diversified plain weave | Tien Chiu's Blog

January 6, 2011 by Tien Chiu

An embarrassingly large amount of yarn

Work stuff has kept me too busy to do anything requiring brains, but I had some leftover time on my hands, so I decided to inventory my stash. After some hemming and hawing, I decided to put it into an online database at http://creator.zoho.com. I could just as easily have put it into an Excel spreadsheet, but I liked the look of the data entry form in Zoho, and with an online database you can access it from any computer. And Zoho exports to Excel in any case.

Here’s a screenshot of the data entry form I cooked up in Zoho (took about 15 minutes):

Screen shot of yarn entry form. Click to load full size version, then click to zoom in.

And here’s a screenshot of the view I built to show all yarns. I have another view set up to show me only all animal yarns, and another to show me all cellulose yarns (the distinction is important to me since I dye most of my yarns). Here is the neatly-organized All Yarns page, screenshot anyway:

Screen shot of "All Yarns" view. Click to load full size version, then click to zoom in.

Contrast this with a view from an Excel spreadsheet:

For ad hoc filtering, Excel is much easier than Zoho Creator. However, it doesn’t present the information as neatly. I’m hoping to find an option that allows me the simple filtering of Excel, the neat presentation of Zoho Creator, and which is online/accessible anywhere.

Anyway, after inventorying all of my yarn, I totaled up the amounts. Egad! I have 171 pounds of yarn – 97 lbs of animal fibers (51 lbs of which is silk, 14 lbs cashmere), 63 lbs of cellulosic (cotton, rayon, linen, etc.), and a few pounds of synthetic yarns, mostly monofilament nylon for woven shibori. That is more than my weight in yarn, and far more than I need. I am seriously considering whether to reduce the stash again, or whether just to suspend yarn purchases until I make a dent in it.

Meanwhile, the diversified plain weave sample with the 3000 ypp chenille is woven, wet-finished, and dyed:

diversified plain weave sample woven with 3000 ypp rayon chenille as heavy weft, scrunch-dyed in flame colors

It is beautiful and very supple, I think too supple for a jacket, which needs to have more body. So I am flummoxed once again. I am having lunch with the couturier who helped me with my wedding dress this weekend, and I think I will ask her advice on what to do.

January 3, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Home sweet home

Yesterday we flew back from Chicago to San Francisco. It was fun visiting relatives, but there’s nothing quite like the joy of sleeping in your own bed! The Fuzz (our cat) was ecstatic to see us, and demanded lots of attention (mostly from Mike) to make up for a week and a half of neglect.

On the flight back, I read through Jane Dunnewold’s Art Cloth. A really fascinating read – she covers a variety of surface design materials (dye, paint, discharge, foil) and a bunch of ways to apply them (painting, stenciling, stamping, and silkscreening), plus a lot of design tips on combining techniques successfully. Definitely a winner! I came out of it with a lot of ideas for decorating cloth, and an atavistic urge to start silkscreening. My family used to silkscreen our own holiday cards – using Chinese paper-cuts for the primary design – and I have fond memories of running all over the house as a child, laying wet silkscreened cards out on the floor to dry. I did some more silkscreening in college, and it was one of the most fun things I did while I was there.

Plus, I have a whole roll of photo-emulsion sheet that I bought a couple years back, which slowly degenerates over time and (if it’s still any good) ought to be used. Great excuse!

Anyway, I also spent some time thinking about designing doubleweave using Photoshop and a divided parallel threading. Bonnie Inouye had very kindly sent me her article in the February 2007 Complex Weavers Journal, “Double Weave on a Divided Parallel Threading”, back when I was trying to figure out doubleweave. Her article showed a clear and easy way to understand doubleweave design using tie-up and treadling. After using a modification of this method to design triple weave, it occurred to me that one could extend the method to design complex doubleweave (and triple or quadruple weave!) designs in the liftplan, using an adaptation of Marg Coe‘s Photoshop design methods to generate the appropriate design. This proved to be a fascinating and very rich area to contemplate. I think I will spend more time delving into this, and possibly submit it as a topic for Complex Weavers Seminars. Even if I don’t, it’s making me think deeply about doubleweave, which is a Good Thing!

Once the plane landed, we hightailed it for home, dropped off the luggage, adored the cat, and got some food into us. After that, I was still feeling pretty peppy (I slept an hour or so on the plane), so I went to the loom and got to work. I threaded, sleyed, and tied on the next diversified plain weave warp:

diversified plain weave warp, tied on and ready to weave!

By this time, though, it was close to bedtime (an hour or so past bedtime if you considered the jet lag), and I had been working for five straight hours, so I left the warp and went to bed. This morning, after Mike gets up, I’ll start weaving the sample. I have corrected the draft (Marg Coe was kind enough to send me an example of a correctly designed diversified plain weave draft, and it showed me where I’d made the error), so all that needs to be done before starting is wind some pirns!

December 21, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Handwoven article, and finished scarf!

The new Handwoven is out! If you haven’t gotten it yet, the article about my dress (a half-pager) is on page 29. Woo hoo!

And, in other cool news, the scarf is dyed, wet-finished, and ready to go:

finished, dyed scarf in diversified plain weave

finished, dyed scarf in diversified plain weave, other side

I like it! I think the colors are maybe a little too dark (it’s darker in real life), and I think the flame colors of the previous sample stand out better, but these colors suit the intended recipient a lot better than orange would!

The scarf is a little narrower and not as soft as the other sample, probably because I was a bit harsher in washing out the dye. It shrank from 12 x 83 inches in the reed/on the loom to 8.5 x 73 inches, so there’s only about 12% shrinkage in the length but a bit over 25% in the width. I conclude from this that the rayon chenille shrinks a lot more than the cotton!

Now I have some enforced time-away-from-weaving. The dyed cotton and rayon chenilles aren’t dry yet, so I can’t start winding a new warp. There isn’t enough of the old warp left to do anything interesting with. And we’re going off to visit family in a few days, which means I can’t really start a new project. I’m doing my best not to twitch. 😉

Anyway, this is giving me time to reconsider what I want to do. It’s been suggested to me that chenille may not be the best choice for a frequently-worn, frequently-washed garment. I don’t know enough about chenille to know for sure (I’ve never worked with it), but this may prove to be a deal-killer for the chenille bathrobe. It’s also becoming clearer to me that I want something more elegant than a conventional bathrobe. Perhaps a kimono robe, perhaps something more fitted and stylish – but then I couldn’t throw it on over a T-shirt, and I’d feel bad about wearing it while doing the laundry (etc.). So the mix is still evolving.

I am pretty sure I want to weave up chenille yardage in diversified plain weave, though, because I think it’s an interesting weave structure and because I’m enjoying working with the chenille. The question is, what does one do with the yardage? I’m having lunch with Sharon (the seamstress I worked with on the dress) in about two weeks, so I think I’ll bring her a sample and ask for her thoughts. Meanwhile I will continue weaving samples in different weights. That should keep me busy for at least the first week or two of January.

I’m also working on my presentation for Black Sheep Guild. I’m pretty close to finishing the content of the presentation, and now need to practice delivering it once or twice to make sure it fits in the time allotted. After that, I’ll start working on making the slides pretty. I think I will do a different handwoven fabric as the background for each slide (if I’ve actually woven enough suitable cloth to do that!), to add some visual interest.

December 20, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Better photos of trapeze

Fran asked for more complete photos of my second warp on a trapeze setup, so here they are:

The warp passes through the raddle clamped to the back beam of the loom (better photos on that a little further down), up and over the top of the trapeze, and is weighted by a pair of barbell weights. The barbell weights are tied to a piece of string and attached to the warp with a lark’s-head knot wrapped around the bout of warp. Here I am using 2 bouts for a 12″ warp, each with its own weight.

Better photo of the raddle, from the back and the side:

The photo here is blurry (sorry – had trouble getting the camera to focus correctly), but you can see the important bits. The raddle is clamped to the back beam, using a block of wood as a spacer to make sure it isn’t sitting directly on the warp beneath it (which is beamed on in the usual way). This means that the top warp comes in at a bit of an angle, but it doesn’t seem to have done any harm.

Here is a photo from the back:

Here the spacers are a bit clearer. I used sections of 2×4 lumber, but I needed the extra space to clear the rounded protrusions at the ends of my back beam (see 1st photo of raddle). I’d use as small a spacer as I could get away with and not have one warp interfering with the other; I suspect it would produce better results.

Here is the top of the trapeze:

I used two sawhorse brackets ($7.58 a pair at my local hardware store), and screwed four legs into the brackets. Then, as directed by the instructions, I stuck a piece of 2×4 as a crosspiece, and screwed it down as well. This results in a very stable trapeze. I had no problems with it tipping over, but if you find you do, try drilling a hole through each of the back legs about 1.5-2 feet off the floor. Attach a long bolt through the hole, secure it with a nut so it doesn’t slip around, and then hang a barbell weight (or some other weight) on the part of the bolt protruding from the hole. That ought to stabilize things.

And now, just in case you were wondering what I’ve been up to (besides taking photos of my trapeze!), voila! A freshly finished scarf in diversified plain weave, hemstitched, fringed, and ready for dyeing.

I soaked it in soda ash and scrunch-dyed it this morning, in purples, blues, and an occasional drip of bright fuchsia. Tomorrow morning I’ll unfold it, rinse it out, and see how I like it!

December 18, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Dyed samples

With a little more obsessive weaving (and dyeing, and sitting firmly on my hands to give the dyed sample time to “set”), voila, the first set of dyed samples:

Dyed sample, 1450 ypp cotton chenille as the thick weft

Dyed sample, 2 strands of 3000 ypp rayon chenille as the thick weft

I’m a little disappointed with the dye job – the photo was the effect I was after, but in real life it looks almost solid orange-red with a little bit of variation. (I suspect the flash illuminated it with bright light, showing more of the color variation.)

The fabric overall is lusciously drapey and thick, the cotton more so than the rayon. Possibly too thick for my purposes. I am considering a second test with 2000 ypp cotton chenille as warp and weft (still using 60/2 silk for the thinner yarn), and see how that comes out. If it comes out nicely, then I’ll order some 2000 ypp rayon chenille and do a second trial with the rayon chenille as weft. (I’m doing it that way because it’s really too late to get packages before the holidays, and I haven’t the patience to wait before sampling.)

The rayon chenille weft seems to “pop” a good deal more than the cotton chenille weft – it is glossier and translucent-looking, whereas the cotton chenille is more matte and opaque – so I will definitely be using rayon chenille (of whatever weight) as the weft yarn.

Shrinkage is comparable in both samples and is pretty dramatic – 25% in the weft direction (I stupidly didn’t measure the length before wet-finishing). This will be an issue with the pattern since it means my end fabric will only be 18″ wide! (I have a 24″ loom.) Some of the pattern pieces measure 20″, so that means I may need to redesign the pattern somewhat. Fortunately, the pattern has LOTS of ease and flares at the bottom, so chopping a little bit off the flared bottom part probably won’t hurt much. I hope!

I am VERY happy with the diversified plain weave structure – the colors appear to be completely solid, and there are no floats longer than three threads, thanks to the silk tie-downs. I think I will do quite a few pieces in this structure, as it’s GREAT for imagery!

I plan to weave another sample to check lengthwise shrinkage, and then weave the rest of the warp off in what it clearly wants to be – an absolutely luscious scarf, perhaps to be woven this weekend, finished on the plane, and given as a Christmas gift? If so, I will have to get a handle on my selvages, which currently look awful.