Next projects

Bertha Gray Hayes was a North American weaver, active in the mid twentieth century and is best known for her miniature overshot designs of which she designed nearly 100 original patterns. I thought I'd use her designs to make some blankets for our yoga studio using some of Susie's homespun wool from our ouessant sheep for the weft and a 8/4 cotton for the warp. 

Because there is a jump in scale (BGH's original designs used 20/2 warp and 10/2 weft) there would be unacceptably long floats if I just used her drafts with these much thicker yarns. Our wool fulls and felts quite easily on wet finishing, so it is the cotton floats that I've reduced with the introduction of alternating tabby picks (as the weaver did in the photo below) in 8/2 cotton .

I ll be weaving these blankets on the Spring II loom as double width. This is a method whereby I weave the cloth in two layers on the loom with a fold on one side and two loose selvedges on the other. When the cloth is removed from the loom it unfolds into a piece twice the width. As the warps tend to weave tighter at the selvedges, it is important to prevent this on the side that will contain the fold as this will create a ridge in the cloth when unfolded. There are a couple of ways to prevent this: Sleying the reed slightly wider adjacent to the fold for a couple of dents and/or adding a tight length of fishing line adjacent to the fold which is woven in, but then withdrawn at the end of the weaving. The tension on the line helps to prevent draw-in.  I'll probably try both together.

More or less the draft I'll be using, but with different colours and heavier yarns, this cloth has two colours in the warp (red and orange) I'll just have a single cream colour. 

As both of the final selvedges for the blanket lie on the same side during weaving and must be kept apart, a special technique must be used to ensure they don't interlock...more later.

On the megado two more "swirl" scarves. Different colour way - sand and white, and this time I m substituting 16/2 tencel for the 30/2 silk, they take the sett. 

Each warp is about 700 ends.

Triple weave part 3

Sorting out the draft for this weave has been a challenge. The main difficulty has been weaving the middle strip of brown wool amongst the other layers without the weft getting interlocked with the warps and wefts of the outer strips and other layers. It took several failed attempts and some extensive rethreading of sections to final succeed. As a consequence it's not the neatest weaving I've ever done, but perhaps one of the more complex. 

The brown red and green strips of wool are thre separate cloths which move from above to between to below the two layers of cottons cloth (yellow and white) which also swap places and occassionally amalgamate.

To develop the draft, it became easier to work with the liftplan and the eventual key to success was to weave two successive picks for each wool strip in turn and using the liftplan to create an escape route for the shuttle ensuring that the wefts were always lying in a position where they were not disturbed by subsequent picks.

I have still to wash the sample which should produce some differential shrinkage and help to disguise the obvious threading error on the lefthand side. After so much fiddly rethreading I couldn't face trying to correct it and the purpose of this exercise was to get the draft to work rather than make something in particular.

Trials and tribulations of lambing

Lambing season is upon us and first up was Sasha who managed a straightforward birth of a male lamb who we called Iggy without any intervention on Tuesday. A couple of days later Truffle had another boy overnight who we named Bonbon. But the following morning he'd vanished. We searched everywhere but probably a fox had jumped the electric fence and taken him...heartbreaking.

Yesterday Inkling had her first baby, another boy we named Nattie. This time we locked mother and baby in the bergerie overnight and will do the same again tonight. 

Today at about 12.30 Trudy's waters broke, but two hours later she still couldn't push the baby out. We called the vet but they had no one available to help. The lamb was normally presented (nose and front feet) but Trudy was too small - this is her first baby. I called my friend Paul in the Mendips who also has sheep and he suggested sticking a couple up fingers up her bum, feeling for the back of the head and exerting a little downward pressure to pop the lambs head out. It worked a treat and once the head was out, in a few minutes later she managed to give birth to a little ewe. Mother and baby are safely in the barn.

Sasha and Iggy

Poor Truffle and her baby that was taken

Trudy and Patchuli

Inkling and Nattie

Tripleweave part 2

As can be seen in this photo the edges of the wool strips when they weren't on the top of the weave were being "sewn" through the other layers at the edges. I've finally worked out a way to avoid this with some changes to the lift plan and separate series of treadling, one for each of the wool strips. 

To be able to weave the three wool strips as a separate layer:

• they each need to each be on their own set of shafts
• there can be no interlocking at the shuttles at the selvedge or a separate selvedge weave - the edges of all the layers must remain open.

I decided to cut off what I had done so far and so wove in a lease stick. After cutting off the weave, I can preserve the tension by tying this stick back onto the front beam.

After wet finishing the this side shows more or less my intention - wool loops, which dive between the white and yellow cotton layers, then later re-emerge of the reverse side. The differential shrinkage giving the fabric some puff and structure. (I cut the wool where it was previously sewing layers together for this picture).

The reverse side as currently woven has the wool strips "sewn" to the other layers at their edges even though they are a separate layer. Some more drafting to correct this, then hopefully a larger sample off the existing warp.

These exercises improve my drafting skills and knowledge even though they may not produce something useable or beautiful at the first attempt. Cotton is much cheaper than more exotic yarns and so is a useful test material for passive yarns.

Tripleweave

In March 2025 I was sampling an idea which involved two layers of cloth (doubleweave) sandwiching some free floating active warp threads inbetween areas of intergrated cloth where they were constrained. The experiments weren't really a success and I eventually ditched the floating warps and kept the intergrated cloth and created a nice shawl (now sold). 

Having recently bought Stacey Harvey-Brown's excellent new book "Creative dimensions in weaving" I have returned to the subject with some fresh ideas. 

This time rather than using floating threads I'm using a complete third layer of cloth in wool/silk, working with two plainweave cotton layers. In fact I'm using three separate differently coloured "third layers" positioned side by side at intevals across the warp as strips of cloth. These active layer strips change position from being either between the other layers, or on one side or the other of them.

In the positions of the strips, the cotton warp for the plain weave changes from 8/2 to 16/2 whilst maintaining the same sett so that the strip is slightly visible between the layers. When the strip moves to the outside position, the layers beneath are integrated.

The wool/silk 10/2 is going on a second beam and the 8/2 and 16/2 I am going to try on the same sectional beam as it's only a short warp now, about 3m. Hopefully I won't have too many problems!

Hard to explain, more explanatory images to follow.

Warps all tensioned and tied on. An annoying sleying error in the reed which I had to go back and correct but all seems ready to go.

The annotated photo tries to explain what's going on! There's a lot of experiments going on at once and the biggest one - wet finishing - is still too come. There's a lot to learn.

• I kept the wool layer loose for maximum shrinkage (it's a wool/silk mix so shrinkage won't be massive) but it's probably too loose - difficult to weave evenly.
• I had to make a dozen repair heddles as the integrated selvedges were too dense - have changed to basket weave.
• It's not possible to keep the wool layer completely separate from the other layers when it's on the bottom below an integrated layer or in the middle (at least not with my current draft) it is caught in at the edges (visible in photo). I'll be working to change this as it's key to the wet finishing result I'm after.
• I need a trap! Managing 5 shuttles on such a narrow sample is difficult. Also I'll probably cut the warp and restart with a different shuttle order to make this more manageable.

Weaving courses start in May

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