network drafting

November 30, 2007 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Possibly the coolest thing since sliced bread

Bonnie and I spent 2 hours going through network drafting yesterday, and I’ve been playing with it since well before dawn. (Admittedly, dawn is kinda late these days.) It turns out that network drafting is infinitely easier using Fiberworks PCW, a different weaving program – actually there are a lot of things you simply can’t do using WeaveIt Pro, my weaving program – but insofar as I’ve been unemployed the last couple of months, I really couldn’t afford a new weaving program (they’re not cheap!). So I was pretty depressed yesterday – nothing like having just learned a lot of cool new stuff and being totally unable to apply it because you don’t have the right tool!

Enter B.. As soon as he heard that I needed Fiberworks and couldn’t afford it, he immediately offered to buy it for me as an early Xmas gift. Woo hoo!! (Have I mentioned that I really, really, really love him?) So I downloaded it and have been playing with it since around 6am. Wow! It’s the coolest program ever!

One of the things Bonnie told me was that the threading and the treadling compose the basic diagram, and the tie-up “colors it in”. So if you want to see the overall shape of the pattern, tie up straight draw and enter the threading and the treadling; that will give you the overall shape. Then put patterns into the shape by editing the tie-up. (The one thing that does change is that the shape inverts if you tie up straight draw slanting left instead of right: rose fashion vs. star fashion.)
Here are some of the shapes I’ve made, all on the same threading/treadling, just by changing the tie-up:

curves-and-straight-lines-2-1-1-1-1-1-3-1-2-3-plaited-twill.bmp

I’m going to thread up a warp with 100 threads (to make bookmarks) and experiment with different patterns/yarns. This is going to be FUN!

November 29, 2007 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Puttering around

I spent most of yesterday suffering weaver’s block – the condition where you aren’t quite sure what to do, so you wind up doing nothing. Well, not quite nothing – I did resolve most of my questions – but basically sit around and let things ferment. I’m not sure what exactly I did for most of the day, but at least part of it consisted of playing mindless computer games while waiting for the phone to ring (that job situation, right?).

Meanwhile, I have found solutions to most of my problems, or at least the right tack. For yarns, I gave up on the darker orange for the networked twill shawls and dyed a new batch in screaming orange. At the moment it doesn’t look like anything you’d want to get near clothing, but I’m betting that some dark, contrasting warps will tone it down significantly, and I want something reasonably bright for shawls. Before putting it on the loom, though, I plan to needleweave some samples so I get an idea of how well the colors mix. I may well wind up using the darker orange. Today I will dye the wefts and test out the color combos with the light orange warp. I may wind up making bookmarks as samples/Xmas presents.

I have also decided that (at least for now) I prefer Sabracron F, which is a fiber-reactive dye, to Lanaset (acid dye) for use on silk. It’s easier to get level colors that way, and you don’t have to fiddle with skein ties in silk soaked with 160 degree water.

For the cocoon jacket, I tried grafting on a five-inch strip of muslin to the bottom to add some length, and that seems to work well. Not well enough to give me a full-length sleeve, but enough to get a 3/4 length sleeve. It will have to do. Fortunately I have enough yardage to do that, and probably even enough yardage to do that and keep my black shawl. I will do more experiments today.

On the remaining warp for the cocoon jacket (I put on 13 yards) I am currently weaving a shawl in red, orange, gold, and yellow weft. It should be both incandescent and iridescent, both of which appeal to me. (What can I say, I like bright colors). If I have additional space I’ll also weave myself another black shawl. I’m hoping to weave this off as quickly as possible, so I can get started on the network drafted shawls.

Network drafting-wise, I have a tutoring session with Bonnie today and will spend a couple hours prepping for it by rereading her book today. I really cannot say enough good things about her book (Exploring Multishaft Design) – every time I come back to it, I get a bunch more great ideas. Anyway, I hope that will straighten out my understanding of network drafting.

So, not a super-productive day, but at least I resolved most of my issues.

No word yet on the job front, but hopefully tomorrow. This is their busiest time of year, so I’m not surprised they’re slow on responding. If this keeps up much longer, I’ll reactivate the rest of my search. I’m not very good at waiting by the phone.

November 28, 2007 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Frustrations

Things are going frustratingly on all of my projects at the moment:

The sleeves are too short on the cocoon jacket, a byproduct of my loom being so narrow. I was fiddling with it last night and haven’t found a good solution – after much fussing I am seriously contemplating using a different pattern altogether. The fabric is gorgeous, though, and I’m certain that whatever pattern I wind up using, it will wind up beautiful. I still have plenty of warp left so I can afford to experiment with patterns a bit – can always weave more black yardage to get additional fabric. I’m going to do some more experiments today in hopes of a better outcome.
I dyed the silk warp for my shawls last night. I had serious problems with uneven dye takeup, so I rearranged the skeins and tossed in some more dye. This worked to get a reasonably even color, but now the yarn is too dark for what I had in mind. I’m not sure what to do about it; part of me wants to go ahead anyway, part of me wants to save this skein for other things and dye another 700g a brighter orange for the shawls. I’m contemplating it. It’s not a bad color, just too dark (IMO) to blend well with the colors I wanted (which are mostly really dark ones). I can think of plenty of things to do with it, I’m just stuck on wanting those network twill shawls.
Speaking of network twills, I discovered (via Bonnie Inouye, who very kindly pointed it out to me) that there are serious flaws in some of my network twill designs. I’m getting a two-hour tutoring session with her (yay!) later this week to go through network twills and get a better understanding of the underlying theory, so I can adapt at will. But meanwhile, it’s kind of frustrating.
Finally, and I hope this turns to good news, the company that is contemplating making me an offer is going to let me know today what the decision is. I hope it’s a “yes”, and that we can work out the salary issues, but meanwhile, I have all that nervous energy to burn. *sigh*

So all in all, yesterday was a frustrating day. Hopefully I can fix some of that today.

November 26, 2007 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

New project: network drafted/"orange peel" shawls

I’m starting work on my next project, a set of network drafted shawls using a fairly simple threading pattern: a pair of opposing elliptical arcs

48 pixels high and telescoped (sliced and overlapped) to 16 pixels high so it fits on my loom. The net effect is a double elliptical curve with “echoes”.

Then, taking the same elliptical curve, I transformed it into a ribbon, rotated it 90 degrees, and put it into the peg plan, producing this pattern:

…which appears as a moire cross when tiled across the fabric.

Flipping the ribbon 90 degrees the other way produces bullseyes:

And turning the ribbon into a wavy line produces ripples.

Not content with that, I asked myself what would happen if you had TWO ribbons in the peg plan, and with different weaves. I grabbed Photoshop, drew two crisscrossing ribbons, one in 3/1 twill and one in plainweave, and came up with this pretty little gem:

I’m planning to weave all four of these patterns and may make up a fifth if I can manage to squeeze it onto the warp.

I’m also going to experiment a bit with color mixing. I’ve decided to use an orange silk warp as a base, and use five different color wefts to create five completely different looking shawls. The wefts I’m planning to use are deep violet, royal purple, royal blue, gold, and black. Those should provide nice contrast to the orange, and the deep violet in particular should really “pop” the orange out. It’ll be an interesting experiment in color mixing. I do plan to swatch before weaving an entire shawl.

So tomorrow I will finish off the tiger jacket, and start skeining off and dyeing the yarns for the shawls. I think I will use silk for the warp (because it’s stronger) and a 55/45 cashmere/silk blend for the weft. I may also use up some 100% cashmere yarn that I have sitting around (I tend to buy large quantities of remaindered cashmere yarn at very cheap prices, then dye it myself so I can work with cashmere without bankrupting myself). I’ll be dyeing it with Lanaset/Sabraset dyes.