Crackle Yardage Two

Here is a photo of the second crackle yardage bit I wove. It has been mended. That is not quite true. Aside from an unfixable mis-treadle, there was no need for mending. All I had to do was cut off all the extra bits of weft thread. Then I washed and hard-pressed it. And here it is as it looked while still on the ironing board:



Yes, the ironing board looks a bit big. That is because I have laid something called a Big Board over the top of the ironing board. It is covered with padding and muslin, just like a regular ironing board is. Sometimes, though, when I want a really hard press, as for silk, I press directly on the board itself with no padding or muslin cover. This has been a wonderful tool for me. For more information, check out the website for Big Board.

And here is a picture of the fabric draped over a lamp:


The fabric is quite light weight and, considering the structure, drapes rather nicely. The lampshade underneath, of course, causes the fabric to look bulkier than it really is.

My original intention was to use this piece as trim. Of course, that was only an intention. I do not know what will finally become of it. I do like it, however, and almost wish this had been the main yardage.

Crackle Jacket Fabric: A Change of Plan

Last night I finished winding the warp. I had made 6 bouts with a total of 1058 ends. As I was winding the last bout I began to realize that I really wanted to have the threads spread out on 8 shafts. The reason for this is that I wanted to be able to use any warp left over at the end for some 8-shaft tie-ups and try some things on them.

I thought this would be simple enough to do. I went to my original 4-block structure and asked my software to convert it to 8-shaft crackle. The resulting threading turned out to be a bit of a mess. Even after I made the necessary corrections manually, I discovered that there no threads called for on shafts 5 and 6. So I decided to start over. But first it was time to go to bed.

I didn't sleep very well for a couple of reasons. One of them was the warp. I had figured out what I needed to do, but it was the middle of the night and I was not going to get up and do it. So I was just quite restless through the night. Morning came. I took my morning walk, had breakfast, went to the computer and opened the software.

This time I redid the original 4 blocks as 8 blocks, keeping the same basic design. Here it is:

Then I asked my software to convert the block design to 8-shaft crackle. The software made a few errors, but not many, and they were easily corrected. When I filled in the tie-up and the treadling, things seemed to be what I wanted.

There was only one minor hitch. The new block design was wider and so called for more warp ends. Consequently I created 3 instead of 4 repeats. That was fine, especially as I am in general a fan of odd numbers. But 10 more warp ends were needed in addition to the warp ends I had already finished making. So, I went to my color diagram, and using the next colors that came up, I simply made 10 more ends. I will simply call that last bout #6a. And when I wind on, I will wind on bouts 6 and 6a together.

There is one more change I plan on making as well, and that is the treadling. The original plan was just to treadle straight across, left to right, left to right, left to right, and so on. I would change the color order when I decided to start a new block. But then I tried notating a point twill kind of treadling. I had the treadling go left to right 2 times, and then return 10 times. Fortunately I will have plenty of room on the warp to try this out. Of course, something could go terribly wrong with the beaming on and I lose a yard or two of warp. No, not going to happen.....

Here is the drawdown, including a possible treadling:


It's a little hard to see what is going on; I zoomed out a great deal in order to give a better image of what the fabric might actually look like. What I like here is the illusion of direction change. What I do not like what happens at the point of change. Perhaps I can figure a way around that. However, the warp here is all black, which it is not in reality. And I will have to weave it to see what is really happening.

Crackle Jacket: Slight Change in Design

It was the middle of the night. I woke up.The block design for the crackle fabric needed just a tiny bit of loosening. I went back to sleep. After breakfast in the morning, I opened up the computer file and played with the design. Here it is.


Here is what I changed. The first time the C block appears, I changed it from 6 to 3 units, and did the same thing later when the blocks moved from D back to A. Then, on the much smaller motives, I changed the turning point of each motive (the C block in the case of the first motive, and the D block in the case of the second) from 2 units to 3 units. My aim is to make the weave pattern just a little more fluid, while still retaining the sense of pattern.

The pattern I see 2 small rises and falls within a larger rise and then fall. I want the pattern to be there, but diffused. I hope for it to be diffused both my these subtle changes and, more importantly, by the use of color. I am getting very eager to see how this will all turn out!

The practical result is fewer warp threads. The warp will still be a bit wider than it needs to be, and that is good. I have already finished one bout so it will have a few more warp ends in it than the other 5 bouts, 14 more to be exact. Because I weight the bouts individually as I wind the warp onto the warp beam, it is important that all the bouts weigh the same. That way the bouts should all wind on the beam with the same amount of tension. I do not think (or at least I hope!) that 14 fewer ends in one bout of 10/2 pearl cotton is going to have a significant difference. And the warp is only 7 yards long, which will also help.

Crackle Jacket: Designing the Fabric

Since I got my computer back and it's working fine, I have gone back to work on the crackle jacket. I had already decided from the earlier samples the particular sample I planned to use as the basis for the jacket fabric. And here it is.
The colors are fairly close to the actual
fabric, but the actual fabric has a great deal
more subtlety. The warp colors are a medium
greened blue, a medium brown and a medium
browned gold. The weft colors are a pastel blue, a pastel yellow, a pastel lavender and the medium browned gold of the warp. All yarns are 20/2 pearl cotton. It might be remembered that I had some initial reservations about the lavender. There were some sample treadlings where it just did not work. But here the lavender, subdued by the other colors, creates a little surprise which in fact, does work.

None of this would be revealed on a computer screen. Or perhaps I simply cannot project in my head from the computer screen to the actual fabric. This is why I can use the computer only for suggestions and finding errors and technical problems. It simply is of no help with color. And for me, manipulating color is in many ways what weaving is all about.

By the way, I have used computer software to pull this sample out of the fabric of samples. I know there are ways to get rid of the unwanted black parts, but I have yet to learn how to do that.

I opened my weaving program and designed a 4-block symmetrical design. I have created it as a 4-shaft design because, despite the fact that the sample I am using for the basis of this fabric was designed on 8 shafts, it is really a 4-shaft design. It just seems easier to thread and weave on 4 shafts than on 8. Had the threads been any finer (my favorite 60/2 silk, for example), I would have used the 8 shafts simply to separate the heddles a bit. Then there would be less likelihood of shed problems when it came time to weave. But this is only 20/2 pearl cotton and the yarn is very slippery.

The design for the crackle exchange and subsequent sampling had been quite wildly assymmetrical, but I decided that some kind of symmetry would make for easier making up of a garment from the fabric. Here is the block design for the threading.


Each individual unit of a block is indicated by one square. Each square consists of 4 threads. These four threads make up the individual crackle unit. What you see (rather dimly, I am sorry to say) is a block representing, when drawn out as threading, 278 individual ends. This thread grouping will be repeated 4 times across the warp. The total number of ends thus should be 1,112.

I am using the same color ordering as I used for the exchange and sampling warp. It consists of 3 colors appearing at apparently erratic intervals. There is, however, a plan and I have used my spreadsheet program to block out the 3 colors with the number of repetitions each time. The ordering and repeating of the colors, however, has nothing to do either with the blocks or the repeated design units.

Sampling for the Crackle Jacket

Two days ago I hand-washed the sampling I had done on the warp left over from weaving the samples for the crackle exchange. Then I gave the sampling a fairly hard pressing. And here is the piece. The whole is not quite visible as I had to loosely pleat the fabric to fit into the photo.

What you see here are the results of 22 different treadlings and/or color experiments combined with 2 different tie-ups. The first tie-up was the same one I had used for the crackle exchange samples. The treadlings on this tie-up are visible on the left side of the picture.

The second tie-up converted an 8-shaft crackle into the equivalent of a 4-shaft crackle. And you can see those treadlings on the right side of the picture. You can even see that the weaving on the right side is reminiscent of a 4-shaft piece I showed some time ago.

By the way, as soon as I had pressed this sampling, the particular sample I plan to use for the jacket fabric immediately jumped out at me.

More later.

Crackle Jacket Continued

A while back Iwas talking about the Spring 2007 crackle exchange (Crackle: the Incidental Threads) and this brings me back to the first rumblings of designing the crackle jacket. The yardage idea I had talked about (Crackle Jacket: First Rumblings) had faded from my conscious mind. But late in the spring I realized that I had only one month to weave samples for the spring crackle exchange. I had just begun weaving some baby blankets, and I am not a fast weaver, so I was pushed for time. In fact, I thought seriously about not weaving samples for this exchange. In any case, I knew it couldn't be fine silk sett at 60 epi. I had to use a heavier yarn for faster warping and weaving. And I certainly didn't have time to dye anything.

Inspired by Leigh's use of her stash to weave some really lovely Summer and Winter stuff, I decided to look at my 20/2 pearl cotton stash. I have never much cared for weaving with this fiber, though at one time I had thought it might be a good way at exploring colors in crackle using a less expensive yarn. I never did anything with that idea because I dye my own yarns. Dyeing silk greatly reduces cost, though that is not my reason for dyeing them. And the dyeing, which includes lots of sampling, the planning and the weaving all take so much time that the cost of silk really becomes negligible. So all my crackle sampling and weaving has been pretty much with silk yarns.

When I checked my stash I discovered that I had some of the colors I had originally planned on using. They were not identical to the original color scheme, but close enough. So I threw together an 8-shaft crackle draft using different using different size blocks in an asymmetrical design and with no threading repeats. I had wanted to explore this kind of threading for awhile. And I decided to use 3 colors in the warp. I wanted, however, to have the colors change, not according to block changes, but according to a mathematical sequence based on Fibonacci.

Here is a part of the drawdown, in black and white (black warp, white weft). The drawdown does show the complete treadling sequence but only a small part of the threading.




For treadling, I decided to try a kind of improvised version of an advancing twill treadling. No tabbies. A one-shuttle weave. Aha, very fast to weave. Well, yes, I did weave with more than one color, so it was really a two shuttle weave. But this is still faster than a 3-shuttle weave. Once the warp was on the loom, I played around with this idea until I got what I kind of liked, both in terms of treadling sequence and in terms of weft colors. And here is a picture of part of the weaving:


The warp colors are blue, gold, and a very grayed brown. The weft uses these same colors with the addition of a pinkish violet.

And here is a closer view of one of the samples:


I rather like the pink-violet as a kind of a punch. But it stands out a bit too much, especially in the closeup. So, if I do use it in the final piece, I shall have to do some careful thinking.

When I finished the crackle exchange samples, I still had warp on the loom for some explorations. But that story is for a another day. The day may not be too far away as it is now off the loom and has been washed and is drying and awaiting a hard press.

Crackle Jacket: A Different Path?

4:00 am. I woke up. I woke up with the image of those oyster shells vivid before my eyes. Frequently when I am planning a project, at some point I have a change of heart. Sometimes this happens in the middle of the night. It happened last night.

The startling blue and gold which stood out so brilliantly against the darkish neutrals. The splatterings of black. I started thinking of having an occasional black warp. Maybe I could have it repeat at regular intervals against the irregular size blocks. Or maybe a colored warp that I dyed black in spots. Maybe both.

How would I do this? The solid black threads are no problem. But the colored warp with black spots. Well, I could separate out threads and paint them. Oh dear, we are talking dyeing cotton and using MX dyes. I've used MX dyes but I have never cared for them. They are the devil to wash out and the dissolved dye keeps for only a few days. The acid dyes, on the other hand (which I use on silk) are easy to wash out, assuming that there is even any excess dye to wash out, and the dissolved dye keeps for ever. The last means much less mixing of powders. Both more convenient and less exposure to the danger of breathing in the dye powders.

Ahh, but there are some warm or hot water reactive dyes. I've not used them myself, but I know people swear by them, and so in my head I am thinking of going to the ProChem site and checking that out.

And then I start thinking of what I might do with painted warps if I turned the draft so that the treadling became the threading and the threading the treadling. This raises all sorts of new ideas, especially for warp painting possibilities.

STOP!!!! Enough already. I begin to realize that these shells have inspired a second project, not a change in this project. After all, the intent is an easy-to-wear cotton jacket for spring summer and fall (in South Carolina), casual enough to wear with my khaki's, but just slightly dressy enough to wear with linen skirts and pants. Whew. Back to sleep.

And today I have to make notes of all this so that I don't lose my thoughts from the wee hours of the morning.

By the way, the blanket warp is now fully covering the width of the loom and ready to weave.

I think an unwoven warp is a lovely thing.

What you see at the back of the loom, by the way, is my raddle. I usually always remove the raddle before starting to weave, but leave the lease sticks in. When I was in Santa Fe I learned that the Mexican rug weavers left their raddles in. I asked, why? The response was, why not? Then my friend Leigh tried leaving her raddle in and found she liked weaving that way. So tried it, and removed with fear and trepidation the lease sticks as well. I discovered that I liked that also. And, even though I had removed the lease sticks to help with finding a broken warp thread, I realized that the raddle would still make it quite easy to find them.

Crackle Jacket: First Rumblings

The idea for the crackle jacket I am in the (very slow!) process of designing had its first rumblings in two different places. First, I had the vague idea of weaving some yardage for the next HGA Convergence conference. I didn't have any idea at all for using the final woven yardage. I was just thinking in terms of weaving yardage for the sake of itself.

The theme for the yardage exhibit is Ebb Tide, and I didn't have the foggiest idea how I could weave that idea. So I didn't think too much about what I might do, except that I did want the structure to be crackle.

Then, I participated in an online workshop on using graphics programs to develop weaving designs. This workshop was hosted by an online fiber guild which is part of the British Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Dyers. One of the things I learned there was how to pick colors from an image to create a computer palette.So I thought a bit more about the possible Convergence yardage and started hunting the internet for images of pearls and oysters. Not quite exactly the stated theme, but close enough, and at least pearls and oysters were something concrete and they interested me. I found tons of stuff, but here are a few of those that I liked the best.
















































I finally settled on the image at the top, an image of oysters. I very much liked the colors. I especially liked the rich blue and gold against the rather dark neutrals, and the lacing throughout of what seemed to be almost black. I took that into my graphics program (Paint Shop Pro) and picked out colors. And here are the colors I came up with:











The browns are not as rich as the browns in the image, and there is no black. Somehow I wasn't sure that I could fit that into a weaving and still have it be a coherent whole. But I did rather like what I came up with, the rather muted palette with no striking contrast. Or at least for a start....... even though this is not at all my "style." I weave with vivid or rich colors, not with pales or neutrals. And here is an example of my more typical weaving:

















Still, the colors did speak to me. Perhaps I was ready for a change? But not quite yet. I didn't quite know how to work with this muted language, so the yardage idea submerged itself somewhere in the depths of my mind for awhile.