In that brilliant book Doubleweave : On Four to Eight Shafts by Ursina Arn-Grischottthere there is a picture of a beautiful double weave shawl with what seems to be two layers of airy lace held together by almost invisible stitcher threads. My next project is to work towards weaving a similar type of shawl. There are going to be several stages to this, the first being to determine a weave structure. I shall start with double weave huck and weave a sample using something nice and visible like an 8/2 cotton. This will enable me to see how the different layers sit together and where to put the stitchers - these are the places where the two layers intersect to join them together.
As always when thinking about double weave I have to go back to first principals otherwise I get confused as to what is happening. The Complete Book of Drafting for Handweavers, Madelyn van der Hoogt explains very nicely the ins and outs of huck lace and there is loads of material on doubleweave by Paul O'Connor on http://handweaving.net.
The pictures below show how I have derived the doubleweave draft. The first draft shows the basic 4 shaft huck lifts; this is the draft for my blue top layer. The second is exactly the same but with the threading moved to shafts 5 to 8 and a similar movement on the treadles; this is the draft for the pink bottom layer. The third draft shows the two interleaved together and the lifting of the top layer out of the way when weaving the bottom layer.
Now as the draft stands both layers will be the same; plain weave top/plain weave bottom, huck lace top/huck lace bottom and so on. The draft shown below has been modified to allow for different structures in the layers, in this case huck lace on the top with plain weave on the bottom.
One of the problems I have with double weave drafts is that I find it is difficult to see the structure from the draw-down. It is possible to see the warp and weft floats in the draft below but not easy. I use PixeLoom for all my drafting but WeavePoint, which I use to drive the control unit on my loom, has a cunning feature that recognizes double weave in the View/Fabric function. So I derive the drafts in PixeLoom and view the fabric in WeavePoint. The screen grabs from WeavePoint of the blue and pink layers (top and bottom) are shown in the picture next to the draft.
The next think to do is to work out where to put the stitchers as there is nothing joining these two layers of cloth. There will be a bit of theory needed that I shall address tomorrow (I love theory but I know that it is not everyone's cup of tea) but their ultimate position will be decided when I weave the sample.
In the meantime I am still weaving my scarves and they are looking pretty good. I have put up an inordinate number of pictures of these scarves, so no more now until they are being modeled!
As always when thinking about double weave I have to go back to first principals otherwise I get confused as to what is happening. The Complete Book of Drafting for Handweavers, Madelyn van der Hoogt explains very nicely the ins and outs of huck lace and there is loads of material on doubleweave by Paul O'Connor on http://handweaving.net.
The pictures below show how I have derived the doubleweave draft. The first draft shows the basic 4 shaft huck lifts; this is the draft for my blue top layer. The second is exactly the same but with the threading moved to shafts 5 to 8 and a similar movement on the treadles; this is the draft for the pink bottom layer. The third draft shows the two interleaved together and the lifting of the top layer out of the way when weaving the bottom layer.
Now as the draft stands both layers will be the same; plain weave top/plain weave bottom, huck lace top/huck lace bottom and so on. The draft shown below has been modified to allow for different structures in the layers, in this case huck lace on the top with plain weave on the bottom.
One of the problems I have with double weave drafts is that I find it is difficult to see the structure from the draw-down. It is possible to see the warp and weft floats in the draft below but not easy. I use PixeLoom for all my drafting but WeavePoint, which I use to drive the control unit on my loom, has a cunning feature that recognizes double weave in the View/Fabric function. So I derive the drafts in PixeLoom and view the fabric in WeavePoint. The screen grabs from WeavePoint of the blue and pink layers (top and bottom) are shown in the picture next to the draft.
In the meantime I am still weaving my scarves and they are looking pretty good. I have put up an inordinate number of pictures of these scarves, so no more now until they are being modeled!
Seeing double layers, tip: use different colours!
ReplyDeleteI seldom use exactly the same colours for warp and weft, and for multiple layers I often use different colour combinations for the different layers, (I don't think I could have figured out the backpack without doing that - see http://oddweavings.blogspot.se/2010/03/backpack.html )
Hey! I would like to try this double lace technique. Can I ask a photo about that example from the book what about you wrote the first sentences? I would like happy to see that shawl.
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