Indholdsfortegnelse for September - October 2015 i Handwoven

In the last issue of Handwoven, Tom Knisely gave us his take on Pennsylvania Dutch show towels, pieces often made by a young woman for her trousseau, in part to show a prospective husband her homemaking skills. I love this tradition of “show” textiles. Show towels are an old Scandinavian tradition, as are showy boundweave coverlets. My grandmother was not a weaver, but I loved using the crisp, hand-embroidered linen towels in her guest bathroom. If you search for show towels on eBay, you’ll find loads of vintage towels that were lovingly woven or embroidered here or in Europe. When we grace our homes with our own handiwork, whether towels or coverlets or table linens or rugs, we honor our families and celebrate the honest work of our hands. In…

Since 1876 Arizona FIBER CREEK Prescott AZ 86305 928-717-1774 fibercreek@hotmail.com THE FIBER FACTORY Mesa (480) 969-4346 California CUSTOM HANDWEAVERS Mountain View Tel: (650) 967-0831 Fax: (650) 967-1005 www.customhandweavers.com webemit@sbcglobal.net CUSTOM HANDWEAVING Redondo Beach Tel: (310) 316-0910 or: (866) 656-1060 www.nancyscustomhandweaving.com customhandweavin@aol.com JULIAN WEAVING WORKS Julian (760) 765-2432 info@weaverslink.com SAN FRANCISCO FIBERS CO. Oakland (510) 893-2015 www.sanfranciscofiber.com lou@sffiber.com Colorado BOUNTIFUL Livermore (877) 586-9332 info@bountifulspinweave.com www.bountifulspinweave.com Illinois FINE LINE CREATIVE ARTS CENTER St. Charles (630-584-9443 www.fineline.org info@fineline.org Indiana THE WEAVERS LOFT Guilford (812) 576-3904 weaving@nalu.net www.weaversloft.com Kansas HERITAGE HUT Whichita (316) 682-4082 www.heritagehutyarn.com THE YARN BARN Lawrence (800) 468-0035 yarnbarn@sunflower.com Kentucky THE WOOLERY Frankfort tel: (502)-352-9800 fax (502)-352-9802 http://www.woolery.com info@woolery.com Louisiana WEAVIN' PLACE Folsom (985) 796-8048 www.weavinplace.com cheryl@weavinplace.com Maine HALCYON YARN Bath (207) 442-7909 (800) 341-0282 www.halcyonyarn.com PORTLAND FIBER GALLERY & WEAVING…

The sudden death of my friend Marge came as a total shock. We had been weaving guild friends for more years than I can remember. We were close and knew each other’s families as if they were our own. After the memorial service, I paid my condolences to her kids, then started out to my car. My friend’s oldest daughter came up to me, thanked me for coming, and then asked if I could help her. “Of course I can,” I said without a moment’s hesitation. “What can I do?” She asked me to help her family go through Marge’s weaving and spinning equipment. “Mother had lots and lots of yarn, and we don’t have a clue what is there.” My friend’s home was a weaver’s wonderland from one end…

Napery is such a fun word that I had to use it for this project! It is a medieval term for household linens such as table linens. It led my thoughts to heirlooms and my grandmother’s linens and china. As a child, I loved to run my hands over the linens and tableware to feel the raised areas of the design. In planning this project, the first thing that came to mind was color. Dark blue hues are a favorite of mine, especially indigo, so I knew they would have to be included. Wanting to combine color and texture to create a more modern look, I chose one of my favorite drafts, “Silk Brocade” (see Resources). It brought everything together: an heirloom quality with the look and texture of brocade,…

This blanket has a rugged feel like the Taos Mountains from which it comes. It celebrates the weaving heritage of northern New Mexico and is a tribute to my weaving teacher and mentor, Rachel Brown. Indeed, she made many prize-winning weavings in her lifetime with these same yarns. The warp is Rachel’s classic tapestry yarn, which is still hand-dyed in Taos by her granddaughter, Teresa Loveless. The yarn comes in five shades of every color. Painted effects are easy to achieve and fun to play with. The weft is a singles yarn, spun from New Mexico’s heritage breed, the Navajo Churro sheep. This hearty ovine has been raised in New Mexico for centuries. Prized for its long staple, Churro wool makes a very strong, nonpilling weaving yarn. (My instructions include…

MARYANN MCDEVITT bought her favorite loom in Paris and shares her love of weaving through teaching and outreach in Pennsylvania. Page 10 TOM KNISELY of East Berlin, Pennsylvania, teaches weaving at The Mannings Handweaving School. He was named 2011 Teacher of the Year by Handwoven and his textilian fans. Page 24 BONNIE WILKER is a recently retired senior center director, and now spends her days in creative pursuits with quilting, Bible art journaling, learning to weave, and grandchildren. Page 36 BETH MULLINS of Roanoke, Virginia, has been weaving since 1978. She enjoys weaving pieces that will be used in daily life and sells her work on Etsy at www.frederickavenue.etsy.com. Page 44 KIMBERLY HAMILL mothers, weaves, and teaches near Taos, New Mexico. Studying indigenous weaving of the Americas is her passion.…

For the past couple of years, I have been fascinated by the versatility of turned taqueté. Taqueté is a two-shuttle weft-faced weave, but when the draft is turned 90 degrees so that the weft becomes the warp and vice versa, it becomes a single-shuttle, warp-faced weave. It’s quicker to wind the warp since you can hold the pairs together, and quicker to weave because you don’t have to change shuttles every pick. On 8/2 unmercerized cotton, the sett for turned taqueté would typically be 30 ends per inch so that only one color of the pair shows at a time. I selected the two colors for each pair based on how they looked together, so I used a more open 20 ends per inch and a balanced weave. Both threads…

One of my goals as a new weaver was to teach myself how to use pick-up sticks to create a pattern on my rigid-heddle loom. I shared my progress with the Rigid Heddle Facebook group to determine if I had created “anything.” Encouraged by the positive feedback, I continued. Plan A: A table runner for my mother failed miserably because I hadn’t properly warped my loom. Plan B: Salvage Plan A by washing and drying to correct tension issues and . . . Nope! As I was staring at my newly created fabric, I noticed one of my pillows. It had come with the couch, was itchy, and was a little worse for the wear having been chewed by a mischievous foster pup. Eureka! I got out my sewing machine…

After all my research into pile weaves, I felt completely humbled by what millennia of weavers had made on very simple looms, and I was ready to apply what I’d learned in a much more modest way to my own plain-weave fabrics. Not quite ready to take on a full-size coverlet, I set out to apply this technique in a smaller but still usable format. Pillows were perfect, as they allowed me to try out simple patterns inspired by Fair Isle knitting charts, and they were a realistic size for me to make on a rigid-heddle loom, the closest approximation I have to the simple looms that the French weavers in North America used. Working in a square frame also established clear borders for my pattern. I have to thank…

TWISTING (OR PLYING) THE FRINGE Divide the number of threads for each fringe into two groups. Twist each group clockwise until it kinks. Bring both groups together and allow them to twist around each other counterclockwise (or twist in that direction). Secure the ends with an overhand knot. (Use the same method to make a plied cord by attaching one end to a stationary object.) SIMPLE HEMSTITCHING Weave several picks of plain weave (or the basic structure of the piece), ending with the shuttle on the right side if you are right-handed, left side if you are left-handed. Measure a length of weft three times the warp width and cut, leaving the measured length as a tail. Thread the tail into a blunt tapestry needle. Take the needle under a…

WEAVERS TRAINING WEAVERS My nine-year-old granddaughter, Noelle, has long been fascinated by my weaving. She begged me to let her try it “her own way” on my rigid-heddle loom (left photo). Note her tie-ons! In the second picture, she has now graduated to managing warp, weft, and shuttle beautifully, on a Christmas present from Nana. —Sandy McLain, via email EMPTY CONE USES? This is a photo of my empty spool holders from the 10/2 and 8/2 cotton I use for making dishtowels and baby blankets. (My three-year-old grandson was stacking them up and knocking them down again.) Are there any ways that other weavers have found to reuse these? I am a recycler and hate to toss things, but I have not figured a good way to reuse them. Any…

THE ART OF WEAVING Else Regensteiner ATGLEN, PENNSYLVANIA: SCHIFFER. 2015, PAPERBACK, 215 PAGES, $34.99, 978-0-7643-4856-3. Else Regensteiner was an accomplished weaver, textile artist, author, and a distinguished professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her influence on handweaving was so great, that some even referred to her as the "first lady of weaving.” Though she passed away in 2003, her work lives on in both her weaving and her writing, including her classic work The Art of Weaving, which was recently released in a revised and expanded fourth edition. While the book begins by covering the basic information needed by beginning weavers to get started—types of looms, equipment, and warping—this is not a “how-to-weave” sort of book. For example, the chapter on warping covers only eight pages.…

On the web Visit weavingtoday.com for a materials list and draft for this project. After twenty-five years, the fabric on my everyday dining chairs had seen better days, and then we purchased a new rug with different colors. It was high time to weave upholstery fabric. The chairs are used every day, so the fabric needed to be durable, and the colors had to play off the new rug. Each corner of the rug has a motif of four acorns. Could I weave acorns? Out came the old issues of Handwoven and my reference books. For upholstery fabric, some goals are just common sense: first, you want a firm weave with no long floats, and second, you need to use durable fibers. Twill and its variations could make beautiful upholstery…

I am very fond of simple patterns, so I like the challenge of designing interesting projects for my smallest loom, which only has four shafts. I have to think creatively to make great weavings on my “little one.” I think these dishtowels are one of my better designs. The structure allows a two-block weave with only four shafts and four treadles, and it gives you lots of pattern design possibilities. For these towels, I was inspired by the shades of blue in peacock feathers to use different shades of blue and turquoise in the warp and enhance it with Evergreen in the weft. TIP Winding This Warp with a Paddle Here’s a trick you could try if you have multiple cones of yarn and a warping paddle. When I wound…

Dukagang is an old Swedish decorative weaving technique, part of a broader group of Scandinavian art weaves, many from the southern Swedish province of Skåne. There are pieces dating back to the 1600s. It can be woven as half dukagang, where it is used as an inlay technique on either a balanced or weft-faced plain-weave background, or as full dukagang where the inlay weft covers the entire surface. I first learned the technique in a Weaving for the Home course at Sätergläntan school in Sweden. This pillow is inspired by the work of my teacher there, Ingrid Peterson. It is woven in full dukagang, using inlay to place squares of different colors side by side. Dukagang comes from the Swedish words “duk” meaning a cloth such as a tablecloth or…

Many weavers find at some point in their weaving lives that they want to create something that is wider than the weaving width of their loom, especially when weaving household fabrics such as coverlets, blankets, throws, or tablecloths. One option would be to buy a bigger loom, but short of that, some of these weavers will take the plunge and weave a doublewidth cloth on two layers. With a 4-shaft loom, only plain weave and its variations can be woven in two layers. With an 8-shaft loom, any 4-shaft structure can be woven in two layers, opening up far greater design possibilities. But then the challenge that arises is weaving consistent selvedges at the fold without obvious draw-in, so that there isn’t a noticeable demarcation down the center of the…