So when I said "tomorrow" in my last post, what I actually meant was in several weeks. It's been a bit nutty for me. My husband went to Houston for 2 weeks for work and my mom came to visit and help me. Yay! So it was crazy, and sad because I missed my husband, but also a ton of fun having my mom here. Anyway, enough the the excuses!
If you haven't read my last post, it is short and it sets up this series of posts I am writing on the process of weaving. This is the second one. The first can be found here.
Now that I have a basic design concept I can get to work. Initially that involves calculations of how much yarn a project will be. There on online calculators for this, but I wrote my own in excel... because literally my whole life i excel based. This was just a natural extension. I need to plan everything out like length and width of the fabric as well as shrinkage, loom waste, colors and how they are used, etc. In this case my planning told me that I needed to buy more yarn. What?!? I can't help it! That what excel told me to do!
Like a I said in the last post, this wrap is going to be neutral. I have a chocolate brown and a taupe, but I want to add in some black. I still have some tweaking of the final design, but I am hoping for a modern, sophisticated look. Conceptually I settled in a design that used a warp of all taupe. Generally I don't use a single color because I find it to be boring. But this wrap is about stepping out of my comfort zone and I'm pretty excited about the possibilities... Once the yarn arrives in the mail.
Before I continue I want to pause for a quick explanation of warp and weft for the rest of this post. I'll get back into this actual shawl next time.
Unless you are actually going to weave, warp and weft are the two most important terms to understanding any weaver. Everything else is mechanics. But warp and weft refer to the yarns used for weaving, and therefore is the most visually important part of any woven piece. These yarns can be any color, thickness, and material you can think of. But floor loom weavers do have a consideration when considering the warp, as I'll talk about later... I think
If you look at any woven fabric you will see two sets of threads or yarns traveling at 90 degrees to each other (there are certainly exceptions to this... deflected warps and wefts, some tapestry weaving. I am keeping it basic here). This is as opposed to knit fabric were the yarn or thread interacts in loops. Most t-shirts are knit fabrics, most jeans are woven. If you've ever bought cotton quilting fabric at a fabric store you know that there is the short side that frays and the long sides that don't. Those are called the selvages. So, with that fabric in mind, the thread that runs parallel to the selvage, the ends that stick out of the fray, are the warp threads. Those that are parallel with the fraying edge, the threads that fray off, are the weft.
So let's relate this to making handwoven fabric. Nearly every floor loom is going to be remarkably similar at it's core. It is designed to hold yarn at tension and lift or lower those yarns in pattern to allow the weft yarn to be woven into the warp. This most fundamental weave structure is plain weave. This is where the loom lifts (or lowers) every other warp yarn... the weft is placed between them, then the other half warp yarns are lifted and the next weft is placed between them. As you can imagine, patterns can be made by, rather that lifting every other warp, the loom lifts every 3rd. The complexity can become enormous and there are scores of books publishing these possibilities as well as websites.
And let me pause for a moment... I am super generalizing and any weaver that may read this can go "well that's not entirely true" and "that's not the way countermarche looms work" etc. Sorry weavers, this post might be painful for you. Then again, if you are a weaver you probably don't need to read any of this. Go take at look at the pretty pictures in my gallery or shop instead. heehee *wink wink*
Also... I interchange the word yarn and thread. Yarn is really just "thick" thread so don't get too worked up about it.
So here is my loom, an 8 shaft baby wolf. This photo is from Schacht, the company that made it. They are located right in Boulder. (I've been on a factory tour... it was amazing! I was in heaven the whole time and wanted to pitch a tent in the middle of the factory and live there. They weren't too keen on that and neither was OSHA!) I labeled the most important parts. There are a ton more, but unless you are actually going to weave they don't matter.
So the warp runs from the front to the back of the loom and the loom holds the warp under tension. This is really the only huge yarn restriction that weavers have. If a yarn breaks or pulls apart when under tension it can not be used as the warp. I bought a lovely wool yarn recently off of the internet. It was listed in the weaving yarns section but it is too weak to be used as the warp. BooHoo! I won't go into the mechanics of how the yarn is held under tension on this post.
The warp is actually many, most of the time hundreds, of individual length of yarn that are measured to be all the same length. The amount of these and how close together they are on the loom determines the width of the whatever is being woven. More warp yarns = wider cloth. Each warp yarn snuggled closer to it's neighbor = thinner cloth (and more dense). You can see where math plays a big part of weaving and designing the finished piece. The warp is measured by an ingenious method that I never would have come up with. So not only does each piece of warp yarn have to be the same length (+/- an inch or so) but you have to maintain the order in which they were measured. Again, I won't go into the mechanics of these but I do it using several pegs that I clamp down to a table as you can see in the first photo below. There are several other methods however and most weavers use a warping board where the pegs are on a wooden frame to the yarn can be measured by traveling back and forth across the big frame from peg to peg. Other methods include warping mills that measures the yarn by wrapping it around a frame in a spiral. To each there own. Each method, though, does the same thing. It measures yarn to a specific length and creates a cross so that the yarn stays in order. And the cross is simply were one yarn travels on the opposite side of two adjacent pegs than the yarn measured before and after it. I tried to take a photo of my latest cross in the second photo.
A reed with 8 openings per inch. (yes, I have a a LeClerc reed for a Schacht Loom. It works!)
As each warp thread travels from the front to the back of the loom it is threaded through two things. First the reed, then a heddle. Reed first. The reed is like a comb. It has metal "teeth" at evenly spaced intervals. Unlike a comb though, the reed has a solid piece on the top and bottom, so each warp yarn has to be threaded through the reed. The distance between the metal teeth determines how close the warp yarns are to each other. A reed that has a pacing of 12 openings per inch is going to be more densely spaced than one with 8 opening per inch.
Threading the wrap through the reed on at a time. You can see the cross from when I measured the warp. Half goes under then over the yard sticks and the other half goes over then under them.
Once the warp is threaded through the reed it gets crazy. The heddles are where the magic happens on a loom for real. But is can be hard to explain. I'll try. My floor loom has 8 shafts. Sometimes this word is interchanged with harnesses but I'll stick with shaft because 1- I think it may be more correct. and 2- it makes the 14 year old in me giggle. So think of each of these shafts as a wood frame... because that's exactly what they are. Each frame holds heddles. These are thin pieces of metal with a eye opening in the middle that are held vertically in the wooden frame, the shaft. My loom has 8 shafts but many looms have 4 and some have many many more but I don't want to think about that because it'll make me envious. Each shaft moves independently... so if you have 1 warp yarn that travels through a heddle on shaft #1 when shaft #1 is lifted, that particular warp yarn is lifted. Each warp yarn... all hundreds of them... have to be threaded through 1 heddle. What shaft that heddle is on and in what order is dictated by the pattern you are following.
Each yarn is threaded through the eye of one heddle on one of 8 shafts. The pattern will tell you the right way to do it.
Now to the peddles... or treadles as they are correctly called. The shafts are connected to the treadles, usually by a piece of really strong string (for lack of a better word). Again, each loom operates differently and I won't get into the details. On my loom, if I connect shaft 1 to treadle 1 when I pressed that treadle, shaft 1 will raise up taking all the warp threads threaded through heddles on that shaft with it. You can tie more than 1 shaft to a treadle. Again, you can see where you have a seemingly infinite amount of possibilities . If I was smart I could actually tell you how many possibilities you actually have with 8 shafts and 10 treadles as my loom has. But math is hard, so we'll say infinite! How the shafts are connected to the treadles, again, is dictated by the pattern.
This process of designing, measuring, threading the reed and the heddles and tying up the treadles can take me anywhere from 1 1/2 days to a week, depending on the complexity of the project, how my loom is currently set up and how I am feeling. For most weavers this is not their favorite part of the process. It is somewhat akin to knitting or crocheting gauge swatches (although I did not talk about sampling... which is a whole other huge aspect to this whole process that some try to do before prepping the loom and some do after the process I described above. Most of us do a combination of the two. Sampling is a whole huge topic in and of itself that I won't go into). Unlike making a gauge swatch, this process is not optional though. Maybe it's more like casting on 400 stitches? Arduous, annoying, best not be done when too drunk, but completely necessary to get started.
Phew, this is a long post! I will get into the actual process of weaving in my next post. It won't be too long I don't think. But I have forgotten to take a few key photos as I was weaving my last shawl so I may have to search the interwebs for some or dig back in my photo archive. Until then... :-)