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topNorthern Colorado Weavers Guild
This piece was inspired by the mountain landscape in Colorado. The weave structure is an "altered" lampas weave with thick pattern threads in the warp, so that the weave is warp-faced in the background areas and weft-faced in the pattern areas. A thick, rug-like textile is the result.
The warp yarns are 3-ply wool rug yarn, hand-dyed with fiber-reactive and/or acid dyes, for layer 1, and 10/5 linen for layer 2. The sett is 5 epi for the wool background, 20 epi for the wool warp-faced bands, and 10 epi for the weft-faced linen layer. The weft for the weft-faced areas is hand-dyed 5-ply wool woven tapestry fashion, with 10/2 linen as the tie-down weft yarn.
The second photograph shows a detail of the work.
Right-clicking on the third picture will enable you to download the WIF to your computer.
The idea for this leaf scarf came out of a project that the Pikes Peak Weavers Guild undertook to document the historical coverlet collection of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. After the collection was documented and photographed, guild members wove an interpretation of their favorite coverlet in a contemporary smaller piece such as a rug, shawl or table runner. The interpretations were exhibited during the spring/summer 2008 alongside the historical coverlets that inspired them. The coverlet I chose was blue and white wool, woven in 1849 using a tied Beiderwand (extended summer & winter) structure, and it contained leaf and square motifs. My AVL was threaded with a 16 shaft summer & winter threading and two drafts were created for the leaf and the squares using Weavepoint software and a technique called "designing in the liftplan" that Bonnie Inouye describes in her book Exploring Multishaft Design. The leaf pattern, which could be woven on fifteen shafts, was used for this scarf, and the squares pattern was woven into fabric for a marble bag, to be displayed near the coverlet that inspired it.
Right-clicking on the second picture will enable you to download the WIF to your computer.
The draft for this piece is entirely original. Because of the technique, the threading is very simple, all tablets being threaded with 2 black and 2 golden threads. All the work is done following detailed charts which I designed. I created the lettering based on 14th century Textura Quadrata, and I designed the brocade pattern for the moth after an illustration in Luther Hooper's "Silk, Its Production and Manufacture."
I actually use a modified version for weaving, where the ground is white and the pattern is colored. The red lines are just "scaffolding," they relate the pattern to specially marked tablets that help me keep count.
The ribbon is approximately 28" long, made with 73 four-hole tablets. Warp and ground weft is #50 weight silk filament sewing thread in black and gold (I dyed the gold, but the black was purchased already dyed) with my own hand-reeled-from-cocoons filament tram for the brocade weft, dyed in two shades of ecru. It's just over an inch and an eighth wide, which puts the EPI at about 260 (although this is deceptive because of the layering). Picks per inch is around 54. The lettering is done using a Double-Face design (the back is the reverse of the front) and the moths are done in surface brocading using a separate shuttle for each of the two colors.
This ribbon celebrates the humble silk worm and the amusing lengths that seventeenth-century Englishmen went to in their efforts to raise them. The ribbon is figured with text along its length, and at either end where it adjoins the medallion, decorated with a brocade image of a Bombyx silk moth. The ribbon is decorated with glass beads, and the ends are joined to bronze cast leaves and attached with jump rings to the medallion.
At the working size, this pattern needed fifteen pages of chart for the lettering, plus the page of the moth on either end. The gold-plated glass beads were strung on the foundation weft, and pushed forward as needed.
The quote is from a 1607 book by Nicholas Geffe, called "The Perfect Vse of Silk-Wormes, And Their Benefit" - this is a document on how to raise silkworms, from a period when King James was attempting to encourage domestic silk industry in England as well as in the Colonies. I pulled an excerpt from a longer sentence.
This is what the text of the ribbon says: "...and to keepe them sweet you shal often sprinckle the floore with vineger, after to strew it with some herbes of a good smell, as with lauendar, spike, rosmarie, time, sauorie, pennie royall, and such like: adding some times, perfumes, made with frankencense, beniemin, storax, & other odoriferous drouges, which shall be burnt on coales". Spellings follow the original, including two spellings of "shall" in the single sentence! Yes, I missed the "e" on the end of "keepe" - it happened very early on, when I was transcribing from the original images of the book, and so every version that I checked my spelling against, it was "keep." It's just a mistake, and I didn't catch it until very late, and there's no "Weave Out." Many of the terms are archaic, such as "beniemin" - Gum Benjamin, which is now called Gum Benzoin, is a tree resin with a vanilla-like aromatic scent.
The second photograph shows a detail of the moth.
The draft for the main fabric of this knee-length coat is a 32 shaft twill taken from the "Thrilling Twills" CD by Ingrid Boesel and used with permission from Ingrid. The draft for the four tablet bands incorporated in the body of the coat is original.
The main fabric warp is 20/2 silk, warp-painted and set at 28 epi. The warp for the tablet bands is 10/2 mercerized cotton at 96 epi. The weft is also 10/2 mercerized cotton. The main fabric and the bands were woven simultaneously on the loom.
The coat was finished off with a hand-dyed silk lining, macramé button loops, and crochet wire buttons.
The second photogrpha shows a detail.
I work with an 8 shaft, 10 pedal loom, no weaving software and at present just one back roller (although I am in the process of changing to two, which should be more fun). For some time now I have been experimenting with layered fabrics - mostly two layers but sometimes up to four. "In the Red Again" has evolved from a piece of seaweed on our beach with curly edges and little balloons, although by now it is not a representation by any means.
I threaded my loom with black 110/2 (Tex) merino sourced from our local woollen mill at 20 epi for the single layer and 40 epi for the double layers. The weave was planned so that some areas on two independent shafts could be lifted alternately for the areas of inlay. These rectangles had no predetermined pattern apart from the number of warp threads used, and a weft of copper wire and or red dyed silk was used. So, I intuitively selected where to put the inlay as I wove. The extra layer in red chenille weft was continued throughout the length of the shawl and finished separately for the last few inches. A weft of elasticized yarn was placed where it was likely to help prevent slippage from the shoulders when worn.
As for areas of special interest - woven lengths of painted warp fabric is something I often do and I usually create garments from this, often embellished with machine embroidery and handmade braiding.
This piece, an original draft in 2/20 mercerised cotton doubled in white and black, 20epcm, uses double weave pick-up with offset layers and warp shibori in undulating twill. The centre third has the two layers overlapping with the imagery being picked up in this area. The supplementary warp threads for the shibori are threaded on four shafts in a random progression with the maximum "flat area", ie the same shaft being used before the progression being continued or reversed is 4 cm. There is no repeat for the resist pattern. Once woven the fabric was scrunched and rusted in a dyebath, dried, the shibori threads pulled up, discharged and then dyed using fibre reactive dyes.
The weaving was inspired by our multicultural society and how each cultural identity becomes integrated within that society. At the same time, while there may be differences within those societies, there is always one common denominator: the land. For the success of that society it is important to recognise individual cultural identity, yet at the same time achieving a common ground or meeting place. Hence the use of double weave pick up, representing the integration of 2 societies. This is offset so that each layer of society can be seen. The shibori is used to represent the land, common to all.
It is important to note that the black and white fabric is not a literal representation of the aboriginal or white race. Rather it represents two opposing cultural groups. The two colours could also be representational of the effect each culture has had on the land.
The motifs I chose to use are a dot to represent a town or community on a map and the 2 circles are recognised symbols for an aboriginal meeting place. The use of rust and synthetic (fibre reactive) dyes was deliberate, to symbolize ancient and more recent cultures. While I could have used only the two dye systems, it was essential to achieve the flow of landscape throughout, hence the need to use discharge to enable this continuity.
The parallel point threading used for this scarf was designed for many samples and pieces in different structures on the same warp. This included echo weave combined with doup leno, for which I had to keep four shafts, reducing to 28 the number of shafts available for other projects. The structure is four-color double weave with triangles added to diagonal lines in the tie-up, giving scalloped edges around diamonds. Advancing my treadling four times moved the position of the four not very contrasting colors inside the diamonds. The warp was 8/2 lyocell, rust and turquoise blue alternated, set at 36 epi. The weft was 10/2 bamboo, eggplant, alternated with 10/2 lyocell, dark red, at approximately 36 ppi.
This piece is a wall hanging with the evening light of the north as its inspiration. The 20/2 silk warp was hand-painted in color gradations before the loom was threaded. Twenty jars of procion dyes were mixed individually for each section, with a total of nine sections. The gradation was created by increasing one color and decreasing another within the twenty jars.
The weave structure is M's and O's with increasing and decreasing weft picks.
The second photograph shows a detail of the piece
This yardage was designed to capitalize on the strangely sculptural properties of a hand-made Japanese metallized silver yarn. I had discovered quite by accident that this thread does extraordinary things when wet - it sends the cloth into contortions and becomes rock hard. As it dries, it softens, but the 3D effect remains. Through quite a lot of experimentation it seemed to me that, while I couldn't control the contortions completely - there were too many variables - I could influence them through the weave structure. The crucial thing was to have areas with different densities of interlacement - low, medium and high. In the areas of high density, the yarn is more or less trapped and stays relatively flat, but it forces its way from the areas of medium density into those of low density, creating a mountain range effect as it pushes up.
I'm sure there are many other threadings and treadlings that would work to this effect, but the one that I decided would suit my design idea as well as the structural requirements was a parallel-threaded networked twill with an unbalanced tie-up (only four shafts out of twelve raised at any one time) and an extended advancing treadling that would give relatively long floats. The warp was 60/2 silk, with dark and light threads alternating; the weft was the silver yarn, which is actually silver flattened into a very thin strip and wrapped around a rayon filament core. The threading was an original draft I designed using Fiberworks-PCW, with a single mirror repeat.
My design source for this piece was a wonderful photo of the North Sea at ebb tide, with the low sun glistening on the ripples. I tried to capture the effect of the low sun highlighting the centre of the warp. Although the threading basically alternated dark and light, the dark itself alternated dark green and black, and the light alternated old gold and one other. I decided I would change this "other" across the warp, using varying tones of ecru, oyster and fawn leading into pale yellow in the centre. In order to avoid a stripy effect I used very gradual transitions from one color to the next based on a Fibonacci sequence. This was phenomenally slow to wind and I succeeded so well in my drive for subtlety that the color changes were all but imperceptible, except for the slight yellow glow in the centre.
But the properties of the silver yarn intrigued me. My first thought was that it was basically a high-twist reaction, but when you look more closely it's not exactly like that - there is also a strong element of deflection or distortion such as one gets in honeycomb or deflected double weave, but the distortion is more three-dimensional. My curiosity led me to more sampling with a wide variety of wires and metallics, and I was helped in this by Ann Richards, whose extensive experience with collapse yarns and metallics, coupled with her scientific background and her willingness to share, were extremely helpful.
I now believe there are two things going on with this metallized silver yarn, and the yarn structure holds the clues. It is an unbalanced yarn - the rayon filament core has virtually no twist, with the silver hand-wrapped around it in a Z direction. The number of wraps per inch is typically 21 - 23, but there are some very lively places where it goes up as high as 27 or even 29, and a few where it goes as low as 17. The unbalanced structure of the yarn gives it a tendency to collapse in on itself, and the inconsistency of the twist creates an inconsistent collapse. But the factor that we believe creates the distortion is the tight wrapping of the silver around the rayon core. Ann has suggested that the rayon core needs to swell as it absorbs moisture, but is prevented from doing so by its inelastic wrapping, thus creating stress. The stress varies from place to place as the silver abuts more or less tightly depending on the wraps per inch. At present this remains a theory -- it is not easy to acquire the yarns that would allow us to test each element independently. But it is certainly, to me at least, an intuitively satisfactory theory and one which has increased my understanding of yarn behavior.
The second photograph shows a detail.
Right-clicking on the third picture will enable you to download the WIF to your computer.
The colors and designs for this set of four dinner napkins were inspired by the neighbourhood red-tail hawk. Each of the napkins has a different treadling and weft color, but they are all woven in three-color echo weave.
The warp was 24/2 cotton set at 65 epi; the weft was 30/2 cotton. The yarns were hand-dyed.
The second photograph shows a detail of the napkins.
This is an original draft but of course the scale-like motif is traditional in Asian art and textiles. In Japan it is called "waves", I believe.
Both warps are 2/24 merino wool. The bottom layer weft is Jaggerspun Zephyr 50% wool 50% silk. The top layer weft is a fine lace-weight wool in graduated colors of blues and greens.
I learned the techniques of loom-controlled imagery using a double- two-tie threading from Bonnie Inouye at a workshop she gave a few years ago at AVL in Chico. I particularly like this technique of stitched double weave and have used it many times now with different images and different threads at different setts. This version with the two layers left open on all four edges makes a very pliant, floaty shawl.
Right-clicking on the second picture will enable you to download the WIF to your computer.
topPlease, if you have further information about these awards, including pictures, e-mail the CW vice president awards@complex-weavers.org
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Requests for the award or information about the award should be sent to the CW vice president, awards@complex-weavers.org, preferably by email or with an email contact. |
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