)• Macaroni and cheese with not one but four cheeses.• My morning coffee created from a blend of the finest beans from different parts of the world. Blending keeps the product consistent. Some well-known makers of Scotch whisky also blend their liquors to help keep a consistent flavor from year to year. It’s really rather smart to do this, don’t you think? And then there are…

EVERY WEAVER HAS A STASH OF YARNS. Eventually, this stash must be used or the pile can grow out of control. I believe that some of the most interesting fabric is created when a weaver decides it is time to decrease their stash and discover the masterpieces hidden within. I recently went through my stash to see what I could bring to a project by combining different fibers. My stash contained rayon, Tencel, wool, silk, and decorative metallic yarn; what potential these fibers could have together! I examined how much of each of the yarns was on hand and thought about how I could combine them all in a project. From my calculations, I determined that there was enough in my stash to create a shawl—I just needed to decide…

SOMETIMES WHEN I RETURN FROM THE GROCERY STORE and unload my purchases, I’m met with a groan and an utterance of “girl food.” My husband wishes I would buy more “guy food” (aka junk food). One day, that got me thinking about how I usually exclude the masculine in my weaving. So with a little advice from my husband, Don, regarding colors, look, and feel, I set out to weave a scarf that hopefully appeals to the more masculine among us. One of my favorite aspects of weaving is how you can achieve a different look by mixing, matching, and blending elements such as threading and treadling, colors, or fibers. With that in mind, I used a four-shaft advancing-twill draft and wove it as color-and-weave using a random combination of…

LAST SUMMER, I TOOK A TRIP TO FLORENCE, ITALY, with my grandmother to source yarns for the weaving yarn shop I was opening. When a woman whose family had been running a mill for generations started pulling out skeins and cones of yarn for me, I instantly fell in love with a cotton/linen blend. It is a laceweight three-ply slubby yarn made from 50% cotton and 50% linen. The texture makes it more interesting than most cottolin yarns, and when washed, it blooms into the soft, durable hand that makes all of us weavers love cotton and linen so much. When I set out to design these towels, I wanted to create something that would showcase the colors and textures of this beautiful yarn. I selected four vibrant colors of…

LUCKY IS THE WEAVER WHO SPINS! Spinners have access to every fiber imaginable and can choose which of those fibers to use, what colors to make them, and how they will be spun. Yes, weavers have access to a lot these days, but they don’t have nearly as many choices as spinners. Spinners who weave can create the most personal of textiles and weave that which no one else can. Spinners can personalize their yarns in at least three ways. The most obvious is with color, not only with dyed colors but with myriad natural colors. Colors in nature are not solid, flat, or uniform, and spinners can blend colors just as nature does. Each blend gives a completely different look to the yarn, even if it “reads” as a…

FOR OVER 25 YEARS, WEAVE A REAL PEACE (WARP) has connected individuals in the United States to traditional textile artists and artisans around the world. As one might guess by the name, the group was founded by weavers, including Deborah Chandler, who wrote about the group and its founding in the May/June 1993 issue of Handwoven. Since those early days, WARP has grown, not just in membership but also in scope. For those who want to experience WARP firsthand, there is no better time than at the annual meeting. Unlike previous years, when conferences have been held in relatively small communities, the 2019 WARP Annual Meeting will be held in Washington, D.C., June 20–23, at the Georgetown Conference Center. Conference organizers are already planning on taking full advantage of all…

SIXTY SCARVES FOR 60 YEARS: REVISED EDITION WITH BONUS CONTENT Weavers Guild of Greater Baltimore Almost a decade ago, the Weavers Guild of Baltimore celebrated its 60th anniversary with a book of 60 weaving patterns: one scarf for every year. The book was a resounding success, and the limited print run sold out quickly. Fortunately for those of us who missed the original printing of the book, the guild, with help from designer and weaver Sara Bixler, has reissued the book, and it is better than ever. Though the title remains the same, the revised book now contains more than 60 scarves—66 to be precise. In addition to the extra projects, errors in the previous printing have been fixed, and discontinued yarns have been updated. Although the projects are united…

FOR THIS SCARF, I CHOSE A YARN WITH A UNIQUE COMBINATION OF SILK and retted bamboo that I had never used before. Resilience is 60% bombyx silk and 40% retted bamboo. Unlike most bamboo yarns (which are commonly called bamboo rayon), retted bamboo is processed like linen and other bast fibers. The bamboo gives the yarn a little more body than would be expected with pure silk, and I immediately noticed less static electricity coming from the yarn than with rayon bamboo. If the 60/2x2 designation seems confusing, it’s helpful to think of the yarn as similar to 30/2 silk. Most of the warp in this scarf is natural in color, but the peach color was specially dyed. I had just attended the Degas exhibit at the Denver Art Museum…

THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS PROJECT WAS THE NEVER-ENDING WINTER of 2017–2018 and the resulting “hat hair.” It was a cold, snowy winter and, although I love hats, I don’t love hat hair. I have a lovely infinity scarf that I oft en wind around my head and neck, but it isn’t wide enough to completely cover the back of my head. I decided a hood with long tails that could wrap around my neck would be just the ticket, but I also wanted the hood to drape around my neck without slowly falling to the floor when inside a building. This led me to connecting the long tails into an infinity hood. After evaluating Jagger Spun Kokadjo sock yarn (a superwash merino/silk blend) for the Yarn Lab article in the…

IN A RECENT ISSUE OF HANDWOVEN, I sampled Halcyon’s Block Island Blend yarn for the Yarn Lab (“Yarn of Distinction,” March/April 2018). Its unique blend of fibers intrigued me, and I enjoyed working with Block Island Blend so much that I have continued to weave with it. This three-ply yarn features a strand each of hemp, cotton, and rayon to give it the crisp, substantial feel of the hemp, some soft ness from the cotton, and a little sheen from the rayon. The three strands each take up the dye differently, so the yarn has a heathered look. I have also been weaving quite a bit of shadow weave in the past year, so naturally I wanted to try the Block Island Blend in a shadow-weave pattern. Marian Powell’s book 1,000…