Tabla de contenidos para May/June 2021 en Handwoven

A friend told me that she once hid in her closet to start a new knitting project. She and her husband were working in the yard together, and all she could think about was the new yarn and pattern she had bought the day before. She finally succumbed, made up an excuse, and went inside to knit… inside a closet. Maybe that wasn’t the best solution, but I understand the feeling. There is nothing quite like a new project and yarn to go with it. Currently, I’m looking for something new. We’ve been staying home for more than a year now, and my looms are empty. I just finished a set of towels on one loom, samples for placemats on another, and over the weekend, I finally cut off a…

To achieve that vision, I used shaft switching on the Harrisville Rug Loom and changed colors many times as I wove. I gradated my colors often, thereby imbuing the piece with color. The resultant rug is reminiscent of an amazing place: Mackinac Island during the lilac blooming season. For my palette, I chose various shades of deep purples, lavenders, and greens. You can almost smell the lovely scent of lilacs in the air and hear the waves of Lake Huron that surround the island. As I wove this piece with lilacs in mind, someone suggested Somewhere in Time as a title, a reference to the Upper Peninsula’s Mackinac Island lilacs and the movie of the same name filmed there in 1979. I thought it was a great fit! My chosen…

Sheep-face laundry balls Soften your clothes naturally—and adorably—with these Flock of Friends Eco Dryer Balls from Friendsheep. Not only do these reusable wool balls eliminate the need for fabric softener and dryer sheets (saving you money), but they also reduce drying time by up to 40%. Each set comes with six dryer balls handmade from 100% New Zealand wool that can be reused for over 1,000 loads of laundry. friendsheepwool.com New ball winder by Ashford Wind your yarn into balls with ease using Ashford’s new Ball Winders, available in two versions, manual and electric. These winders clamp easily to tables, where they stay put thanks to rubber feet. They wind clockwise or counter-clockwise to make balls up to 500 grams/171/2 ounces. The large yarn guide allows you to smoothly wind…

This project fell easily into place and I was able to quickly check off some boxes in the planning stage. The result is an elegant scarf with an asymmetric plaid for added interest. Yarn and palette: In my stash, I had partial cones of Bambu 7 in Lime, Indigo, Rice, Ginger, and Honey—five hues in this issue’s palette. These yarns, left over from a twill shawl that had a wonderful hand, were the perfect choice for a summer-weight scarf. Weave structure: With the issue’s theme of Checks and Plaids, I didn’t have to look far for inspiration. I pulled out the paperwork for a table runner that I wove last year based on a 2/2 broken twill from Anne Dixon’s book The Handweaver’s Pattern Directory. That draft had been a…

My grandmother would have loved these towels because she also was a weaver. When I was young, she took me with her in the summers to her spinning and weaving groups. She taught me to weave on her four-shaft loom and supported me in every way in my love of textiles. Holidays were wonderful at my grandmother’s house, and the best of all holidays was the Fourth of July. We went on big family picnics with all my aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. My grandmother would pack way too much food. The kids ran around playing, while the grown-ups caught up on all the latest news. I have fond memories of the Fourth of July holidays we spent watching fireworks from my grandparents’ deck. When they were over, my grandmother…

The plaid in these napkins was inspired by images of lively striped bolster pillows in Stripes Rhythms Colours by Lena Rahoult. I did a watercolor painting based on those pillows, followed by a woven tablecloth, and I revisited the same design when I wanted to make a set of napkins to go with the tablecloth. To break up the picnic table aesthetic of checks, I added bright contrasting lines to my warp and weft. Designing plaids can be daunting. To simplify the process, I keep in mind the formula “plaid equals stripes squared.” If I can make a compelling and well-proportioned stripe, it usually creates a dynamic plaid when woven tromp-as-writ. The simplest structures can be made infinitely more complex by varying yarn color in warp and weft. Weaving these…

While wrapping a gift for a friend, I looked at the gift wrap and thought, “This pattern would be great for towels!” The gift wrap featured two dominant colors, teal and orange, surrounded by three other colors, each separated by white. I originally created a design that mimicked the same proportions of colors but then decided I wanted to give equal weight to each of the colors. The resulting design has large stripes of each color flanked by the other four colors with a band of teal between each color group creating 12 unique color blocks. I love patterns that allow room to play around with color and texture, and these towels fit the bill. The point threading allowed for many treadling options that enhanced the color combinations and created…

The wedding would take place outside, in the Colorado mountains. For the bride, I knew a shawl would be perfect. But what could I weave for the groom? He planned to order a kilt in his family tartan of County Kilkenny, Ireland. Jefferson’s mother, Janet Butler, was knitting the traditional kilt hose for him. I could weave material for the kilt! After all, a traditional tartan is simply a specific color order in the warp and weft done in a balanced 2/2 twill using a worsted wool. However, as I soon learned, there is much more to it. There are strict rules and regulations that govern the weaving of authentic tartan fabric and the construction of a kilt. To begin with, you need a lot of fabric for a kilt,…

SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2021 Detail Oriented How do you make an ordinary weaving project extraordinary? It’s often the details that make the difference. It might be a simple trick you often employ, a complicated specific technique for a unique project, or even a finish that’s more than just twisting fringe. We’re looking for projects that go the extra mile. NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 Reflecting on Deflecting Deflection is caused by multiple factors including weave structure and yarn choice. This issue will feature techniques that cause deflection and the beautiful projects that result. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022 Deep Stash We all have yarn stashes, but have we ever looked at them critically? What yarns should be in a stash? How should you care for a stash? This issue will feature projects and articles that are all about…

Palaka, a plaid originally used by Hawaiian cowboys and agricultural workers, piqued my interest when featured in the January/February 2020 issue of Handwoven. Coincidently, in February 2020, my husband and I went to the island of Hawaii for the first time, and, of course, I went looking for palaka. It comes in many color combinations, but the classic plaid is blue and white. My guild study group is working through Handwoven Laces by Donna Muller, and that gave me the idea of combining canvas weave with color in both the warp and weft in palaka-like proportions. Traditionally, canvas weave has two ends next to each other on the same shaft and two subsequent picks in the same shed. In my version, I tripled my ends and picks in the canvas…

I live in a very hot and dry desert. It’s been a long time since I’ve enjoyed a picnic in the shade under trees. Imagining the look and crunch of cool slices of watermelon served on a red checkered tablecloth allows me to enjoy one of summer’s finest treats, even when I’m inside. Because I wear a name tag at fiber festivals and to guild meetings, I thought name-tag lanyards would be a fun way to wear my weaving. Maybe I can’t celebrate and enjoy real watermelon while under shady trees, but I can share my idea of summer at the next guild meeting when I wear my name tag. I used an online bandweaving pattern editor to chart the checkered band (see Resources). The watermelon band is a basic…

During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, I decided to focus on using my yarn stash. About five years ago, I bought a large amount of 8/4 cotton carpet warp, intending to make rugs for my kitchen, but then never wove those rugs. Fortunately, the colors matched my kitchen/dining area, and I needed some new placemats and a matching runner. I added a couple of accent colors and then I had my warp and weft. Next, I chose a draft. On social media, I had noticed many weavers were using draft #246 from A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns by Carol Strickler. I, too, had wanted to use that draft for many years because the weave structure creates what appear to be woven ribbons in the cloth, in an almost trompe l’oeil…

Easily woven with an infinite number of color and design possibilities, plaids are my thing. I play with these possibilities using a free online tool called PlaidMaker. I choose my palette and weave structure. Then the fun begins. PlaidMaker allows me to quickly adjust the width or color of stripes and then select a mirror image of my design horizontally or vertically to create a symmetrical plaid. When I’m satisfied with a design, I can save it to PlaidMaker’s public space and have a copy sent to my email. Within that public space you can browse or search for designs by title and then review color selections and pixel/thread counts, all of which can be edited and saved as a new design. Love a color combo but not the design?…

I enjoyed reading both articles in the March/April 2021 issue about weaving five-shaft patterns on four-shaft looms; Susan’s lovely bed runner shows that it is indeed possible to weave more complicated patterns on simple four-shaft looms. Thank you for bringing older ideas forward and making them available to a new audience. Mary Meigs Atwater to Carol Thilenius to Susan E. Horton to the next weaver is a nice chain. I was reminded of Dorothy Burton’s monograph, Versatile Bronson (Weavers’ Guild of Boston, 1984), in which she quoted Carol Thilenius’s 1974 Interweave article about this technique. Dorothy described a second method that she used that involved a heddle bar placed behind the shafts and on top of the warp. This is also a slow technique as the heddle bar must be…

THREAD MAGIC: Weaving for Shape and Texture Lotte Dalgaard and Paulette Adam Authors Lotte Dalgaard and Paulette Adam have studied the effects of active yarns for quite some time. This book is the culmination of much of that study. For Dalgaard and Adam, an active yarn is one that changes in appearance during wet-finishing, either in length or thickness, without the use of special chemicals. The book focuses on crêpe yarns (overtwisted or elastic yarns), Lycra blends, and shrink yarns: yarns with a polyester core that contracts with steaming. Fabrics woven with active yarns shrink much more than those woven with other yarns. During wet-finishing, they pleat, bubble, ripple, and twist, creating astonishing fabrics. Although the authors discuss a variety of weave structures, they focus primarily on plain weave and…

Weaving inspiration often comes directly from the yarn itself. In this case, I found myself with too much yarn to choose from. If you’ve ever been in a RedFish DyeWorks yarn booth, you know what I mean. The quickest way to narrow down color choices is to have someone else do it for you. This help came in the form of a RedFish jump-start kit that contained six beautiful 300-yard skeins of a silk/merino blend. (Jump-start kits can be ordered for any of the yarns RedFish DyeWorks carries.) After choosing a kit, my goal was to use as much of the yarn as possible. A plaid of some kind would do the job, but I decided to jazz it up with a color-and-weave houndstooth pattern. A six-color houndstooth? Sure, why…

When thinking of summer celebration symbols, pinwheels and stars immediately come to mind, and four-shaft pinwheel and star color-and-weave designs can be considered part of the check family. A straight-draw four-shaft twill can be woven with two rigid heddles by placing every other warp end in a hole, either on the front or the back heddle, and then assigning the remaining warp ends either to a pick-up stick or string heddles. With this set-up, four-shaft twills are more practical and easier to weave on a rigid-heddle loom. For these scarves, warping is direct—four dark ends and then four light ends. When warping, you can cut and retie after four ends, which keeps the warp tidy but is a bit tedious. You can also just carry the ends continually, which is…

Years ago, I found a sample in Reps: Technique de création de tissage traditionnel et moderne by Bibiane Proulx that caught my eye. I always wanted to duplicate the pattern but never had the time to try it. While quarantining in our home in Vermont during the COVID-19 lockdown I had the perfect opportunity. Warp rep is a familiar weave structure, one that is characterized by a close sett and a barely visible weft. Weft rep, on the other hand, is usually called something else, such as boundweave or tapestry. The sett is open, and the weft completely covers the warp. Although it seems improbable, you can combine the two techniques and weave a wonderful cloth with a checkerboard look and color-and-weave effects. The technique is called warp and weft…

When you think of Scotland or something Scottish, what comes to mind? Maybe it’s Rabbie Burns or haggis. Do you recall your favorite bagpipe music while enjoying a wee dram of single malt whisky? If you are a weaver, I would guess you are imagining warm, woolly tweeds and colorful tartans. If you are Scottish by blood or have married into a clan, you are well aware of how proud these families are of their heritage and how they like to show off and wear their family tartans whenever an occasion arises. lf you are a Campbell or a MacDonald, or have any other Scottish family surname, you may feel destined to weave the family tartan in some form or another. Maybe something like a scarf or towels for your…

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