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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

More Samples

More samples this week as I work through ‘Exploring Multi-shaft Design’. I think I find weaving samples quite relaxing. There are no expectations of the final piece, it doesn’t have to be functional , and the colour choices can be a bit wild! First, another fancy twill, designed by repeating small shapes diagonally in the […]

Exploring Multi-shaft Design

In the next few posts I’ll be working my way through Bonnie Inouye’s book ‘Exploring Multishaft Design’. I bought a PDF version from Bonnie via her website. I put a sample warp on the loom 12 inches wide, with a straight threading as instructed. The aim of the first few chapters is to change one […]

Weaving on a 32-shaft loom

I think there are several ways to approach weaving on a 32-shaft loom, like my Megado. You can scale things up from eight shafts, and have many more blocks of a structure like summer and winter to design with, or you can investigate techniques like network drafting which seem to produce better results with more […]

My Weaving Life

I started weaving eight or nine years ago, when I went with my partner to Halsway Manor in Somerset for the weekend. He was teaching Northumbrian Pipes, and I was going for an Introduction to Weaving with Janet Phillips in Nether Stowey, just over the hill from Halsway. By the end of the weekend I […]