It’s been hot the last few days – too hot to weave much, despite the best efforts of our air conditioner – so I have been designing instead.  I was seeking a sampler that would be more interesting than plain squares, so I could test all 14 combinations of wefts without feeling too bored.  But (despite what you might think) I am really not very artistically creative, so I played around with the preset shapes in Photoshop and finally decided to do puzzle pieces!

The preset shape didn’t work, so I created my own puzzle piece, symmetric around the center, and made a strip of puzzle pieces in 14 different colors.  Here is a .gif file of the drawdown:

It’s not great art, but it will do for this experiment.

After I weave this up, I will go back to two-shuttle weaves for awhile.  I’m trading my two Bluster Bay mini shuttles for a pair of Schacht end-feed shuttles, but it will take time for the postal service to deliver the new shuttles, so I may be short some shuttles for a week or so.  But there is so much more to explore in Marg’s book (Fit 2 Be Tied) on using Photoshop to draft double two-tie threading weaves that I don’t think I’ll feel too deprived.  4-shuttle weaves come out beautiful, but they are also extremely fiddly to weave – I can do about 4″ an hour at my current rate, and it requires a lot more concentration than weaving with just one or two shuttles.

Tomorrow morning I will check over the draft, and weave it up over the next day or two.  I’m hoping it will make decent bookmarks!

I rushed over to the loom this morning and wove up another test section…and then, since weaving test after test really isn’t much fun, plunged into the motif I had done up earlier.  It came out well, so at lunchtime I rushed over to the computer and made up another design, the chrysanthemum I’d been toying with, and wove it up as well.  Here they are (chrysanthemum top, first crest bottom):

And another view:

The first one has only a single weft on the surface at any given time.  In the second one, I got a little bolder – the purple flower petals actually have red AND blue wefts on the surface, producing a blended color.

More later!  Gotta get back to work.

By working diligently yesterday and this morning, I managed to finish my Cibacron F dye process testing AND finish threading, sleying, etc.!  So today at lunchtime I rushed home, debugged the warp, and started weaving my taquete color samples.

And here is the product of about two hours of intensive weaving:

(Click on the photo if you want a really close view.)

I started by weaving with four wefts (the blue and black squares), but didn’t really like the coverage I was getting, and instead of the expected 160 ppi I was getting something closer to 80-100.  This suggested that I needed to resley to a more open sett, but rather than go there, I decided to see what happened with only three wefts.  So I wove another inch and a half or so using three wefts (changing my draft, of course, to suit), producing the yellow and black squares (single color weft on top).  Then I switched and wove another inch or so with three wefts, two wefts on top, because I wanted to look at the color blending.  (That’s the top section.)  Midway through, I decided to change the black weft to a blue one, so I could get a better idea of color mixing.

And then I noticed the five broken warp threads on the left selvage.  By then I had been weaving with intense concentration for nearly two hours, so I decided it was time to take a break, write this blog entry, and make dinner (roasted duck breast with Meyer lemon marmalade/soy sauce glaze, roasted beets with balsamic vinegar/olive oil vinaigrette).  Tomorrow I’ll fix the broken warps and experiment some more.

Meanwhile, a few observations:

• Three wefts doesn’t seem to produce as “neat” a pattern as four wefts do.  If you look at the spots of blue, they are neatly bracketed by the tie-downs to produce a regular, brick-like pattern.  Looking at the spots of yellow in the next stripe up, they appear to be smooshed together into two lines of yellow followed by one line of black.  I’m guessing it’s somehow related to the fact that three is odd and four is even, and that the regularity will return once I reduce to two wefts.
• Color blending via yarns is not at all the same as color blending via dyes.  I expected the fuchsia and gold mix to produce a red or fuchsia-leaning orange; what I got instead was salmon.  The yellow comes out much more strongly than I would expect from mixing dye, probably because the yellow dye I work with has weak tinctorial strength, meaning it doesn’t have much power in mixes.  This looks like a 90% yellow, 10% fuchsia dye solution rather than the 50-50 mix I was expecting.
• Coverage doesn’t seem to be vastly better between 4 wefts and 3.  We’ll see what it’s like with two wefts tomorrow.
• Three shuttles will just fit onto the web of my loom.  Three wefts is thus much faster to weave than four wefts, which require putting one or more shuttles on top of the loom (and totally breaks the rhythm).
• The four ultra-slim shuttles I bought from Hokett Would Work at Convergence, which were meant for getting the very last dregs out of a warp, don’t work as “regular” shuttles.  They do a quick nosedive through the bottom of the shed, every time.  (Oh well, c’est la vie.  If you don’t try, you never find out…)
• The sett appears to be way too close.  I should probably resley, opening up the sett by 10-15%.  The only problem with this idea is that I stupidly warped up at the full width of my loom, meaning I’d have to unthread and drop about 15% of the warp ends off the back end of the loom.  A prospect that fills me with about as much enthusiasm as you’d expect.
• Another option is to use a finer weft.  At 12,000 yards per pound, the wefts I’m using are a trifle heavier than the 60/2 silk warp.  Lillian recommended going with the same size or slightly smaller, so I’m going to hunt through my stash tomorrow.  I think, however, that I haven’t got much between 60/2 and 120/2 silk in grist.  Also, my skeiner is broken right now (replacement motor on its way), so I can’t do much dyeing.  So, it looks like it’s going to be rayon machine embroidery yarn.

Much experimentation to do!  This is a start, but it’s just a very small step forward.

Plans for tomorrow: farmer’s market, more taquete experiments, dye the Cibacron F “pure” color samples.  I think dyeing while weaving is a good idea; four-shuttle weaving requires intense concentration and I could use the regular reminder to get up, stretch, and go stir the dyepots!

Nothing too glamorous has been going on the last few days – I’ve started testing my process for dyeing with Cibacron F (fiber-reactive) dye on silk, have wound some of the skeins of 30/2 tencel/silk onto cones, and threaded up about 2/3 of the warp.   I hope to finish testing my dyeing process tomorrow, and the threading on Saturday.  This will allow me to start sampling, both in fiber-reactive dye and on the loom!

I’ve also done a few more drafts in Photoshop, mostly oriented around sampling.  The intent is to do 1″ squares, using four wefts, in each of the fourteen combinations of one, two, or three wefts on the surface, and see how the colors interact.  (I had planned for 2″ stripes, but rapidly realized that this would require weaving over 2000 picks, 28″ of weaving, just to get my sampler!)  There are lots of things I want to assess – sett, appearance, and “hand” being the top ones.  I’ve never woven taquete before, so this is a bit of an adventure!

And, just for pretty pictures’ sake, here is a Japanese crest (chrysanthemum I think) that has been colored in for a four-weft taquete:

The idea here is to use weft #1 for background, weft #2 for the black outlines, weft #3 for the purple petals, weft #4 for the blue center, and wefts #3 and 4 for the blue-violet petals.  I don’t have huge expectations as far as esthetics goes (I think it would look prettier with all the petals the same color), this is more an experiment with color blending in the wefts.  I might do a similar flower with five different colors in the petals, just to practice blending multiple wefts.

I went up to see Lillian this morning, and she was tremendously helpful.  She confirmed that I had the draft from yesterday’s post set up correctly, and showed me how she works things out using graph paper and pencil before transferring the results to weaving software.  First she colors in a sketch, then she sets up liftplans for each weft she plans to use (up to SIX!), and transfers the appropriate sections of the design to each weft’s section.  Then she simply takes each line and transfers each weft shot in turn into the weaving software, along with the tie-downs.

This is actually a pretty laborious process – Lillian enjoys it, and it works well for her, but I find Photoshop to be faster and more intuitive, so I will probably go on using Photoshop.  The question I am struggling  is: what do I want to weave?

Towards this, I asked Lillian where she gets her ideas.  “From all over!” she said.  She showed me some of her patterns and explained where she got the idea behind each – it turns out, of course, that it’s simply a matter of keeping your eyes open, and learning to spot patterns that would make good woven designs.

Which is great, but which doesn’t help me right this very moment, since I have not yet developed the requisite “eye”.  I think I may make a pattern of Japanese family crests, just because they’re handy, free, and non-copyrighted, and weave them up in a series of stripes while I consider other designs that might work.  They will make a great “test pattern” to get up to speed on weaving taquete, determining proper sett, color mixing, etc.

So that is relatively simple.  More complicated is the question: what colors do you want to weave them in?  I have wound six 25-gram skeins of a tencel/silk mix that’s slightly thicker than the warp.  So I can dye six colors.  I already know I will be using the 60/2 silk for the black background weft.  But what colors for the  others?  I am thinking fuchsia, bright purple, royal blue, red, green, and gold.  Tomorrow I’ll have to decide for sure, and will  break out the fiber-reactive dyes to dye the tencel/silk.

Lillian showed me dozens of her samples, and quite a few of her finished garments (exquisite!).  She did warn me that taquete is not the most durable of weaves, because of the lack of tabby, and to be very careful about using it in a garment that gets a lot of wear.  Nonetheless I do plan to weave some yardage in taquete, as a gift for a friend.  (She is a very experienced seamstress and familiar with delicate fabrics, so I’m not too worried.)

Lillian also suggested that I try rayon machine embroidery thread for weft, especially if I wasn’t certain what colors I wanted.  Lots of available colors, so easy to purchase a couple of spools and test them out.   Later on, I can try to reproduce the color using my own dyes (that is, after all, what this dye study group is about!).  But since I don’t have any stocks of colors yet, this idea is a godsend.  I will dye my 25 g skeins, since I already have them soaking, but if I feel I need more colors, off to the fabric store I will go!

On my way home, I stopped by the American Craft Council show in San Francisco.  This turned out to be both a colossal mistake and a great idea.  I love this show – it always has gorgeous stuff, and frequently thought-provoking stuff as well – but the traffic getting there was horrendous!  It took me over two and a half hours to make what should have been a one-hour drive (at most) from Lillian’s place, and traffic was just as bad trying to get through San Francisco on my way home.  But the show itself was glorious, and I loved it.  If you are in the San Francisco area this weekend, it’s not to be missed.  It’s at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

I also got to see some friends who were exhibiting there, and that was great fun as well.

Unfortunately, while I did manage to finish reading the latest issue of Handwoven during the THREE HOURS I sat in stopped traffic, not much else got done, meaning I’m behind on my plans for the weekend.  My intent, at least for the next day, is to focus on dyeing: getting the samples complete for my dye study group, and dyeing the first set of weft yarns for the taquete project.  That means doing four batches of acid dye and one batch of fiber-reactive dye in one day.  (The word you are looking for is “ambitious”.  Also, probably, “nuts”.)  In between dyebaths, I plan to do some rethreading of the loom, but probably won’t finish that until later this week.