It's Called Imbrication!

At a weaver's estate sale, I picked up a copy of The Virginia West Swatch Book.  It has some lovely weaving ideas and one that clicked with me was a draft that she called Imbrication.  As she explains in the book, imbrication is the overlapping of tiles, scales and shingles. 

 



Here is a close up of the shawl I wove using this draft.  I used up balls and balls of cotton dye samples that a friend gave me when she cleaned out her studio and interspersed them with 5 or 6 colors of blues and blue green cotton in the warp. To make the shawl a bit more luxurious to touch, I used one strand of tencel and one of bamboo in black for the weft yarn.  Then, I finished the ends of the warp with a picot bead edge, rather than a plain hem or twisted fringe.

Here is the draft.  The threading can be used on quite a variety of weaving drafts.  Take a look at Double Two-Tie Unit Weaves by Clotilde Barrett and Eunice Smith if you have a copy for ideas.  One thing is that this threading seems to be treadle hungry and you may have to use a skeleton tie up. 

Handspun Alpaca & Silk Shawl

One handspun alpaca and silk shawl woven!  What a long, long journey if you look at the dates on the handspun yarns I dug out to weave this piece.  Some of them went back to 1999 when I decided I had to spin up everything I had before I bought more fiber.  Notice that I didn't decide I had to use the handspun yarn before I filled my fiber coffers again.

I had a reason to weave the shawl.  There will be an alpaca event later on in October and they want alpaca fiber arts on display.  I knew I had black handspun - some worsted weight, some fine.  I also had a lot of black alpaca that had been blended with white silk - in singles for weaving, but for this project I decided I needed to ply it.  I turned it into a three ply which matched the weight of the worsted yarns.  Thinking thick and thin, I dug out some alpaca that had been plyed with colored silk, some two ply silks in mauve and two balls of finely spun black alpaca. 

In order to make the stripes symmetrical and since it is always tricky when you aren't actually sure how much yarn is on each of the balls, I started winding one inch bouts on the AVL sectional beam, starting in the middle.  Five inches in the center of the warp with mostly black and some of the alpaca silk, which is silver colored.  Then, I wound an inch on each side - two thick threads, two thin ones.  When a ball looked like it was going to run out, I could switch to another ball of something to make sure the stripes matched on each side.  As I approached 25", I could tell that my supplies were pretty well depleted and I stopped at that width.

I chose a 16 shaft crepe draft and for all that it shows, I could have easily used an 8 shaft crepe. The sett is 12 epi.  I had some 8/2 black silk for the weft and beat it very carefully, easing down to just about 5 picks per inch.  I was nervous that the cloth was going to be too sleazy, but at that point there was no going back. 

Once off the loom it did look sleazy.  I lightly knotted the ends of the fringe to keep them from getting too tangled, put it in my front load washer with just a tiny bit of dawn detergent and in the rinse cycle some white vinegar.  The setting on the washer is wonderful - silk and wool and it really is gentle.  When it came out of the washer, things were already starting to look OK.  I put it on a wooden dryer to air dry, twisted fringe and, voila, a shawl that is light, butter soft and very warm.  Sometimes you win in spite of your insecurity.

Naturally Dyed - Nevada County Dyed

Probably about six years ago, I learned that you could get pretty good natural dye colors on cellulose fibers if you used aluminum acetate as a mordant.  I ordered some from Earthues along with a scouring agent.  Right about the same time, mushrooms began a big bloom on the mountain here - something that happens every year, but this particular season it was spectacular.  I started harvesting mushrooms and seeing if they would give me  good color on 10/2 tencel.  Some did, a lot didn't.  The Butter Boletes were pretty good and the Bitter Bolete gave me a soft green that was lovely.  Since I was on a roll dyeing tencel, I cracked out some dried marigold flowers I had harvested at the Nevada County fair grounds (after they had been uprooted at the end of the season by their gardeners).  Marigolds are an especially pleasing gold which was cool.  Then, over the next few years I dyed with locally harvested Osage Orange, dug up my madder roots and used those, picked Rabbit Brush at a little higher altitude and got a screaming good yellow.  A friend who lives nearby has a big Black Walnut tree and welcomed me coming by in the fall to collect the dropped walnuts in their hulls. 

My dyeing frenzy died down and I put all of the yarns away for an inspiration.  Over the years, I've used some of them, but I had dyed quite a bit of yarn.  Then, earlier this year our weaving group, the Not 2 Square weavers, decided to sponsor a textile challenge at the local fair.   The theme would be Nevada County inspired.  Most people decided to use a photo of something local for their inspiration, but I had the hot idea of pulling out all these tencel skeins dyed from plants grown in Nevada County.  Since I had so many colors and I wanted to include as many as possible, I opted for a plaid woven with five thread satin structures.

This is just a portion of the threading and liftplan I used.  I kept the Rabbit Brush usage to small stripes because it was rather overwhelming next to the more subtle golds and browns.  I had one skein of cream color from some mushroom or other which acted very strangely when I used the fly shuttle.  It seemed like it was sticky and pulled in at the selvedges.  I wanted to use it, so I kept tugging the selvedge back into shape after the shuttle was thrown.  I could see or feel no difference in the thread, but the dye process must have changed the texture of the yarn in some way.

The fair judging is over now and I have no idea how I did with my shawl.  It really doesn't matter all that much, because it was such a pleasurable journey in the dyeing and weaving.  It was really just for me that I wove it.

 

 



Using Up the Fancy Yarns

This shawl was the culmination of  several dyeing projects and a knitting project.  Quite a few years ago, my mother bought a kntting kit for a beautiful sweater.  She was an excellent knitter, but because age was starting to catch up to her memory , she couldn't remember the pattern and finally turned it over to me to finish.  There were balls of a beautiful felted yarn left over and some of those colors were the magenta, dull lavender and darkish purple you see in the woven shawl.  I had some alpaca/wool that I dyed purple and some fine lace weight yarn that I had painted for my local yarn store and finally ended up buying myself.  The owner couldn't sell it and wanted an overdye job, but I couldn't bear to color over my lovely  purple paint job. 

The warp was done with three ends of the lace weight and one end of the heavier sweater yarn in five big stripes.  I didn't have enough of the lace weight yarn or the sweater yarn for the weft, so I dyed more alpaca/wool and some fine Merino wool.  Once I started weaving, I realized I would need more of the Merino and since I never dye to specifications, I went for an entirely different lavender - and then another magenta.  Weave, dye, weave, dye.  After all those improvisations, the shawl turned out pretty nice after all!

The draft was taken from Handweaving.net and when I originally downloaded it, it was a six shaft draft.  I converted it to eight shafts and when I went back to retrieve the draft for this post, I see that it is 8 shaft there now as well.  (Draft 41906).  The fancy yarns float on the surface of one side and are just caught up in little dots on the other side, making it a two sided fabric.

And, I finished the tied weave shawl (alpaca and painted Merino) and it's on its way to a new owner.

The Whole Nine Yards

These three shawls were on my loom for a very long time but were finally finished the later part of October and I'm just getting around to putting this blog post together. Nothing but procrastination here! The shawl in the photo above is called Morocco Sands and I was really excited that it turned out well because I took a leap of faith when I chose the weft color. The warp for all three shawls was a rayon boucle in a dull rose and a 16/2 bright coral ring spun rayon. I had a chartreuse boucle on my shelves that appeared to be just about the same value as the combined warp color, so I went for it. Irridescence was achieved and I was so pleased that I got it right!

This shawl is called Glen Eagle and is one of my one shuttle plaid designs. Actually, the plaid is in the weave structure which is a networked twill threading and treadling. The tie up was 3/1 and 1/3 twill blocks. The twill blocks are shattered in the weave structure and fade in and out on the shawl.

This last shawl is called Esperanza for "hope" in the cure for breast cancer. I'm donating the entire amount of my sale proceeds to Women of Worth, in Grass Valley.