31 Aug 2011

Pics to Picks

11

Today is P2P2 Big Reveal Day so it is time for a worldwide round of applause and appreciation for Meg, who has organised the whole thing with tremendous generosity and grace. I have not only enjoyed my own project, but have been avidly following the progress of the other participants.

My set of pictures came from Meg. Here’s a reminder of the first one I chose to work with (you can see the whole set here if you want a refresher).

My reason for choosing this one was that I liked it the least. I didn’t like the colours and I didn’t like the busy bittiness of the image. However, I decided to embrace those characteristics and use them to weave something appropriate to the theme: a hand towel. (Well, I couldn’t face the thought of a bath towel, but it did need to be a towel for people rather than dishes.)

I’ve said more than enough about Brighton Honeycomb already, so let’s not dwelll on the technicalities (except to note that the hopsack welt worked well on my sample piece, but scaled up to a full size towel it ended up being a smidgeon too wide — something to record here so I’ll remember next time).

Here’s the towel, posing with its picture source.

Here’s a close-up of the weave structure, which is surprisingly animated.

And here it is on duty. Our cloakroom has no natural light, and I reckon that helps to improve the colour of the towel.

In fact I wove two identical towels, and the twin of this one is currently en route to Nelson, New Zealand as a thank you gift to Meg — though I can’t help feeling there is something rather barbed about sending a gift when you have publicly declared that you don’t much like it! It isn’t really like that, though: the work that I’ve done with the image and the yarns means that the result is something I am quite pleased with, even though I’m still not very keen on the original picture.

Having got myself a bit bogged down in my official P2P2 project, I also embarked on a second project which was inspired by my favourite image in the collection. This one, of a sculpture by Niki de Saint Phalle.

In this case I didn’t spend any time planning, I just took some yarn to the warping board and got ready to weave my favourite triangles. I used such a mish-mosh of fibres that I was prepared for all sorts of weirdness when it was finished. However, the result was a more-or-less flat piece of cloth — flat enough, at least, to be used in small pieces to make a messenger bag. Here’s the result.

In fact the body of the bag is a black cotton drill and only the flap features the handwoven fabric. To make it robust enough I used a base of the cotton drill and handstitched two pieces of the coloured fabric side by side onto it. Then I just continued using it in the pattern (which is from this amazing book). I wove the strap in warp-faced plain weave and my selvedges are RUBBISH. But the colours are nice. Oh, and the lining is red.


I’ve included links above to some of my earlier posts on these projects, but you can see them all here or by clicking P2P2 in the tag cloud on the right. More interesting, though, if you go here you can see what everyone else has done.

Thanks, Meg!

“Pics to Picks” was posted by Cally on 31 Aug 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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18 Jul 2011

P2P2 update

9

I had quite forgotten that I haven’t posted any pictures of my 12-shaft honeycomb sample. It certainly has a waffly look about it.

However, I don’t like it as much as the 8-shaft version. The cells are nice and deep, but the larger size gives less sense of movement. And to be honest it wasn’t very comfortable to weave. The lifting sequence is 3 shafts, then 5, then 7 and finally 9 shafts — and back again. I added a basketweave selvedge on the other four shafts so add 2 to all of those. 11 shafts are pretty heavy, but the 5 shafts go flying up and I found it hard to get into an even rhythm. It might be easier on a countermarche loom, but I only have 8 shafts on the Delta.

So I have a nice little selection of samples to ponder, but in the meantime I thought I’d indulge myself. Another of the images Meg sent has lots of big shapes and bright colours so I just grabbed some yarn and made a warp.

I haven’t even come up with an original draft. I’m using my favourite echo triangles to try and create areas of bold colour. My yarns aren’t as bright as the paints in the image (wish I had more of the really zingy reds!) but I’m still having fun.

“P2P2 update” was posted by Cally on 18 July 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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19 Jun 2011

of floats

4

My P2P2 sample warp looks a bit like a riot on the banks of the Ganges, but there is method in’t I promise.

I’m trying a whole assortment of stripes so that I can see what happens when floats of one colour surround a cell of another colour.  However, I started with a pre-sample (yes, I’m afraid so, neki desu!) because I wanted to find out how the two surfaces of Brighton honeycomb differ in practice.

Well, now I know. On the face of the cloth they alternate large and small — you can see it in the area I’ve circled below, though the small cells are so tiny they have practically disappeared.

The large cells occur where the floats surround an area of plain weave. The little cells have no plain weave inside, but occur where two warp floats and two weft floats meet. Now that I’ve seen it in the cloth, the drawdown begins to make sense!

On the reverse side, the cells are not square but rectangular, and they alternate between horizontal and vertical.

In the cloth they hardly look like cells at all, but if you peer closely you can make out little pairs of parallel floats: a horizontal pair followed by a vertical pair and so on. Well, that’s them.

I’ve also been on a nostalgia trip through my earliest weaving records, though I’ll have to come back to that later. I’m off to a research workshop for a few days, but I’m leaving the loom in capable hands.

“of floats” was posted by Cally on 19 June 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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17 Jun 2011

least liked, most looked at

8

So I have been busy with my looking and an idea has begun to take shape. The picture I instinctively liked the least was this one, of the people bathing in the Ganges at the Varanasi ghats.

Why don’t I like it? Well, mainly because I am not very keen on the colours (although they are not quite as mustard-toned as that scan makes them appear). It is also too busy for my taste. The detail which would be engaging and inviting in a mural seems fussy and bitty to me in a postcard. (I feel so rude saying that! Sorry, Meg — though I know you didn’t necessarily choose pictures you like yourself.)

Anyway, a couple of weeks of looking can work wonders. I started to notice more of the subtlety in the shades of beige, brown and orange, and to think about the potential in the complementariness of the blue river and the orange robes. I got out my pastels and played with all the orange and blue ones.

I got out some yarns too. Thinking about the context of the picture, it seemed to me that unmercerised cotton was the fibre I should be using and, believe it or not, this is the range of colours I have in my unmercerised cotton stash:

Although that’s not a brilliant photo, the colours in the picture are a bit more accurate this time! Anyway, I thought it was worth trying out some wrappings, like this one (in yet another colour rendering variant).

Plus, as you know, I have been thinking about weave structure. The reason I started on the whole Brighton honeycomb business was due to the context of the picture again. What goes with bathing? Towels! I have never woven a towel, so this seems like an opportunity to try it.

The first structure that came to mind was ordinary honeycomb (or waffle weave), which I’ve used before although not in any very exciting way. So I turned to the books to look for inspiration and found two things: the Brighton honeycomb and an article by Alice Schlein on network drafting with waffle weave (it’s in Fabrics That Go Bump if you’re interested). Like the threading for waffle weave, the threading for Brighton honeycomb can also be used for plain weave, so I am experimenting in Fiberworks with things like this.

The next important step, though, is to try it in practice. I’m winding a sample warp (hooray! a whole warp for sampling!) in an assortment of cottons to try out some of the structure/colour options. Not bad progress for something I didn’t like the look of.

“least liked, most looked at” was posted by Cally on 17 June 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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13 Jun 2011

sticky stuff

17

Since yesterday’s brain pain I have been on a journey through the weaving books which has become steadily stranger and stranger. The root of the problem is a structure called Brighton honeycomb. It isn’t a structure that I have ever used before, and I am inclined to think that an awful lot of other people can say the same. (It is just possible that there is a tremendous conspiracy about it, but as I am an anti-conspiracy theorist I prefer my first hypothesis.) In any case, there is scant reference to it online and no trace at all in any of the message boards I’ve searched. However, it appears in quite a number of books as an alternative to the “ordinary” honeycomb, aka waffle weave.

The problem is that in most of the books the 8-shaft draft is wrong. This wrongness goes back years and I rather suspect it has been copied from one book to another. Some of the books also include photos of woven samples and I have been peering at the samples to see whether they correspond to the draft or not; however, the distorted surface of the fabric (it is a honeycomb, after all) makes it rather tricky to analyse a photo – the only way to see for certain will be to try it “wrong” for myself and compare it with “right”.

So three hundred cheers for Sharon Alderman, whose Mastering Weave Structures does actually get it right – albeit in the online errata and not in the printed copy which I happen to own. From yesterday’s position of complete ignorance about the structure, I am now prepared to proclaim hers the definitive and correct version for the simple reason that it makes sense.

Brighton honeycomb needs a multiple of four shafts, with a minimum of eight. The 8-shaft version is the one most widely presented, but – as the smallest – it is also the most fiddly, and I can see why a few interlacements might get missed. It is easier to look at if you start with the 12-shaft version, which everyone seems to get right.

It is threaded on a straight draw so that part’s super-easy. The tie-up is where stuff happens. Its basis is a single diagonal from bottom left to top right crossed with a double diagonal going the other way. Like this.

In the spaces around the crossed diagonals, you fill in diamonds like this.

Notice that each diamond includes part of the double (blue) diagonal, but that the single (red) diagonal is always a step away. The left and right diamonds fit into the space quite neatly, but the top and bottom diamonds need to be wrapped around. When it is repeated, the pattern looks like this.

Interlocking diamonds, rather jauntily off-centre!

Now that we know how that works, we can see the 8-shaft pattern does the same thing even though the diamonds show only as little tiny crosses. Here are its diagonal lines and the complete tie-up.

And here is the repeated pattern. The busy-ness makes it harder to see the overall structure, but if you squint at it, tilt your head to one side etc etc then the diagonal lines do reveal themselves. Honestly. The tilting is especially helpful.

It all seems fine and logical. However, what I have found in every other book is this.

Note that there are two crosses missing in the top row (positions 3 & 4) and two more missing in the bottom row (positions 5 & 6). These are the “wraparound” parts of the top and bottom diamonds, and without them you get a very peculiar shape in the repeat.

It looks rather as though the moths have been at it, don’t you think?

One reason why I got so bogged down in this is that I couldn’t quite believe that so many books were wrong. This draft is given by Ann Sutton in The Structure of Weaving, by Anne Field in The Ashford Book of Weaving, by Marianne Straub in Handweaving and Cloth Design and in several other random books I started pulling off the shelves. Not completing the wraparound actually seems to be a habit of Marianne Straub, as her 12-shaft version also peters out at the bottom – although in that case she shows a couple of repeats so the problem isn’t fatal. The incorrect draft is also picked up and explicitly referenced by others, e.g. in Carol Strickler’s A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns, the Brighton honeycomb is taken from Ann Sutton. As I said above, I suspect this incorrect draft has just got stuck in the system and been reproduced from one book to another.

Until Sharon Alderman got it sorted! However, another cause for confusion is that Alderman gives a step-by-step guide to deriving the design which is not the “based on crossed diagonals” one that other sources use. Her tie-up works, but it is actually a different segment of the pattern and therefore tricky to compare with the others. Even when I was working with the correct version it took me a while to find the way in which it almost-matches-but-doesn’t.

Well after all this I am about ready to write a dissertation on Brighton honeycomb* even though I still haven’t used it! I have to use it now, don’t I? Well, it’s certainly part of the plan — although what I really want to do is network it with plain weave so I’ve only got myself to square one so far. An improvement on square zero though.

*Oh look, I just have.

“sticky stuff” was posted by Cally on 13 June 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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