Seeing double – weave explorations

It’s feeling very spring-like now in west Wales. I love this time of year with the blackthorn blossoming and the birds shouting their joy a little bit earlier every morning. For the last couple of months I’ve been on an online course with Cally Booker – Understand Double Weave on 8 Shafts. It’s been a delight and there’s so much more I want to explore. Cally is an excellent teacher with her own ways of seeing and explaining that somehow make everything fall into place.

Choosing colours was fun and I always love warping the loom, which is something I still need to practise – a lot!

We started out making panes and chequerboards with our blocks (only two double weave blocks  are possible on an 8 shaft loom – but what a lot you can do with them!). The colours on the top layer are reversed on the bottom layer, sometimes the ‘back’ is more exciting than the ‘front’.

Then we wove tubes and folds. You can use these techniques to make bags and containers. The choice of weft colour – the colour decisions you make as you weave – makes a huge difference to the colour of the cloth, and not always in the way you imagine.

After that we studied microblocks, pickup and padding. I had a lot of fun playing, padding the blocks with thrums (the ends that are left after you cut the weaving off the loom) and chunky twisted cords. Definitely something I want to revisit.

The next lesson explored more variations on the theme: weft interchange, introducing twill in one of the blocks and my favourite part – colour and weave effects.

By this point I was running out of warp, and the course had officially finished. The final lesson offers various suggestions for further exploration and the one that makes my heart beat a bit faster is double weave huck (huck is a lace weave). I haven’t yet woven huck at all, though, so my next learning project is to find out how to do that before I plunge into weaving it in two layers.

Ruly unruly weaving

This warp started as a deflected doubleweave draft from The Deflected Doubleweave Handbook, which accompanies a video by Madelyn van der Hoogt, adapted to the yarns I had on hand when I began it while staying with my sister and with limited supplies.

Deflected doubleweave is a weaving structure with separate yet interwoven layers where the movement of the yarns, once the cloth is off the loom and wet finished, creates new shapes, curves, even circles, and the front and back are different, sometimes very different.

When I picked it up again after arriving in Swansea, with a different limited set of supplies, I wandered away from the pattern, trying different yarns, using up bobbins and experimenting to see what would happen with different combinations of fibre and pattern.

I find the fibre interactions astonishing, what happens with the colours and the textures and how it can all shift into something so different. And even more than that, I am seeing so much potential in this weave as a metaphor for expressing the magical spaces that fascinate me – this world and the otherworld and the thin places between, those liminal borderlands and thresholds where one thing becomes another, the integration of images, ideas and emotions that seem to be in opposition but can be experienced as both/and, not either/or. What Rowan Williams calls ‘a layered and broken reality’. I’m nowhere near the technical mastery to embody any of this in the weaving yet, but I mean to practise all I can, till I am able to break (or keep) the rules through choice and not through ignorance; and to explore the debatable land a little further with every warp.

tree and moon

Web Spins February Challenge – Racing Stripe

Late, but I hope not too late, my attempt at Racing Stripe for the Web Spins Challenge, working through the book Spin Art by Jacey Boggs. Racing Stripe consists of spinning a singles yarn while letting an existing yarn wrap around it in a controlled way.

fibre and yarn

I had this small arty batt carded and for the wrapping I chose a variegated cotton yarn that would sometimes contrast and sometimes blend in.

racing stripe singles

The spun singles. I ‘lost’ the striping yarn a few time in the fibre, especially to begin with. My batt was only carded once and was quite textural so I went with the flow as I drafted, resulting in some thicker parts with less wrapping and some thin, heavily wrapped sections.

racing stripe plied

I plied it – it’s supposed to be a singles but I wanted to see what would happen. It will find its way into a weaving sooner or later.

a quick one

I realise how often I don’t post here because I take so long to write a post and get images together; and how counter productive that is.

So just a note about a couple of things I’m doing.

The latest in the withdrawn warp experiments, this is bigger than the previous one, 36cm long, and was woven on the tail end of the first warp on my new Saori loom. The fibre was combed top, with an assortment of frayed fabric strips. I’m beginning to get an idea of how this could develop.

wool. fabric

This is the first length of fabric I wove on the loom using the pre-wound warp that came with it. It’s mostly handspun yarns and the warp is cotton. Apologies that I haven’t yet trimmed the ends on the back.

length of fabricOffset Warehouse, while looking for a heavy organic fairtrade cotton. I sent for their sample set and it arrived yesterday. I love the range… They sell reclaimed fabric as well.

fabric samples

The prayer flag project

I can’t remember how I learned about this project, but I’m thinking about joining in. I find prayer flags and prayer trees captivating: the raggedness; the littleness; the physicality of spirituality; the way they hold permanence and impermanence combined.

screenshot of blog

Back when I was exploring prayer flags (and their relationship to laundry) for a prayer flag weaving, I favourited a number of images on Flickr, so I’ve just made them into a small gallery to share with you. If you also happen to like looking at laundry, on the line is another gallery I made a while ago…