Silk & cashmere jacket

This came off the same warp as the goldenrod shawl and the garnet shawl. I dyed some 2/28 nm silk yarn for warp and some 2/28 nm cashmere for weft. For the warp, I alternated 2″ stripes of chestnut brown and golden brown; the weft I dyed a deep shade of eggplant.

The draft was my first attempt at network drafting, for which I had lots of generous help from Bonnie Inouye. Network drafting is a technique for making curved patterns in fabric, made available to the handweaving community by Alice Schlein in her book Network Drafting: An Introduction. It produces complex, curvy patterns with very little effort, and generally produces a very stable cloth.

Weaving the fabric for the jacket was quite a challenge; one of my shafts kept “floating” and so there were numerous flaws in the finished fabric.  But aha, the magic of cutting and sewing: I simply cut around the flaws!  There are a few visible in the finished piece, but on the whole it looks quite nice, better than the fabric did!

I lined the jacket with silk charmeuse, dyed chestnut brown to match the warp.  The pattern is a Butterick pattern, but I don’t recall the pattern number.