Ramblings of a Mississippi Weaver
Today is a twiddling kind of day, while watching software install.
I haven’t had the energy to play with the 12 harness loom for a while, but I’m hoping to get back to that soon. Meanwhile here’s one more pattern I can try weaving on Esme when time and energy allow. If it wasn’t for the M-W warping that’s already on the loom, I could just warp threads from 1 – 12, and repeat, and all the chains would face the same way.
It’s a pattern for the Gleann Abhann rampant ram, in all its tabletweaving glory.
So I was recently reminded that lo these many years ago I had woven some rampant rams in a baldric or two in kingdom colours, and someone asked me for patterns.
Now the Gleann Abhann colours are red/ black, and white: the background being red and black, and the ram being sheepishly white. And I will admit my ram isn’t pizzled (although that fleck of black almost hints to me …)
And having found a picture dating back to April 2015, next was to see if I still had the graphed pattern. back then, many patterns were graphed on paper, rather than in the computer, because paper was handy.
And look what I found. Ready for printing. It’s doubleface, the pattern is only 30 cards wide, and will look best if you start weaving the pattern (which is woven from the bottom up) when the white in the right hoof creates a \/\ pattern. If it doesn’t, back up and weave one more row of background before you start the pattern.
This pattern, btw, is free to use to make Gleann Abhann tokens. Attribution would always be preferred, but it’s not suitable for commercial use.
So for Christmas this year I acquired a modular pinloom from a seller on etsy (https://www.etsy.com/shop/TotaLoom). The looms are modular, with pin bars and angled corner pieces, so that you can arrange it into hexes and diamonds, and squares, etc. (The angles I have so far are 60, 90, and 120 degrees.) Of course, then the question becomes what to make. I started with making diamonds with some yellow acrylic I had left over from mom’s visit.
And then this morning I started noodling about patterns. This pattern block uses the hexagon as it’s main inspiration, although all the shapes are variations of the hexagon so that they can all be woven with the continuous warp approach. I’m calling this one the Field of Flowers, and I’m thinking I can vary the fields by using different colours.
Note: this is a picture heavy post. And I’m learning about wordpress’s new block editor, which is its own brand of fun. So layout is a trifle simplistic.
In the summer of 2019 I purchased a 12 harness tableloom from Egypt; it came packed in a lovely box, some assembly required. Which also allowed me to learn a lot baout how the whole loom was constructed. Here is what she looks like as I’ve assembled the castle – the structure that houses the 12 harnesses – and am about to tie the harnesses up to the levers that control them.
Since then she was assembled, I warped her up, I started weaving, I had shoulder surgery, covid hit, cancer hit, and … just recently I started weaving again. And I’ve been playing with weaving patterns that use 12 harnesses. I’ve been posting quick pics on facebook, but realistically, I would like to start collecting the patterns in a logical place. Like, uh, here …
So this first placemat wasn’t too complicated, because it was a modification of twill, and I could follow along with my pattern so I knew where I was. Also, I finished this first placemat before the shoulder surgery. And then I started the second placemat …
And then I made the colossal mistake of stopping for 2 years … and not marking my spot in the pattern. (So the restart had … issues. And then I made a weaving mistake. And then … yeah. We’ll weave this one off and hide the bad bits.)
But meanwhile as I’m weaving I’m fantasizing about new patterns. Preferably ones that are less fiddly than this one because the fiddly doesn’t work as well as I would like because I’m working with fairly fine thread (10/2 cotton) so that the individual details fade out over any kind of distance. So after some inspirations from handweaving.net (where I had oodles of fun searching for other patterns with the same threading) the next two patterns I want to try are below. The difference is that these patterns are easier on the brain, because the changes are very predictable. Well, at least the first one.
In contrast this pattern below is very different from the previous patterns, in that it has much longer floats. Now if I was weaving in wool the floats wouldn’t worry me in the slightest, because in the wet finishing the wool always felts to itself at least a little. But the current warp is cotton, which will shrink but not felt. On the other hand, this warp is set at 30 epi (ends per inch) so a 5 thread float is one sixth of an inch long. That’s about 4mm. It may be manageable. Especially if I end up throwing these into the feast kit for placemats.
Backstrap weaving using the minimum required while making fabric, and can be improvised anywhere you can acquire stick like objects.
I’ve been diving into youtube looking for helpful videos on how to set up and weave, and this is an unordered collection of links to videos and sites that intrigued me:
I am intrigued by the variety of heddles and how tightly they are attached to the heddle stick, because these three offer three separate options. If you want to weave using more than 2 sheds, you can add additional heddle sticks to accomplish that. The biggest challenge seems to be keeping the length of the heddles consistent: this is less of a problem with the first two methods, where the loops aren’t tied in place.
Consider the following two patterns: they look very, very different. The first one is basically a broken diamond twill with 12×12 squares, and I’ve been weaving various sizes of those for a while now.
But the second looks drastically different. There’s a spiral effect, and this is highly reminiscent of greek key patterns. Again graphed with 2 pattern repeats.
But what absolutely fascinates me is how similar the two patterns are, structurally. If you look carefully at the warping and treadling setups, you may notice that the two patterns differ in only one way. In the first pattern, all the warp is white and all the weft is blue. In the second pattern both the weft and the warp alternate blue and white.
I foresee some experimentation coming up.
So while I’ve been quiet here, I’ve finally been weaving on the 12 harness Leclerc. The design of the loom, it turns out, has some major, and annoying, flaws. Worst is the way I can’t adjust the harnesses so that the string, traveling from back to front beam, lies flat. Since the heddle eyes are below this level, the strings all come off the backbeam, slant down, go through the heddle, and then slant back up. There’s enough distance between the first and twelfth harness that when all the harnesses are down there’s a visible deformation … And there’s tension issues, too. Between that, and getting the loom warped, and then trying to fix it, it took a little longer to get weaving than I had hoped.
But as long as I’m weaving relatively narrow ware, and am careful, I can make it work. So I’ve been working on the rug mugs. In this picture you can see the pattern below, as well as previous pattern. The warp’s path was particularly problematical when the higher-numbered harnesses were down. The edges are not ideal (I keep meaning to weight those two edges, and then I keep forgetting, but …)
The pattern I used for the latest rug mug is an earlier variation of the one on the left. The other challenge of that pattern is that in some places there are floats over 5 strings.
So the next two mug rugs are going to be a) the left pattern, and then b) the right pattern.
And I’m still playing with the same warp so I haven’t changed the threading through the heddles on the harnesses at all. There is still so much room to play here …
So last night my new 12 shaft Voyageur Leclerc table loom arrived. Unpacking her was an adventure; she was packed in a wood shipping crate in a cardboard box, with much tape. Pity the customs inspector who had to open her up. (Although I don’t think anyone did, actually. She arrived ship shape and bristol clean, as it were.)
So my first project is going to be a series of mug rugs. My goal is to experiment with the weave structures, so I’ve measure up about 5 yards, give or take, of 4/8 superwash wool (which is heat resistant and flame resistant). 79 ends, which I will be using at 12 ends per inch. One copy of the pattern is 22 threads, so this gives me enough room for 3 repeats, with about 5 threads on each end.
So patterns. Turns out you can do a lot with 12 harnesses … The following are just a small collection of possible patterns, all warped identically. It’s how the harnesses are lifted and in what order that makes all the difference …
So much twill …
So in happy anticipation of an oncoming birthday gift from hubby — 12 harness table loom where each harness is manipulated separately using a lever — I have been playing more with different weaving patterns and trying to make sense out of them. (I’ve also learned how amazeballs having software to work out these patterns is, because doing this by hand would make my brain hurt. Hurt worse.)
The first thing I learned is that it’s all about symmetries, reflections, and translations. So I started with a very basic building block: Each column here represents all 12 harnesses, (each square is one harness), and if the square is black, the harness is lifted on this pick. If I just kept repeating this block I would get diagonal lines across the surface.
So then I started playing with symmetries. Now in these symmetries I’m reflecting both the warp threads and the raising and lowering of harnesses as I weave, so I can’t move seamlessly form one pattern to the next. But I’m trying to develop the intuition for how reflections work so that’s what I start with.
This is the base pattern. There are reflections both horizontally and vertically so that each full repeat of the pattern consists of 4 copies of the basic block. Every time the diagonals in both the threading (on the horizontal bar) and treadling (the vertical bar) change directions we’re starting a new reflection.
In this version we’re still reflecting the basic square in its entirety, and the size of a single repeat is 22 threads high by 22 threads wide.
It’s pretty, but it’s not really complex.
So let’s up the ante.
What we’ve done here is add some partial reflections, where the threading/treadling change direction after only 6 strings instead of 12. The basic bloc is still the same size, But a full repeat of the pattern is now 32 threads wide and high.
Of course the next logical experiment is to add translations. Translations occur when you keep going in the same diagonal direction for more than 12 picks, which you see here in the parallel lines in the pattern. And the pattern is now 56 threads wide and tall. (And yes, on the left side I forgot a reflection in the threading, so there’s an unevenness there. Oops)
And then there’s this last Variation, where translations have been utilized to make the individual building blocks much bigger than they really are.
So I’ve been idly daydreaming, along with friends, about getting looms with moar harnesses! And wondering how much of a difference it would make, and how I could draft patterns for it …
And I like brick-work. One of the first patterns I worked out how to tablet-weave from first principles was the woven in version of Birka strapwork. So here, for my first case of many harness pattern drafting, I present the 8 and 12 harness versions of birka strapwork. Now all I need is the loom to weave them by …
Developing these was actually an interesting exercise in Escherian tilings; you have an 8×8 (or 12×12) grid that’s tiled horizontally and vertically, and so you want to set it up so that the repeats tile nicely.
