Off the Loom but not Finished

The fabric is off the loom, and waiting....... The first and main yardage is, as I was beginning to guess, a bit sleazy. The reason for this is that the sett was for plain weave but the treadling was really a twill treadling. Twill treadlings require a closer sett than plain weave treadling. The photo does show how nicely it drapes, even unfinished, but it does not show the sleaziness of the fabric. I am hoping that washing and pressing will help reduce that. I'm sure it can be made up into the jacket that I planned.


The second yardage, designed for trim, is nice, not at all sleazy. It is woven on opposites. It is in essence a plain weave. The sett, really a rather firm sett, seems to have been just right. Washing and pressing will reveal the truth of this.



The colors are a little strange on the photo of this last sampling. I guess I was losing patience..........As in the second yardage, this sampling is not sleazy. However, it is a bit firmer and thicker than the second yardage. The fabric's resistance to draping seems quite clear. It is treadled in the same way as that yardage--on opposites. But instead of the 20/2 mercerized cotton, I used 10/2 mercerized cotton. The 10/2 is twice as thick. Perhaps a slightly looser sett was in order there? Only sampling would really tell the truth of that. But again, washing and pressing might change some things here.




So now I am ready to finish the fabric.

But first, there is the loom to clean up. Things to put away. Dusting to be done. Vacuuming to be done. Then my weaving space will be bright and clean and ready for work.

Then there is the machine zigzagging to do on the fabric to keep the ends from ravelling. But then comes one of my unfavorite activities: checking both sides of all three pieces for errors. In unrolling it off the loom I noticed one place which is probably a treadling error. Regularly long lengths of yellow weft appear across the width in one shot. Can this be mended? We shall see. In any case, I have a new warp to put on, so I can always take my time with the checking and re-weaving........ I'm fairly good at procrastinating.

Then there is the measuring. Lengths and widths.

Then comes the washing and then the pressing. And more measuring.

All in all, I am not unhappy with what the loom has produced. One way I can tell is that I am suddenly getting inspired to get the details of the next silk warp in order so that I can start the dyeing, so that I can make the warp, so that I can weave..........

However, the next warp is still going to be the dark red 10/2 mercerized cotton warp. I am much too curious about what that is going to teach me.

End-of-Loom Weaving

What happened at the end of the warp is not an unusual occurrence. The bar had come over the back. As I was weaving I heard these funny dull snapping sounds when I pulled the beater towards the fell. And then the whole warp broke loose. What had happened was that one by one, the cotton string I had used to tie the warp rod to the back apron rod had broken. I weave at very high tension. That string was just not strong enough.

I could have just stopped weaving, but I had a bit more yarn left. So I thought I would fix it up and continue weaving. I got some heavier cotton cord and tied the two rods back together. But only in three places. One I tied in the middle and the other two on the ends. What then was revealed was that bad left side (as I sit on the bench), the 10-15 warp ends that were looser than the rest of the warp. They had plagued me for a bit at the beginning. Well, now they were really looser. So I tied some weights on them.

I continued to weave. I could still weave with fairly high tension, but a notch below what I had been weaving at. So I had to do a lot of strumming of the left side of the warp, to get the warp ends that were supposed to go down to actually go down. But it worked. And then...................



I didn't have very much weft yarn left. I called it a day.

On the next warp, I will use Leigh's trick of putting two rulers between the beater and the front beam. Then I have something to rest the front rods on while I lash the warp onto the front rod. I will also try something a bit different with the knot on the lashing cord on the left side. I wish me luck!

Creative Intelligence and Weaving

In a recent email, artist and writer Robert Genn discussed something he calls "Creative Intelligence." He considers that for an artist to succeed, he needs this kind of intelligence. When he listed some of the traits he associates with CI (as Genn calls it for short), two traits seemed particularly interesting to me. First, artists with creative intelligence know "how to control the medium." But second, they also know "how to let the medium control the art.

In my work with crackle I have been talking quite a bit about my exploits in learning to understand the structure. Only by understanding crackle can I learn how to manipulate it to the ends I want to. And manipulating the structure has been what I have been about. Or so I thought.

But the crackle structure also controls what I create. The structure has possibilities and limitations. It has possibilities for exploiting color that plain weave (and other structures) does not allow, for example. I can do things with color I cannot do with these other structures. On the other hand, there are things I cannot do with crackle that I can with plain weave (or with other structures). So, while crackle gives me what seem to be almost endless possibilities for exploiting color, it also restricts what I can do. I cannot, for example, weave a tapestry, or at least a traditional tapestry.

There is a push and pull here and it is in working within this push and pull that ideas can arrive.

But Genn is suggesting something a bit more subtle. And this is what I am struggling to understand. He says that the creatively intelligent artist knows "how to let the medium control the art." It is the notion of knowing how to let the medium do the controlling that is intriguing.

It would seem, then, that the artist/weaver needs to be in control of the medium/structure, in control to the point that he actually controls the medium's controlling. This is worth thinking about...

For Genn's entire piece, including comments, go here.

Next Crackle Warp

The next crackle warp is not going to be the silk warp that I have been dyeing the samples for. Instead, it is going to be another cotton warp. This time the warp is 10/2 pearl cotton.


Here are the colors: a deep slightly blued red and a deep reddish orange. I have wound the bouts, alternating one end of the red with one end of the orange. These are colors I had. I thought this might be interesting.

So yes, the warp is made. But no, the current crackle warp is not yet off the loom. Still those last five or six inches to weave off. But now that I am ready with the next warp, I am motivated to finish up weaving the current warp.

Colors for Silk Crackle Warp

This is a picture of the colors I am thinking of using on the next silk crackle warp. On the left are two versions of the major color: blue. Then there is a series of neutrals which will make up the greatest area. And the last two colors are sparks that will be used much less frequently. Also, I want to work in a tiny bit of black.

The colors here come from the yarn wrappings I made from the dye samples. I have a screen capture program called Snag-It. I went to the photos of the yarn wrappings and used Snag-It to capture each of the colors I wanted. Each color I captured I pasted into a Word Perfect document. When I was done, I could manipulate each capture to get the size I wanted and arrange it on the page where I wanted. When I had them all lined up the way I wanted them and the size I wanted them, I used Snag-It to capture the group and saved it as a png file. It is that png file that is the picture at the top of the page.

The colors are relatively accurate. But what I like about the resulting montage is the lack of flatness in the colors. If I had simply pulled pure colors out of Paint Shop Pro and created a montage like that above, the colors might have been "prettier" but they would have lacked the interest that the yarns show.

I had fun doing this (maybe too much fun?!). I could play with the arrangement by changing the proportions. I could make copies of some of the colors and add them to the montage. I could create a picture of what I would like the entire width of the warp to look like. I could change the png file to a PaintShopPro file and play with it there. I could try some of the neat stuff that Karen Madigan has done. One example is here. But check elsewhere in her blog for other neat stuff she had done with computer software.

I am too easily seduced by the computer.

Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow

The warp has come up over the back beam. That means I'm just about done. Done with the actual weaving, that is. But still not really done. I have maybe six inches left of weaving? We shall see.

Coming to the end of a project leaves me with most peculiar feelings. I guess it's really kind of a depression. On the one hand I am depressed because the woven fabric does not meet my early expectations. Still I suspect that nothing we create lives up to our original hopes and expectations. Besides, experience has taught me that the final fabric, washed and hard pressed, will result in something much more satisfying than what comes directly off the loom.

On the other hand I am depressed because I am kind of in love with the weaving and hate for it to end. It has been part of my life for quite a long time!

I used to be seriously depressed at the end of the warp. I greatly resented that I had put all this work into weaving the fabric but I was still not done! Not fair! Slowly, as I started to refine it, I began to understand the finishing process. Gradually I built up enough faith in the finishing process that I started looking forward to it. Finishing has become a part of the whole magical process of bringing a piece of fabric to life.

This kind of thing happened to me when I did a lot of sewing. However, because I simply used patterns and did no designing, the emotional involvement was not nearly so intense. And I solved the problem by always have another project waiting in the wings. Pattern, fabric, all the notions ready in a box waiting to be opened.

I do the same thing with weaving. I now have the next warp designed and the details worked out. I have the yarn. But I have yet to work out the dyeing details. Still, even as I weave off this current warp, some subtle design changes continue to happen in the planning of the next warp.


As I have neared the end of this project my critical eye has been working hard. And I used the work "critical" in a neutral sense, not a negative sense. I have been analyzing, as I weave, what works and what doesn't work. One thing I have figured out is that for the effects I am trying to achieve, wide blocks do not work. 1/2" wide blocks seem to be a good average size. Changing the size of the blocks is effective, but there should be no blocks wider than 1". If I were weaving a narrow scarf, 3/4" would probably be the maximum. And I will have to consider how many I would have of them and where I would place them for they do become focuses of attention.

One of the problems with the above picture is that it gives the effect that the weave is weft-faced. It is somewhat weft-dominant, but the warp colors are clearly visible on the fabric itself and so have an effect on the entire fabric. Consequently one of the most important things that is not visible above is how effective changing the warp colors within the blocks is. Most effective are fairly quick changes with at least three colors. By quick changes, I mean 2-8 warp ends of a given color. At least for a weaving at 30 epi this seems to work.

In terms of weft, I liked keeping one color constant and changing the other two. I used only two other colors because this is meant for yardage and I needed to make life a little bit easier for me when I cut out the fabric. The color that I kept the same was the blue. The other two colors were gold and a medium brown. But what would look better, to me, is having 3-5 of the changing colors so that the color positions and relationships would change with each block. This would still keep the gold as a dominant color but a bit less intrusive.

Also, it is looking like weaving the pattern with a yarn twice as heavy as the warp is creating a more attractive fabric. Perhaps there is less fighting for attention between warp and weft. Weft clearly dominates but is affected by the warp colors. There is no way, however, that I can really determine that until all three fabrics are washed and pressed.

However, and this is a big however, as I make preparations for dyeing the silk yarns, I have another crackle warp designed and ready to be wound on the warping board. More on this later.

Shut Up and Weave Rethought

I have been thinking about a post I made a while back about not sharing ideas, especially undeveloped ideas, until these ideas are thought out and put into place. I appreciate the thinking behind that and understand how this kind of talk can take away from the power of the thinking and the doing. The notion is that the more someone talks about something, the less likely he is to do it.

But as I thought about this over the past weeks, I began to realize that if there is any purpose to this blog at all its purpose is to show process. Not completed objects, but the process of one particular weaver as she moves and slips and slides through the process of bringing a weaving to life. Whether I view the blog as something of value to me or something perhaps of value to someone else, this is where I believe its value lies. It is a kind of messy film about a messy weaving life.

There is another piece to this, however. In many ways, I am also a writer. To think I need to write. I was never the person who could construct an essay in her head and then type it out. I needed the physical act of writing to help me process ideas. Blogging helps.

I am not that much different as a weaver either. Weaving helps me process weaving ideas.

A number of years ago I took a workshop in tapestry weaving at Arrowmont. There were only a few of us in the class, five if I remember correctly. I had the good fortune of finding the workshop instructor sitting at the loom next to me. During those times when she wasn't teaching or checking out what we were doing or answering questions, she used that loom as a place to play and invent. Being able to watch her experimenting on the loom was perhaps the best thing of the whole workshop. That is certainly what I remember most vividly.