Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2019 i Handwoven

YOUR FAVORITE FLOOR LOOM has a set of treadles made to fit it and designed to function efficiently. The loom likely came with cords, chains, or metal rods to tie the lamms to the treadles. If you purchased a used loom, it could be missing any of these parts, or the original pieces may have been traded out for what worked at the time. You might even find yourself wanting to make some changes of your own. In either case I have some tips and tricks I’ve learned from years of experience. LAMM TO TREADLE TIE-UPS The advent of Texsolv cord has made a huge difference in loom mechanics, and using Texsolv for tie-ups is a great way to go. Texsolv is a heat-treated, crocheted polyester cable with small loops…

THE DELIGHTFUL THING ABOUT THIS PROJECT is seeing one warp create two very different fabrics, simply by changing the weft yarns and the picks per inch. The fabrics coordinate but are not identical, and each is suitable for different functions. The scarf is drapey and lovely to wear, while the bag is firmer with more structure. Tiny sequins embedded in one of the warp yarns give the scarf a touch of bling and the bag a subtle shimmer. The slow color changes in the weft yarns add interest to both fabrics. Setting up a rigid-heddle loom for direct warping is a quick and efficient way to dive into a weaving project. Although making a long direct warp can be a bit trickier than making a short warp, long warps allow…

THEY SAY IF YOU BUILD A BETTER MOUSETRAP, the world will beat a path to your door. I think things that are built to last are better than disposable items such as paper plates or fast fashion. Durable things save money, help the environment, and can be passed on to others who need them. Of course everything wears out eventually, but even then I like to give things a second life if I can. That’s the intent of my sakiori weaving: to make something as good as, or better than, the original rag material. Vinyl tablecloths with a soft polyester backing have served a perfectly good purpose over the years. They are easy to wipe clean and can be used indoors or out. However, they eventually develop holes and tears,…

MY FAVORITE POT HOLDERS ARE THICK enough to protect my hands, but flexible enough to ensure a good grip on a hot dish or pot. The thickness in these pot holders comes from throwing three picks in the body of the pot holder before changing sheds. The flexibility comes from the twill structure. Pot holders are a good way to use up your stash. Although this pattern calls for 3/2 cotton in yellow and three shades of blue, you can select any colors on hand that go well together, although I do suggest emphasizing darker colors because pot holders are notorious for showing stains. They weave up quickly and make lovely practical hostess gifts. This project calls for enough warp to make 10 pot holders, two of each style. You…

“HELLO, ALLEN,” began the email from Christina Garton, associate editor of Handwoven. “We are having a weaving emergency. Jennifer Johnson needs a project to go with her excellent research; would it be possible for you to weave an accompanying project to go with the article?” “Sure,” I said. “No problem.” Allen, aka St. Bernard the Rescue Dog, had a mission to accomplish, a magazine to save, a… okay, I will stop now. My hubris is bad, bad, bad. I had never woven anything in dimity weave before. Plus, the draft was handwritten and from 1830 or so. Plus, it was the start of the academic year. Plus… okay, St. Bernard, quit complaining and get on with it. I spent quite a bit of time studying that handwritten draft, which was…

YOU CAN WIND A VERY LONG WARP, enough to weave many kitchen towels, or you might prefer to put on a much shorter warp—just enough to make a single scarf. A warp’s length doesn’t limit a weaver’s creativity. Although weavers generally do not like to fiddle with a warp once it is threaded through the heddles (unless they are fixing a threading mistake), they can still creatively manipulate the warp through treadling, tie-ups, color, and/or texture, to create multiple projects from one warp. In my case, I used one threading as the basis of my exploration into using color changes and more importantly tie-up changes to weave three very different scarves. This tie-up tale started with my Salt-n-Pepper Scarf published in the November/December 2017 issue of Handwoven. I used a…

THOUGHTS ON KNITTING YARNS I was very interested to read Anita Osterhaug’s article on using knitting yarns in weaving (“Rethinking ‘Weaving Yarns,’” March/April 2019). I guess I just never thought that you couldn’t use them that way because I’ve been weaving with knitting yarns for many years. No one told me that I shouldn’t do it. I’ve used Malabrigo Sock, Willow Yarns Verbena, WEBS’s own Valley Northampton, cashmere/silk yarns, Noro silk, and various alpaca knitting yarns, all with good results. In the process, Anita’s cautions were all things I have discovered, too—especially the note about the yarn unspinning itself on the floating selvedge! The most intriguing knitting yarn that I have used is Araucania Nuble in a variegated color for a scarf. It was just sitting on the shelf, and…

LOOKING AT THE SUGGESTED PALETTE for this issue, I was drawn to deep blue-purple and red-violet, colors that reminded me of raspberries and blueberries. And then, in that funny way the brain sometimes works, I remembered when pop star Justin Timberlake went viral last year with an Instagram video praising the combination of stuffing a blueberry inside a raspberry and calling it a “braspberry.” Using the braspberry as a springboard, I experimented with a wide variety of colors in my sample but ultimately chose four closely related hues, blending them in the warp for rich, saturated color. I wove the first scarf using a turned taqueté treadling with one color at a time, creating a strong graphic quality. I alternated two weft colors at a time for the second scarf…

MANY YEARS AGO I THOUGHT I might try production weaving. I had a loom with a sectional warp beam that could hold yards and yards of warp. “I’ll weave rag rugs with lots of different colored fabrics,” I thought, “and each one will be different from the next even though they share the same warp.” I wound a 50-yard warp of natural-colored carpet warp. Fairly quickly, my brilliant idea became the warp of nightmares. After weaving five rugs, I was bored out of my gourd, with more than 40 yards left to weave. I persevered but promised myself to never make that mistake again. Today, I stick with warps 10 to 12 yards long, and I plan carefully to make sure each piece from a warp is different in some…

FOR THIS PROJECT, I imagined a set of household textiles, perhaps for the coffee table and sofa, in fresh greens, blues, and browns set against the off-white of natural Egyptian cotton. The sett for rep weave is close to that used for doubleweave, and I’ve made use of this fact in the past when experimenting or doing color studies. For a “two-in-one” theme, it seemed fitting to do a combined project using rep for a runner and tubular doubleweave for pillows. The runner is a warp-faced weave I have seen in Guatemalan mats and runners owned by several friends. I also saw the structure described in a 1986 Handwoven project as “plain weave and warp-float blocks” and in Jan Shenton’s Woven Textile Design as “grouped weft distortion,” although it was…

THE YARN Bluegrass Mills Hemp Yarn; 2,450 yd/lb; 1,352 yd/250 g cone; 100% long-fiber hemp. The grist of this yarn is similar to 5/2 cotton. Yarn wrapping indicated 16 ends per inch (epi) for plain weave. I wove all samples with the yarn dry (no misting the warp or steaming the weft as for linen), and it was wonderful to work with. Hemp has more elasticity than linen and produces a fabric that is crisp with heavy hand and drape. The yarn had some slubs, which I left alone because I liked the added texture. If you don’t want slubs in your fabric, wet your fingertips and roll the slub area back and forth between them until the slub disappears. All the fabrics were stiff as a board when I…

THE CITY OF AGRA IN NORTHERN INDIA is perhaps best known as the home of the Taj Mahal and was once the capital of the Mughal Empire. It is also the birthplace of one of India’s most famous textiles, the Agra carpet. These carpets are more than a nice souvenir; the history and work that goes into each and every carpet is a story in and of itself. Emperor Akbar, who ruled from from 1556 to 1605, established carpet-weaving workshops in Agra, where they took hold quickly. He brought weavers from Persia to teach the art of making handknotted carpets and to introduce Persian designs to the Indian artisans so that they might create carpets worthy of a palace. Emperor Akbar also directed the Persian weavers to go to jails…

CRACKLE IS A SURPRISINGLY VERSATILE weave structure, perhaps because of its “makeshift” nature, as characterized by Mary Meigs Atwater. Crackle’s blocks are composed of three-shaft point twills. The blocks are not independent of each other but instead are interrelated. This idiosyncrasy can produce overlapping and blending of colors when crackle is treadled in the traditional polychrome manner. On the other hand, when crackle is treadled as twill, its twill structure becomes apparent. A crackle threading offers an opportunity to make two distinctly different scarves on one warp. For these scarves, I designed a block arrangement that produces three diamond shapes across the width of the scarf, alternating positive and negative motifs: ABCDCBA, CDABADC, then ABCDCBA. As a twill structure, crackle is woven with a standard twill tie-up: four pattern treadles…

HANDWOVEN DISH TOWELS are a weaver’s staple and a perfect long-warp project. They are welcome gifts, sturdy and thirsty, and they last forever. For some time now, turned taqueté has been my structure of choice for dish towels. Conventional taqueté is threaded exactly like summer and winter, but turning the draft 90 degrees so the threading and treadling orders switch places creates turned taqueté. It becomes a one-shuttle weave, with tie-down picks that alternate with pattern picks. Using highly contrasting colors in the warp makes shapes appear as if by magic as you treadle. The circle is one of my favorite design elements, and I have found that turned taqueté is a great structure for weaving the circle shape with the fewest number of harnesses and treadles. I am always…

LIKE MANY WEAVERS, I have long been curious about the textile traditions in my community. Although I grew up elsewhere, I have lived in eastern North Carolina for the past 16 years and have come to regard it as my home. The weaving traditions of the Appalachian region of North Carolina are well-documented, but what about the eastern region of my adopted state? Were there weavers here whose work I could discover? I began my research at the state archives of North Carolina. Beyond my personal interest, I hoped to uncover enough regional weaving history to create an exhibit for the Imagination Station Science and History Museum in Wilson, North Carolina, where I worked as a history curator and educator. In my first foray into the state archives, I found…

PROJECT DIRECTORY SUPPLIERS Cotton Clouds, 5176 S. 14th Ave., Safford, AZ 85546, (800) 322- 7888, www.cottonclouds.com (Jackson 30–32). Brassard, Maurice, et Fils, 1573 Savoie, C. P. 4, Plessisville, QC, Canada G6L 2Y6, (819) 362- 2408, www.mbrassard.com (Poague 46–48). Lunatic Fringe Yarns, (800) 483- 8749, (850) 539-1964, www.lunaticfringeyarns.com (Walck 60–61). Red Stone Glen, 435 Popps Ford Rd., York Haven, PA 17370, (717) 212-9022, www.redstoneglen.com (Knisely 42–44). R&M Yarns, 8510 Highway 60, Georgetown, TN 37336, (423) 961-0690, www.rmyarns.com (Deeds 54–57). Treenway Silks, 2060 Miller Ct., Lakewood, CO 80215-1325, (888) 383-7455, (303) 383-7455, www.treenwaysilks.com (Wilson 34–36). Trendsetter Yarns, 16745 Saticoy St., Ste. #101, Van Nuys, CA 91406, (800) 446-2425, (818) 780-5497, (818) 780-5498, www.trendsetteryarns.com (Jarchow 26–28). WEBS, 75 Service Center Rd., Northampton, MA 01060, (800) 367-9327, www.yarn.com (Abrell 50–52; Deeds 54–57). The Woolery,…