Even More Double Weave!

In my previous posts I talk about learning how to make double weave designs in Photoshop Elements. Once I was comfortable with this, and had woven a few samples, I decided that I wanted to weave some silk scarves. But I wanted those scarves to feel soft and drapey and, well, silky. Some of my […]

More Double Weave

In my last post I talked about using Alice Schlein’s book ‘The Liftplan Connection’ to learn how to design fabric in Photoshop Elements. The next step was to see how this worked with double weave (interchanging double plain weave). I’d woven double weave on eight shafts before: I was interested to see how, essentially, not […]

Weaving Adventures

So, I bought a 32-shaft loom. A Louet Megado compudobby. It’s a great loom. But I’d only had eight shafts before, so it was a bit intimidating. My thinking was that I could either have more blocks of various structures to play with (satins, 3/1, 1/3 twill, summer and winter etc) or I could try […]

Blankets!

Well, a blanket. I’m not that keen on weaving double-width on the loom. I’ve done it a couple of times and the last time didn’t turn out well at all. There were skipped threads on the underside, a really uneven beat which didn’t even out when the blanket was washed, and let’s not even talk […]

Interchanging Double Plain Weave

Or, weaving a Welsh blanket-inspired design. I decided I wanted to weave some cushions based on traditional Welsh Blanket designs. These are often based on four blocks of double plain weave, and need four shafts per block, 16 shafts in total. I started off with a profile draft, with a 2/2 twill tieup. As I […]

Interleaved Networked Twills

I was asked to make a wall hanging for an office. It was to reflect to company logo (a circle intersected by squares) and was to be in the corporate colours, which are sea green, light and dark grey and navy blue. My thoughts turned to networked twill, which is what I’ve been experimenting with […]

More Network Drafting

Last time I wrote I was about to weave another networked twill that reminded me of lichen. Although when I designed it the warp was orange/yellow and the weft was stone-coloured, I had lots of grey and pale brown 16/2 cotton already, a mixture of mercerised and un-mercerised. And I had a cone of orange […]

Network Drafting

Still following Bonnie Inouye’s book ‘Exploring Multishaft Design’, next we come to network drafting. I’m also reading Alice Schlein’s book ‘Network Drafting – an Introduction’. Network drafting is about using weave structures in a different way, using a network of possible threading positions as, as Alice says in her introduction, ‘a framework upon which the […]

Dip-Dyeing

Last year sometime I wove some waffle-weave towels in Venne 8/2 cotton from Vav Magazine (March 2019). They were woven on eight shafts, with a straight draw threading. I made the towels a bit wider than the pattern suggested, and wove the hems as a double-weave tube rather than in plain weave with a finer […]

Plaited Twills

I’m still working my way through ‘Exploring Multishaft Design’ by Bonnie Inouye, and still on the first section where changes are made in the tie-up to design new drafts. I made two drafts for plaited twills by adding diagonal lines to the tie-up of some of the 32-shaft twills I wove earlier, the lines being […]