Eowyn – Page 5 – Dixie Weaver

Playing with Baltic Pickup style inkle weaving (Part 2)

So I spent some time this weekend playing with the Baltic inkle pickup warp. The rules of the game were simple: two repeats of the simple diamond with the 4 interior diamonds, alternating with a diamond with some other free-styled pattern.

By keeping the edging pattern between the diamonds and the outer diamond’s dimensions consistent, the band feels cohesive, even though every third diamond is something else. Below are 16 possible variations I came up with, while enjoying a Columbo marathon.

Oh, and just one more thing … there are 25 places where the warp thread can be pushed down, or not, inside the diamond. That means that there are 2^25= 33554432 possible combinations, but I’m guessing that many of them lack pleasing symmetries.

Back of the envelop suggests that requiring symmetry along one diagonal reduces the possibilities to about 2^10+2^5=1024+32=1056 (the places below the diagonal line plus the diagonal line), but then the diagonal line can itself be flipped … But the “S” figures are flipped around a vertical or horizontal line; so there are 4 possible axis of symmetry, so 4*1056= 4224 possible combinations that are symmetric.

In short, back of the envelop suggests that I’m going to run out of warp before I run out of possibilities.

Playing with Baltic Pickup style inkle weaving

Baltic pickup style inkle is woven using background threads and pickup threads; the pickup threads are usually either thicker, or doubled up. In the threading diagram, you can see how each pickup thread is place between two threads in the opposite heddle; the white boxes representing the pickup threads. In the diagram one row represents the heddled threads and the other the open threads, and the rows aren’t labeled since it actually doesn’t matter which is which in this case, so why complicate things?

The patterns here use 17 background threads; the 5 leftmost and rightmost threads are woven over a green background, while the middle 7 pick up threads lie nestled between dark blue background threads. The plan is to eventually experiment with the Kostrup patterns, since those are 17 cards wide also, but I needed simple patterns to weave while out and about Monday.

The current patterns are simple diamonds, and by weaving them upside down I only ever have to drop threads from the current row, rather than having to pick up. In the pattern (Baltic Diamonds) squares with circles in them are the pickup threads that are high in each row. If a pickup thread is high but has a grey background, then it gets dropped, resulting in the front patterns we see on the left below.

This is what the pattern with the small diamonds looks like; the predominantly green/blue side is what you see while weaving, the white side is the underside which is much harder to photograph while on the loom.

Here I was working with larger diamonds, and experimenting a little with alternate patterns like the diamond in a diamond and the inner cross. Making the outside diamond a little smaller results in a 2×2 grid of the smaller diamonds, or a 3×3 grid of the larger, and then it’s just a matter of dropping a few extra threads here and there.

Final update on the Kostrup weaving

Sunday was the moment the weaving came off the loom. Total woven length is 1.36m. And the wool used in the brocading is the same weight as the wool used in the weaving, except that the brocade uses doubled threads. For the weft I used 60/2 silk, and in a next product I might go thinner still.

As you can see from this first picture, I handled the colour changes by cutting the brocading thread at the end of each colour. Each woolen brocade thread passed through one weft after it’s done brocading; given the stickiness of this wool, that should be more than enough to anchor it in place. In some cases, like the small triangles, you use two colours at the same time; even beating extra hard I struggled to get both brocading wefts to lie in the weft without a smidge of gappage. In a next attempt, I think it might be better for those areas if the brocading weft does not go the width of the band, but instead goes only part way.

On the other hand, once the band relaxed off the loom, the occasional gaps between successive lines of brocading improved already.
Trimming the ends of the brocading threads carefully, you can see that the brocading threads are visible on the back only where it moves from pick to pick; I dropped the brocading threads two cards from the edge (or halfways through the 4 card selvage), so that there wouldn’t be any colourful bumps on the very end.

Next step is to take it to the post office tomorrow and mail it off, and then I want to experiment with some pattern variations.

Continuing the Kostrup weaving part 3

Progress remains painfully slow, although the netting needles have helped tremendously in picking out the pattern, and I have finally developed a rhythm of sorts.

By evening last night I had finished the first 30 cm, which was one repeat of the patterns in the paper. I’m going to weave about a 3cm break and then repeat the set of patterns. Three repeats should get me pretty close to a meter.

The biggest problem so far is that the wool sticks to itself, and so I am having to reverse direction sooner than I am used to, just to keep the wool from felting.

Well, that and occasionally a card sneaks in a quarter turn, and it takes me a while to notice and fix it.

Tabletweaving for the Kostrup smokkr: Part 2

So once the skeins of wool were wound up into balls it was time to warp the loom. The trim that I am trying to reproduce was 1.2 cm wide, on 17 cards that were each threaded with 2 threads. It looked like there was selvage in the picture, so I added 4 cards of selvage, and alternated the threading of the selvage cards, as well as the pattern cards. By alternating the threading direction (or rather, warping and then flipping every other card) the ribbon should naturally lie flat.

When you zoom in on the picture you can see the interesting weaving structure created by the missed hole threading in the pattern tablets. The weft is a navy 60/2 silk and just about invisible on the edges, and the brocading threads are doubled threads of the 20/2 wool, dropped down below two cards from the edge so that you don’t see them at the edge. Right now the ends are also visible; those will be trimmed flush with the band when it comes off the loom.

What I find particularly interesting is the effect of the weaving structure on the diagonal edges of the brocading; for instance in the cross over X part of the yellow fish it looks like two rows have the same end point, but they don’t. I think this effect is due to the fact that the threads in each card are basically floating two above and two below, which affects the appearance.

What I find more frustrating is that the emergency brocading shuttle I’m using – a tatting shuttle whose bobbins can be traded out – is not really long enough and difficult to manipulate with the left hand, making every second row trickier. This is exacerbated by the pattern cards’ desire to shift …

Unless I find a way to speed up, this is going to be one of those projects where the pace is measured in cm per hour. So far, roughly 2 cm per hour.

Another Program in Another Lab …

Sometimes I like to rewrite the words of songs … often those of musicals. In this case, Evita’s “Another Suitcase in Another Hall”

Eva:
I don’t expect my programs to compile at first,
Never fool myself that my typing is true.
Being used to errors, I anticipate it,
But all the same I hate it, wouldn’t you?

Chorus:
Eva: So what’s compiling now?
Che: Another program in another lab …
Eva: So what’s compiling now?
Che: Printf, echo, take another stab…
Eva: Where is this silly bug?
Che: You’ll compile, you always have before …
Eva: Where is this silly bug?

Eva:
Time and time again, I’ve said it’s in NP,
That it just can’t be done, in polynomial time,
But every time we argue, all the proofs desert me,
And back I go trying, one more time …

[chorus]

Eva:
Call in three months time, I’ll be fine, I know,
The problem solved, though the code might be slow.
I won’t recall the names and places of this complication
But that’s no consolation here and now …

[chorus – but now Che’s lines are sung by nerdlets]

Tabletweaving for the Kostrup smokkr: Part 1

A bartering agreement has been made, and I will be trying to recreate the tabletwoven band that sits between the brooches but above the pleated fabric of the actual smokkr, as described in the paper The aprondress from Køstrup (grave ACQ).
Step one was acquisition of the wool; I will be going with commercially dyed wool since this needs to be done by late May (which is sooner than it sounds). I bought 20/2 Mora wool in four colours: blue for the background and then white, yellow, and red for the brocading. As you can see from the pictures below, I may have a slight surfeit of the brocading wool. Luckily wool can be used for more than one project at a time, no?

This is how the wool arrives from the vendor; in skeins that need to be wound off into balls to be useful for warping.

Step two was turning the acquired skeins of yarn into something I could warp. Swift and ball winder to the rescue. Note that the swift is constructed similarly to an old Viking horizontal swift, and is made entirely of wood, with the exception of the metal washer I added to facilitate the turning of the arms. The ball winder, in contrast, is thoroughly modern but faster than a nostepinne. And while it’s sunny, it’s not that warm outside.

The skein is mounted on a horizontal swift and then the end is found. After untying the skein, the end is fed into a ball winder and the turning begins. Each skein was wound into four very roughly equal balls of wool; sizes were eyeballed.

The advantage of having four balls is that I can quickwarp, when I get t that stage.

Several hours later, all four skeins have been turned into center-pull balls of wool, ready for the next stage.

To be continued …

Gulf Wars is Coming!

Which means I’m winding off spools of silk for Dixie Weaver, and working on class notes.

I’ve updated the Starter handout by adding more patterns, and have added a second handout with patterns for the Egyptian Diagonals class. I’m planning on using the old hand out for days 4 (doubleface) and 5 (3/1 broken twill).

So the new handouts are added to the Class Notes section and we’re slowly getting more and more ready.

Losing track of time …

We’re heading to the middle of February, and time has been getting seriously away from me. Gulfwars XXV is just over a month away, and there’s a lot I have to get done before then.

I’m teaching a week long series of tabletweaving classes; we start warping on Monday, and end on Friday with 3/1 broken twill, stopping to play with simple patterns, as well as Egyptian Diagonals and doubleface before we get there.

Which means I have been writing teaching handouts; it was time to take some of the old ones out and refurbish them. And I’ve added a new one which introduces some very simple patterns on the same warp you can use for the fancier patterns: Tabletweaving Starter Class Handout.

And while working on that, I also found an old class handout from a few years ago, that explains how to play Rithmomachy (Rithmomachy Class Handout)- a game that was played from the 11th through the 17th century, primarily in monastery schools, where it served as an excellent way of reinforcing students’ abilities to add, subtract, and factor. I keep wondering if we could reintroduce the game to modern students …

Using inkscape to draft tabletweaving patterns

I draft a lot of patterns for tabletweaving, and the way I like to display the pattern includes both the turning directions and a guideline as to what the pattern should look like.

When I first started drafting patterns, I would work in pencil on gridded paper where each square represented one card in one row; first I would outline the main shapes, and then use a highlighter to add the turning directions for each card — highlighted for backwards, not highlighted for forwards. The biggest downside was that even at 5 squares per inch, a sheet of standard letter paper didn’t really hold room for a lot of cards. And heck, the squares could be smaller in any case.

I use computers a great deal, so casting around for solutions I experimented (briefly) with spreadsheets and discovered that this was too fiddly for me. Then I discovered Adobe Illustrator, which is a vector based graphics editor that has all the bells and whistles one could desire. Sadly, it also had a price tag to match, and I was at the time a graduate student, and student discounts are nice, but not *that* nice.

Which brought me to inkscape which is free, opensource, and available for Windows, Mac OS, and most importantly linux, aka my operating system of choice. Inkscape is a very powerful program, but I take advantage of a limited number of features.

I use layers extensively, as each part of the pattern is in its own layer, including the grid. In fact, I usually use the following layers from top to bottom:

Grid lines – black grid lines 0.5 px wide
White grid lines – white grid lines 3.5 px thick
Pattern – one layer per colour to make colours easy to manipulate
- Colour 1 – line 3 px wide
- Colour 2 – line 3 px wide
- Rough Pattern
Threading – the colour in the dots indicates the colour of thread in the two top holes.
Greyscale – used to indicate the turning directions forward and back. Grey squares are turned towards the weaver, and white squares means the cards are turned away from the weaver.

Setting the layers up in this way allows me to take advantage of the order in which they’re drawn (bottom up) so that the diagonal lines I draw in the pattern colours become small individual diagonals.

Once I have the layers set up and the grid built I usually save the file as a blank.svg file, so that I don’t have to keep rebuilding the grid.

In this case, I’m planning a very simple pattern where the cards turn continuously in one direction until twist builds up, and then they reverse direction. I’ve roughed it in and now it’s just a matter of adding the colours.

The basic design has all cards threaded the same way with two dark and two light colours, and we will be turning the cards forwards 12 times, and then backwards 12 times.

In this simple variation, we have turned every second card around its vertical axis, so that half the cards are threaded from left to right, and the other half are threaded from right to left.