Weaving Stool

Just before I got my Spring loom I built myself a weaving stool from some oak. Splay legged for stability and wide for reaching all those 14 treadles.

When I picked up the Megado, I hadn't realised how high the breast beam was. The stool needed to be 70cm high, nearly 15cm higher. It's difficult to start weaving without so I searched for some offcuts. I quartered a piece of douglas left over from the roof trusses for the legs and planed it the right section, some old curtain poles made the foot bars and some oak from an old desk the seat and rails. A days work et voila! As the megado has a single pedal, width isn't so important.

 

Sampling networked doubleweave

This draft was going form the basis of the first sampling. The blue is 28/2 superwash merino and the white is a 30/2 silk. I'm hoping for a little differential shrinkage between the two yarns so that the areas with two separate cloth layers (they appear the whitest in the draft) puff just enough to separate. It comes down to how the superwash behaves...otherwise I might try some cashmere in 26/2. The sample is 16cm wide in the reed and has 240 warp threads. First sample will be at 15 epcm (38epi) and depending how it feels, I might try a wider sett too. I need 2 or 3 samples at each sett to experiment with the finishing process to control the differential shrinkage. The final piece is a commisioned shawl.

After contemplating the above I realised the areas of the raised silk layer will only be on one side...fine for a wall hanging, not so great for a shawl. So I revisited the draft to get the pattern more evenly distributed on both faces.  

After reading Alice Schlein's book on network drafting and several other books besides (some given to me by Pat Foster when I bought her Megado) I succeeded in getting a networked draft with the silk squares alternating on each side backed by squares of wool....then my silk yarn finally arrived!

It's beautifully lustrous and as I know from the swedish lace doubleweave scarf I just completed, that shine is killed by plain weave. I drafted something in doubleweave with each layer as a 5 end satin, but it wasn't pleasing to me. Finally I redrafted a design with 3/1 twills - a compromise but a good one I hope. An extract from the draft below. Using the same yarn I originally intended, the change from plain to twill increases the warp density to 25 epcm, so the sample is only 22cm wide with 550 ends. I ll weave three samples and finish them differently. The new Megado will enable me weave these 18 shaft samples.

 

The megado has landed

Sometimes you are in the right place at the right time. I was looking at facebook just as Pat Foster posted on the Megado loom group that she was wondering what to do with her 20 year old Megado loom, she was 90 years old, not it the best of health and down sizing, would it be cheeky to try to sell it? The Megado is the flag ship loom from Louet with 32 shafts and an electronic computer controlled dobby, my dream loom! Brand new they retail for over 18,000 euros, Pat was asking £1500. I immediately registered that I would be very interested, but someone beat me to it. 30 mins later she got back to me to say the first buyer had dropped out...was I still interested? 

I would have to go to Reading, disassemble the loom and take it away asap. With Susie's dance and yoga lessons the car is only available to use Saturday, Sunday and Monday. I decided it was possible.

So Saturday I left the house at 6.30 and drove pretty much none stop to Calais (11hrs). The next morning I got the 6am ferry to Dover and drove to Reading to meet Pat and her sister Dorothy. Two lovely ladies with amazing life stories. Pat is an amazing weaver and it turns out that Cally Booker (another amazing weaver) is Dorothy's daughter!

It took a few hours to disassemble and load everything into the car, thankfully Dennis a friend of Pat's was available to give me a hand loading. I had already taken the rear seats out of the car so that there would be enough space for the castle to stand upright, but in the end it didnt quite fit so I had to lay it on its side fit. Everything else had to be completely disassembled. Pat was very kind to give me some yarn, some books, four extra reeds and CDs that she no longer had space for. 

Back to Dover for the 6pm ferry. Both crossings were very windy but amazingly the sea was calm as a millpond. Good for me as I am seasick. At Calais I was expecting to have to pay VAT and import tarifs, but amazing there were no checks and I drove straight out of the port into the town.

Next morning the long drive home. 12 hours due to horrific traffic in Paris and protests from the farmers blocking the autoroutes around Toulouse.

Today I have reassembled the loom, but not yet plugged it in. A few missing pieces, which I have refabricated and I hadn't realised now much higher the breast beam is on the Megado compared to the Spring, so I will have to make a new bench.

Spring and Megado Side by the side, The Megado has a 115cm wide beam compared to the Spring which is 90cm although in this photo they look like it is the opposite.

 

Checkerboard swedish lace

I revised the draft developed in the last post to get it back to 10 shafts and 10 treadles. Repeating the treadling at the changing of layers to create a closed selvedge.

At first I was just going to weave a sample but in the end I added a few more warp ends so that the sample could be a scarf.  After the first square was woven I noticed a couple of misthreadings, so corrected them and started again. The yarn is 15/2 silk (14 wraps/cm) so each layer was sett at 7epcm (18epi). I experimented with zquares using weft in both of the greens in the warp and alternating them.

The silk is lovely and soft with the doubleweave giving it more weight. The sett was a little close, the colours a little too similar and the silk too reflective for the plain weave to be seen through the "windows" in the lace, but the lace adds a nice texture to scarf.

Networked doubleweave

 

Gone down a bit of rabbit hole with this. Above is a networked double weave fabric with areas of double and single cloth. Eva Stossel has done some very interesting work with networked doubleweave using yarns with different shrinkage. I ll probably try some similar things or maybe a wool that felts and one that doesn't.

I've been trying in vane to network something with two different structures. Its complicated because ideally you need structures transposed to a straightdraw threading, but the number of shafts becomes too big, even with frequent turning of the draft and using a treadle reducing program. In the process, I came up with a chequerboard design for Swedish lace over plainweave. It reduced to 10 shafts but I added a couple more to try and get a firm border. The lace appears in the opposing squares on the reverse.

Network drafting with doubleweave

Having experimented with double weave using 2 different weave structures in some previous projects (Swedish lace and twill, huck lace and plain weave) my mind turned to networking double weave. This would produce a cloth where rather than the two distinct fabrics changing place instantly, a gradual transition would occur. Some research revealed that this technique is already being explored notably by Alice Schein and Paul O'Connor amongst others. I had seen a recent project by Eva Stossel but hadn't really appreciated ( despite the title) that this is exactly what she was doing.

This paper by Paul O'Connor attempts to explain what is going on. It is rather mind blowing and I am already thinking about possibilities for my next weave!

Textile museum - Lavelanet

 I had to drop a planning application into the Mairie at Aigues-Vives, so whilst we were in the area Susie and I visited the Musée des Textiles in nearby Lavelanet. Once a major industry in the town employing over 3500 people, it is now all gone.

Interesting to see a variety of machine looms including jacquard looms and many machines for carding, spinning, warping and finishing fabric.

Part of the museum also explains another now lost local industry that made bone combs....now of course replaced by plastic!

Jacquard loom

Inside the jacquard loom

Machine loom

Various carding machines turning fleece not a thing continuous rolag ready to be spun.

Bateman Park 303

Warping underway for 4 table-runners in two designs off the same warp based on Bateman Park (303) weave. The 7.2m warp is in 8/2 red cotton with 8/4 cotton in alternating blue and white on shafts 2, 3, 5 and 7 which create a counterpoint to the main pattern. The weft is 16/2 white cotton for the tabby, with blue, orange or white in 8/2 cotton for the rest. Sett is 9 epcm (24 epi) for a fairly stiff cloth.

I spent a long time playing with colours and the final choice (subject to sampling) is much simpler than my first designs!

First few sections completed until I ran out of red yarn!

 Draft showing the edge (right handside) and part of the centre panel for the first pair of runners, Starting point was Bateman's Park sample 303-2. 

The second pair, which started as Bateman's Park sample 303-6.

Weaving underway but not without a few hiccups. After the first six inches of weaving I realised the pattern was all wrong. Eventually I figured out that I d tied up the loom for the second design but was treadling for the first. After redoing the tie up things seemed better but still not quite right. After more investigation I deduced that the draft I d produced for the second design had a slightly different warp threading to the first, In one I had groups of 1, 8, 2, 8 and in the other they were 1, 8, 3, 8.  Too late to change, so I'll have a slightly different fabric for the first design.

The second design has quite a bit of texture in the orange sections, we'll see how this plays out in wet finishing.

The runners finished

The new Weaving Barn

After 16 months of hardwork the first floor of our barn renovation is complete - a new studio for weaving, spinning and yoga. Downstairs is next to create teaching space and washing/drying/dyeing spaces for our ouessant fleeces.

Hopefully we'll be announcing dates for courses in spring 2026.

 

Huck Lace

460 ends of 30/2 silk on the loom for a new project in huck lace. It's a shawl design by Susan Foulkes that caught my eye. You can see hers here

It's the first time I've used pure silk. Its slipperiness meant an overhand knot was necessary on the warping wheel to prevent each section from sliding off as I warped it onto the beam. The weaving went easily although a gentle beat was required to to stop the square motif becoming diamond shaped.

Normally with lace weaves the warp and weft are the same colour but I used brown for the warp and yellow for the weft. The result is a gold, lustrous fabric. With so many ends I decided to hem stitch and leave a fringe. Hem stitching a fabric with 26 epi was excrutiating and required a large magnifying glass and several hours!

The cloth has a lovely softness and drape as you'd expect from silk. I gently wet finished than hung to drip dry.

Close up of the structure

The shawl with the plain weave border and fringe

One repeat of the draft, 9 shafts and 9 treadles

Advancing twill

I've always been intrigued by the fractal quality of advancing twills. So at last I decided to weave one to make a backrest cushion for our iron bedstead.  Inspired by weaver woman's Caribbean Beach I designed a warp then wove two 1.50m lengths of fabric, one with a black weft the other with a white weft - both in 8/2 cotton at 25epi. 

Difficult to spot threading errors with these fine constantly changing patterns.  In fact I had one through the entire white weft weave and only when I changed to black and the pattern was clearer did I discover it.

 

Warping wheel in action!

First time using the new handbuilt warping wheel. Maybe a little slower than bobbins and tension box for a warp with many colour changes, but much less fiddly, more sure and less stressful. Also much less waste! I had to make a couple of changes to the wheel, I realised the arm holding the raddle for winding on was on the wrong side of the wheel (it would have had to rotate the wrong way) and I moved the holder to align better with the warp on the wheel.

This next project will be an extended advancing twill on 8 shafts in 8/2 cotton with a set of 25epi - it'll make a bedhead cushion, a scarf and maybe something small.

Building a warping wheel

I started my sectional warping experiences using a homemade bobbin rack and tension box. It works reasonably well for my warps which tend to have complex colour sequences rather than length, but there are drawbacks. Winding the correct amount of warp onto each bobbin is rather hit and miss and usually involves a lot wastage. The bobbins have to be moved around the rack frequently when the colour sequences of the warp doesn't co-ordinate with the number of threads in each section. Sometimes warp threads catch in the bobbins and snap halfway through winding a section, requiring immediate repair or if you haven't spotted it soon enough, supplemental threads hanging off the back of the loom.

I've heard only good things about the American made AVL warping wheel but at 900 euros in Europe it is rather expensive. It doesn't seem too complicated so I'm making my own. A few old bobbins, some cheap timber, mdf, a handful of bolts and a dog comb for the raddle has 95% of the materials covered. The only piece I've been struggling with finding is the brake drum (turned on a lathe on the original). After much head scratching I found a drive pulley for a lawnmower which will work.  For the clip I used an old feeler guage which has the right amount of spring to grip the thread.

Dog comb raddle, the holes originally connected the handle, but are now used for the locking pin.

Saw tooth connector to keep the warp in the raddle when winding on to the beam.

Texsolv and spring for tension adjustment.

Lawnmower pulley, brake and spindle bearing combined.

Double layer shawl

The weaving went much quicker than I expected and was all over in about a day. I hemstitched both ends on the loom then cut the fringes to about 2 cm. At first I couldn't get The wool to shrink but eventually at about 55 degrees it started. Overall about 33% shrinkage in the width and virtually nothing in the length (superwash merino warp). After gently pealing the layers apart that had slightly felted together, I blocked it and let it dry. 

The fabric is very light, soft and drapey with its open sett but the two layers add warmth. The areas os single cloth using the warps from both layers (the squares, selvedges and hems) help puff the layers apart and flare the ends of the shawl. The yellow side was a bit disappointing as the grey weft killed the colour (I couldn't see it when I was weaving as it was the bottom cloth). The slightly slubby linen/silk/lambswool weft adds a bit of texture.