A short post about weaving

Geeze, it's been over a year since I've posted anything.

So why am I here now? Well, a recent visitor to this blog had a question about weaving, which it so happens I have been doing lately. Some time back I acquired a Schacht Rigid Heddle loom (this one though without the stand). I've done some rigid heddle weaving with a paddle loom, and also a little bit of card weaving (which is totally fun and I need to do it again), and at one point I had some ambitious weaving ideas, including crazy long shawls seen in Regency fashion plates, and period accurate fringe (eventually, one of these ideas will come to fruition...)

Anyway, I wanted to be able to do more weaving than I could do with the paddle or the cards, but wasn't about the shell out big bucks for a floor loom. So, I went with a table loom with two rigid heddles.

My first weaving project was pretty much a total failure, due to poor yarn choice. Maybe fuzzy angora-style yarns can be woven, but THIS particular fuzzy angora-style yarn SUCKED. I gave up on the weaving after only a few inches

For my second weaving project, I used what I think is a cotton or cotton-blend yarn.

Yeah, that's me sitting on the floor with the loom, which is not how it's supposed to be used, and is not good for my back. Ahem.

Here's the scarf that I wove.

The yarn was slightly variegated, which serendipitously resulted in a plaid pattern.

 
This scarf was for the charity knitting (to which I've added weaving) a group of us at my work have been doing. This one will join the Red Scarf Project donations.

Learning Card Weaving, Part 2

Ok, I'm back, with another quick post about my card weaving project.

When I left off, I had gotten my warp wrapped around my improvised warp beam, and had strung up the cards. I just had to secure the warps to my "cloth beam" and then I could get started weaving.

The "cloth beam" is just another clamp. I rather
lazily secured the warps with a medium Gem clip.
They weren't super secure, but good enough for
me to get started.

For this project I'm using size 10 cotton crochet thread (probably Aunt Lydia's brand; I don't have the labels anymore), because I have a lot of it laying around (it's my favorite thread for lucet work). I'm using the same thread for the weft, in red to match the selvedge edges.

When I started weaving, scroll frame arms tended
to pivot and cause slack in the warps. I flipped
the clamp around, which helped but didn't
eliminate the pivoting.

I had several objectives with this project:

1. Could I get the warps properly rolled onto a warp bar?

The warps here are 80 inches long, which makes them only slightly longer than the 72 inch warps for my pink stocking garters. The stocking garters have 37 warps, though, whereas this project has 64! Anyway, with the exception of the pivoting problem, I got a very satisfactory wrap round my improvised warp bar.

2. Can I really work a pattern where the cards rotate only one way?

I don't think so, but I must be missing something. After I had woven about a foot, the warps behind the cards had turned into ropes.

By turning the cards only one way, the warps
got twisted to the point where I couldn't move
the cards back any more.

Candace Crockett, in her book Card Weaving (I have a copy, and it's quite excellent) suggests untwisting the warps. I'm thinking, after all the time it took me to roll up the warps (and it really did take a while), do I really want to unroll them? My conclusion was, what's the worst that could happen, and I went ahead and unrolled the warps. Well, the worst didn't happen, but pretty near: I ended up with a twisted, snarly mess that I was not going to be able to get back onto the bar (I have no photo evidence of this...it's too embarrassing). I soldiered on and just wrestled with the twisty mess, replace the scroll frame with the clamp by itself and clipping the warps to the clamp's bar. Needless to say, I had an issue with keeping even tension.

Also: I decided I should just turn the cards in the reverse direction.

Two turnaround points, where I reversed the turning
direction of the cards.

There's probably something I'm not understanding yet, but so far I'm not sure you can work a pattern where the cards only turn one direction. At least not with a piece that's this long.

Anyway, my third goal was to get a better understanding of how card weaving works.

My fourth goal is to find a solution for Laura's weaving problem, which she talks about partway through this post. I don't think I have an answer yet.

In the meantime, the piece is done!

The back side looks nice, too!

The color combination makes me think of traffic signs, but I'm still quite fond of it. I hereby dub this piece: "The Road Goes This Way!"

I got the pattern from eqos at Deviantart (she calls this one "Korba"). Check her out, she generously gives these patterns away.

I was aiming for 60 inches and ended up just one inch short. The weave is tight but not totally consistent; I think that once I can keep the warp evenly tensioned, I can achieve better consistency.

But I must find a solution to Laura's problem....

Learning Card Weaving, Part 1

My blog has gone rather idle, sorry about that! Ever since I got back from Costume College, I've been utterly swamped. My hands haven't been idle, despite how busy I am.

My latest thing has been card weaving, aka tablet weaving, aka inkle weaving (though I think "inkle weaving" really means weaving with an inkle loom, with or without cards, so that might be a bit of a misnomer).

This is just a quick post to show Laura (aka Rocking the Frock) my improvised loom (and my equally improvised photo box).

Improvised card weaving loom, using two clamps and part
of an embroidery scroll frame.

Laura is reproducing the gown worn by Eleonora di Toledo as painted by Bronzino. She's considering weaving the gold and silver trim on the gown herself. I'm hoping to help her out by figuring out a way to for her to do it by card weaving.

Warps wound around a dowel and cards loaded.

At one end I've got the warps wrapped around one of the two dowels from a scroll frame for embroidery. I clamped the sides of the frame to a scrap of board I had laying around. The pink paper is something like heavy construction paper, somewhat similar in weight to grocery bags. I'm not sure what it is exactly, since it came from a roll a contractor left at my house. The Gem clips are keeping the cards (sixteen, for this pattern) under control while I load them.

In-progress warping, not quite ready to weave yet.

At the other end I have the warps wrapped around the bar of another clamp. I still need to tighten up the warps before I get started actually weaving. I'm using a pair of not-separated restaurant take-away chop sticks to keep the warps under control in the mean time.

By my next post I'll probably have woven this piece. I'll talk more about the process then. Stay tuned!

Paddle Loom

It's been dreadfully and boringly quiet here. Truth is, I haven't been working on anything new. So, instead I'll talk about something old.

Back in September of 2010 I acquired a paddle loom.

Paddle loom with matching shuttle, made from
curly maple. It technically doesn't have a "paddle"
because I wanted it to be as short as was practicable.

I got the idea from Janea Whitacker from Colonial Williamsburg. At Costume College 2010, she had a box loom with her. I decided I wanted something that took up less space, so opted for just the standalone heddle, generally called a paddle loom. The paddle loom also allowed me to have more "dents" (the slots and holes), since the box looms I found used narrower heddles. Mine was made by Jonathan Seidel (http://www.jkseidel.com/) and is a gorgeous curly maple.

I set to weaving what I had on hand: DMC pearl cotton and DMC cotton 6-ply embroidery floss.

First (or second?) experiment. DMC pearl cotton
warp and weft, using 15 warps. The resulting tape
is about 3/8" wide.

My first experiments used 13 and 15 warps, and I experimented with different numbers of plies for the weft. I also experimented with different warp patterns.

The upper tape is DMC pearl cotton warp and weft. The lower
tape is DMC 6-ply embroidery floss (using random
colors I wanted to get rid of). I used a full 6 plies for the weft.

So what can you weave with a paddle loom? I wove myself a pair of stocking garters.

A pair of stocking garters, in three shades of pink.

Yes, they only match in color, and mismatch in weave. I couldn't resist trying a different warp pattern for each one. These are about 41 warp threads wide, making them about 3/4" wide. With that many warp threads, the challenge with a paddle loom is to keep the tensions even. I invented a setup that lets me control the warp tension, and eventually I'll have to do a blog writeup about it. Here I also used 3 plies for the warp, which made the tape flatter.

These are made from DMC 6-ply embroidery floss. For the
weft I used 3-ply. They have 41 warp threads (I think)
and are about 3/4" wide.

I've used these garters a couple of times now, and they do work quite well.

The one thing I haven't succeeded at yet is doing a pick-up pattern. I really want to try this one from  WeaveZine. I think pick-up patterns work best if one uses different weights for the warp threads an so far I haven't had a chance to try it. But someday....

I surfed the web a bit in writing this post, and see that there are some great looking table-top looms available. Box looms (as seen on Jonathan Seidel's website) and paddle looms like mine have some historical backing, so if you're interested in doing historic demonstrations, those might be more appropriate. If you want to be able to weave wider wares, you may want to consider a table-top loom. If you really just want to save space (like I do) and maybe also some money, go for the paddle loom.