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You are here: Home / All blog posts / The magical tie-up
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October 22, 2008 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

The magical tie-up

I have been messing around in the tie-up a bit, seeing what happens when I tweak things.

The first thing I did was change the direction of the twill line, to rose fashion, which of course produced a profound change in the “look”.  Here is star fashion:

Random twills, star fashion twill tie-up
Random twills, star fashion twill tie-up

And here is rose fashion:

Rose fashion tie-up
Rose fashion tie-up, random twills

Then I converted the tie-up to a 1/3/1/3/1/3/ 3/1/3/1/3/1 twill to produce the boldest possible lines:

Tie-up with a 1/3/1/3/1/3/3/1/3/1/3/1 twill tie-up, rosepath style
Tie-up with a 1/3/1/3/1/3/3/1/3/1/3/1 twill tie-up, rosepath style

Whew!  Makes me think of a zebra.

To soften the lines, I added some 2/2 on either side of the 1/3 and 3/1 sections:

A 2/2, 1/3/1/3, 2/2, 3/1/3/1 rosepath twill tie-up
A 2/2, 1/3/1/3, 2/2, 3/1/3/1 rosepath twill tie-up

Notice how dramatically the lines soften with a bit of shading?

Finally, I changed it from a balanced tie-up to one with more warp on the front face:

And I finally settled on this one, which is ever so slightly weft-dominant:

Slightly weft dominant side of final tie-up
Slightly weft dominant side of final tie-up

And the reverse side:

The reverse side of the previous image.
The reverse side of the previous image.

I think I will use this for my next shawl, which will be the red-to-orange-to-gold changing-color weft.  Having a slightly weft-dominant side will make for lifting slightly fewer shafts (hopefully meaning less stuck threads), but more importantly, it will give the shawl a slightly different look on opposite faces.  I don’t want to go overboard, because I want both sets of color changes to show, but I think it would be cool if it were slightly different on front and back.

I have been warned that all these shifting colors + complex design may turn out to be “just too much” – but while my hearing is excellent, I am occasionally hard of listening.  🙂  I think it’ll be a neat experiment to try, and if it works, it should be absolutely fantastic – and if it doesn’t, I’ll file it away for next time.  As I read on a blog (Alice Schlein’s?) recently, “If no one is willing to go over the top, how will we know what’s on the other side?”

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Filed Under: All blog posts, textiles, weaving Tagged With: gradient colors, network drafting

Previous post: Two years of weaving
Next post: Next steps

Comments

  1. Peg in South Carolina says

    October 22, 2008 at 10:59 am

    Listen to the warnings and then go ahead and weave. You really can’t tell everything from a computer drawdown in terms of the final fabric. I view weaving software as valuable from two points of view: it will get you a technically correct fabric–i.e., wefts and warps floating no more than you want with correct threading. and it will give you ideas to explore. Go weave it up…….once you’ve got your loom working. I would be so so angry if I had spent all that money and…………grrrr!

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