weaving drafts

December 29, 2009 by Tien Chiu

Chicago, Convergence, and profile drafts

Today I am flying to Chicago, where I will be spending several days with Mike’s family before flying home to California. Because of the airport “security crackdown” (which I think is laughable, but let’s not go there), we’re going to the airport earlier than usual. Since the Funky Hat is already finished, that means working on one of the pairs of socks I brought along. So stay tuned for pictures!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting up with a couple of VERY experienced weavers and seeing their work (gorgeous!). We were chatting along (poor Mike sitting very tolerantly off to the side with his computer, since he has very little interest in weaving) and one of the things that came up was the Convergence Fashion Show. Apparently the models wear fairly heavy makeup, with the result that some weavers who have sent in white garments have had them come back with makeup smeared on them(!). So I am rethinking the idea of sending my wedding dress to Convergence. If it came back with someone else’s makeup on it, I would go ballistic (not to mention being heartbroken!). Between that and the fact that I would have to work night and day for the next month and a half to make the Convergence entry date, I’m thinking that this year’s Convergence is not in the cards. Two years from now I may be less emotionally attached to the dress, and willing to risk it. This year, even after the wedding, I am not.

So I will probably not enter the dress, though I may enter some of the “extra” yardage if I have any. I will bring the dress to the Complex Weavers fashion show, though.

And, finally, an interesting question about profile drafts. I have been doing a little bit of weaving study while on vacation, mostly centered around profile drafts and block substitution, and think I have wrapped my head more or less around the concept. However, I’m wondering about terminology, since I have no references with me. Is it still considered a profile draft if there are more than two patterns, and if so how is that indicated in the “tie-up” of the profile draft? (I know it’s not actually a tie-up, but I can’t think of a better word for it.)

Here’s a couple of .jpgs of what I mean:

A simple profile draft

The profile draft interpreted in two 4-shaft twills

The same profile draft interpreted in three structures

I’m certain that this is not unique (surely those complex overshot patterns use more than two patterns!), but is it still called an interpretation of a profile draft, and if so how are the different patterns indicated in the “tie-up”? I’m sure this would be an easy question to answer if I were at home and had my references, but I don’t.

I’ve uploaded the .wif files in a zip archive, or you can see the profile draft and the three-structure interpretation .wifs on Weavolution.

October 5, 2009 by Tien Chiu

Several successes

Thanks to Bonnie’s suggestion (thanks Bonnie!), I figured out how to make the eternity knot into a turned double-two-tie unit weave! Here’s the profile draft:

And here’s the fiddled-with, turned, etc. version:

And, finally, the .wif file, in case anyone’s interested in a closer look. I’m not 100% sure I have it right, but it looks fairly good to me. (I can’t figure out how to get Firefox to treat it as a file and not as a text document, so you might have to “save as” from the browser to retrieve the .wif file – if anyone knows how to manage it, please let me know in the comments!)

I still have some questions about the technique, starting with what sett to use, but I think I got the draft turned correctly. I’m pleased! I’ve never tried a tied weave before, but it was much easier to work with than I expected.

My other major success for this weekend was entirely Mike’s idea: he was watching me weave, and said, “Do you really have to move the beater all the way back when you beat to clear the shed?” Of course not! but that hadn’t occurred to me before. As soon as I adjusted my rhythm, my speed went down from 2.5 seconds per pick to 2 seconds per pick. A 20% increase in speed, so simply!

Of course, at 60 picks per inch, this means about 2 minutes per inch or 72 minutes per yard, just of throwing the shuttle. Once you factor in advancing the fabric, fixing broken threads, etc. it’s probably closer to 2 hours/yard, so still not super-fast. But! this one small change will save me 4.5 hours (!) over the course of 15 yards. Just by taking a mere half-second off each throw of the shuttle.

It all adds up, doesn’t it?

I’m almost at the halfway point for this warp, having crossed the 7-yard mark today. I’ve revised my goals to a still-challenging target of 1/2 yard per day during the workweek, and 1 yard/day on the weekends. If I can manage that, I’ll be able to finish weaving this piece by mid-October. I really want to get it done by the end of this month because, as you all know, November 1 kicks off chocolate season, and it would be nice to get it done before I go whole hog into chocolatiering for a month.

I had some other minor successes over the weekend, the most interesting of which is a mountain bike! I had been looking for a cheap bike to ride to the gym – my road bike is too expensive to risk getting stolen – but since I’m a nonstandard size, I expected to have to wait awhile for something to come up. But I found one on Craigslist almost right away – a nice little mountain bike for only $60 (!). I took it to the bike shop and ordered a new stem and a bike rack for it, which will make riding more comfortable. I also need to swap out the tires, adjust the brakes, clean and oil the chain, etc. before it’s really usable. Once I’ve finished tinkering with it, though, it should be quite serviceable, and if it gets ripped off by a bike thief while I’m working out, it won’t be a financial disaster. I’m only planning to ride it short distances, anyway – for longer rides, I’ll use my more ergonomic and efficient road bike.

January 13, 2009 by Tien Chiu

Yet more doodling with huck lace

Today I played in the tie-up. I discovered that vertical and horizontal lines make, not too surprisingly, horizontal and vertical lines respectively. Then I started playing around with curves, and realized that (in general) if you make your lines parallel to each other, they will produce “echoes” of each other, making for a pleasing, repeating pattern.

Here is a plain curve:

Network drafted huck lace with a single curve in the tie-up

And here is the same with an echoed curve:

Network drafted huck lace with an echoed curve in the tie-up

I like this look; it’s nicely organic.

Then I asked myself what would happen if you combine two different lines in the tie-up, like a curve with a diagonal. The patterns superimposed on each other, leading to a more complex (and I think intriguing) design:

Network drafted huck lace with one curve and one line in the tie-up

I then tried echoing the lines to see what would happen, and discovered that that way lies madness:

Network drafted huck lace with echoed curves and echoed lines in the tie-up

And that’s all I had time for. Off to work!

January 11, 2009 by Tien Chiu

More doodling with network drafted huck lace

Following Bonnie’s advice, I tried playing with interleaved drafts and block substitutions in Fiberworks PCW. I couldn’t get interleaved drafts working since the interleaving would be A-B-A-A-B-A (where A is one draft and B is the other) and I couldn’t figure out how to do that in PCW, but the block substitutions worked great. So I drew some semirandom lines (a set of circle-like curves, a set of jumpy (“flea”) lines, fiddled around and got it into the huck lace network, and produced the following (all treadled as drawn in, for the sake of simplicity):

First I used the standard “straight” tie-up that came with the block substitution:

(Here is the .wif file, if you are interested in examining it more deeply, since the tie-up and threading/treadling are nearly impossible to see in the photo).

And then I tried it by modifying swaths of the tie-up to produce a black-and-white double curve:

Network drafted huck lace, tie-up in double curve

You can see here that the basic design line remains the same, but the way it’s filled in is much more complex and exciting. (Here’s the .wif file.)

And then I tried it with the random tie-up I used in my last post:

Network drafted huck lace, random tie-up

You can see that the design line is radically different, not too surprising since the line of the tie-up is also quite different. I’m still trying to figure out the influence of , say, diagonal lines vs. horizontal/vertical lines vs. curves in the tie-up – I imagine knowing this will come in handy in later experiments in network drafting. At any rate, here’s the .wif file.

I have been making rapid progress on the last of the color-change shawls – about a foot and a half woven so far – and am hoping to finish it up today. Later today I will also dye the yarn for the samples for the cashmere coat – which will be next on the loom. I’m also going for a bike ride – a short one, since training season is just beginning!

(I have not yet decided whether to do AIDS Lifecycle, but have decided to train – and sew – as if I am, since otherwise I’ll have no hope of finishing either training or sewing in time. If things get too intense in the spring, I can always drop out. I’ll do my fundraising later, I’m not seriously worried about raising the minimum since I have a large donor base (I hope!).)

January 7, 2009 by Tien Chiu

Doodling with network drafted huck lace

After playing Chocolatier for way too long this morning, I got to messing around with something I’ve wanted to understand for awhile, network drafted huck lace. Out came my trusty copy of Network Drafting: An Introduction, and off I went!

I actually wanted to play around with tie-up and treadling, rather than using the ribbon method. I was curious what would happen with different tie-ups – how they would affect the shapes, etc.

So I started with a very simple design line, a set of arcs which ought to produce circles and X’s with a diagonal tie-up. When the line in the tie up goes from SW to NE corners of the diagram, it should produce an X, and when it goes from the NW to SE corners of the diagram, it should produce an “O”.

And this is in fact what happened:

huck-lace-doodling-nw-se-tie-up-full-drawdown — Network drafted huck lace, nw-se tie-up

And here is the SW-NE version:

network drafted huck lace, SW to NE tie-up

They look quite similar, but the X’s and O’s are inverted, as you’d expect.

This is more obvious if you use both diagonal lines together:

Network drafted huck lace, NW-SE and SW-NE lines in tie-up

Now the lines are superimposed on each other. I rather like this effect.

Then I tried it with a semirandom tie-up (still compatible with huck lace structure) and all hell broke loose:

It’s pretty, but I’m still trying to understand how it relates to the threading/treadling and what I had come to think of as the “base” pattern. I think to understand it more I’ll have to take simpler geometric variations from the basic designs I started with, and morph them gradually to see what changes.

Neat stuff, though! Huck lace is different from twill and satin (the structures I’d played with before) because the network isn’t a simple repeat. Instead, the initial is 6 ends long and with height 24 – threads 1,3,4,6 are entirely deterministic and 2,5 are the pattern threads, which can be threaded on any of the 24 shafts that fit huck lace structure. In practice it comes out on shafts 1,O,1, 2, E, 2 where O is an odd-numbered shaft and E is an even-numbered shaft.

This makes the network more complex to set up – I wound up having to specify each individual thread by hand, using WeaveIt Pro because it has better hand-drafted network drafting tools than Fiberworks PCW (which is what I use most of the time). But it is a lot of fun and quite gratifying to see what happens with a more unusual network.

No plans to weave this up anytime soon; already hip deep in queued projects! But as a gedanken experiment (thought experiment), still fun.