yet *more* weaving nerdery

[dragonlady7]

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So I’m to the point with inkle weaving that I reach on a lot of things, where I understand the technique well enough to just kind of do it, which is good because most of my difficulties lie in attempting to follow patterns. Understanding the principle means that if I thread up my own thing, I’m likely to have it work because I’m not misreading a pattern I’m just doing it so it’ll work. Now, are my patterns as good as those designed by experts? No. But they work. And I’m getting there.

Here’s a thing I’m finding as I web-search for information about inkle weaving specifically: most of the people who write posts and make videos don’t actually know that much about it. Many of the instruction videos are long and rambly and feature the person doing things that even I with my scant experience can tell are inefficient or won’t yield that great a result. So it’s frustrating to have to rely on that for information, and I really should just buy a published book, but also, I struggle with following book instructions. I have one pamphlet printed out from the 40s and it is literally impossible for me to follow– it’s the one I warped a design from only to realize that they had not explained their method of notation and so I had put in like a hundred white threads that they’d merely meant as spacer blocks in the pattern notation, not white threads at all. Most of their instructions are like “see fig 4″ and then it’s mislabeled which figure you’re actually meant to look at. So anyway.

I’m trying to learn pick-up, now, which is the technique by which you can make finely detailed figures, even letters, but again, the videos on this technique are overly long and not done by experts, and there are some blog posts that are reasonable but I’ve warped up a pattern and realized my threads are so fine it’s nearly impossible to pick them up in the correct order and also I was working in a dim corner last night and so could not see what the fuck I was doing and this was a terrible idea. I’ve done most of my weaving in terrible lighting and it hasn’t mattered, but when you need to look at the threads, and it’s too fucking dark to tell the yellow from the cream border, that’s not a recipe for success. So that’s on hold until the sun comes up at least.

Here are some assorted pics of my most recent weavings, which I’ve done without using a pattern. I need some more colors, is a mild hang-up; I lack cobalt blue, true orange, and of all things black. I mean, I have black in carpet warp but if I’m doing a whole band in crochet thread then it’s too coarse. Except I think it would work for pickup, and meant to try it but I couldn’t find a weaving diagram for that– the instructions that said use a coarser thread for your design did not have a diagram, so the one I’ve copied uses three threads per block of design and that is obnoxious because I keep losing count. I don’t do counting, you see. And you don’t have to count for this technique, it’s all “next” and “next” and following a grid chart, and I can count “every other” and “first and last” and such, but saying okay pickup one drop one, pickup two drop two, pickup three drop three for every single block? i lose count. (Of course you can’t do all three as a chunk, you must pick up and drop them in order so they stay correctly arranged, and with crochet thread it is far too fine. so this experiment is going to be hell, but i’ve warped it on so sunk cost fallacy means I’m gonna make myself do the whole thing and hate it the whole time.)

so here’s my first self-drafted pattern:

I found out how to make that central chain– it’s two wavy lines next to one another– and did that in carpet warp, and the rest is crochet cotton.

Next I did a shades of green one, with a gold dashed line down the middle; I have an idea in mind to use this as trim on a kind of crazy quilt panel, so we’ll see how it does like that.

Experimenting with the visible weft, I rather like it but it’s hard to keep disciplined and make it perfectly even, and you often wind up with two little bits showing, sort of unevenly. So I see why all the directions say use the same color weft as border, but a bit of that is that the people giving the directions are so frequently inexperienced weavers themselves!

Then I warped this one on, and realized at the end that I’d just made stripes and there was going to be no pattern, so like an idiot I added warp threads in the middle which involved taking some of the heddles off and fucking up the tension and spending forever repairing it and I don’t know how in heck I got it all back together but I did, and wove it, and it worked.

(yes this is the very beginning, I was using matches as spacers to stabilize it before I started weaving. Later I switched to using a weft that matched the borders but about half of it is done with purple flecks in the border, I do like the effect.)

And then I did this one, can you see what’s going on with it?

It’d be better if I had black crochet thread instead of that beige I used there, but it was a proof of concept.

Yes– it’s variegated thread, which I warped on to the number of pegs that meant that the color repeat lined up. So the whole band is a spectrum along its length, as well as across its breadth. This is an idea I’d been wanting to do for a while, and I did see that someone had but now don’t remember where or what technique and can’t find it again. But I was obsessed with the notion of it, and am going to use this as background for like, a bunch more ideas I have for designs.

I think it turned out pretty great! But the beige, eh. Black would work better, and I need some slightly more carefully-chosen colors for the spacer threads. (The threading diagram is pairs of the variegated threads, then a pair of spacers that’s one beige and one of a solid color that matches the vareigated spectrum, though you can see for example that dark red thread is not matchy and rather too bold instead.)

Anyway there’s my weaving update, and i know that looks like I’ve been weaving a lot but actually that’s two weeks of work in one post. It’s not nothing and I’m progressing but man hafving several day jobs is slowing me way down. (Your picture was not posted)