This is an advancing lace structure on a plain weave ground that I found in the Greater Baltimore Weaving Guild’s book Sixty Scarves for 60 Years. The pattern was designed by Carol Bodin, and it is called “Raku.”
Warp:
JOY “Almaza”
Length: 6 yards, 35 epi, 16: wide= 560 ends + 8 ends for selvedges. Total 568 ends
Click on this image for a bigger version:
I threaded right to left and had 2 floating selvedges on the right side, then ended with threading 1,2,3,4 and two floating selvedges. That used the 8 extra threads I assigned for the selvedges.
As you can see there are little huck interlacements on a plain weave ground.
Here is the warp.
The weft is Almaza in a different colorway.
I wove 3 1/2 yards of the lace pattern and 1 1/2 yards of plain weave for fabric to make a jacket.
I’m dreaming about my next project as I zoom along on the current one. There are always surprises, and this yardage has had its share. Last fall I decided to make the warp a yard longer than I’d figured when I bought the materials. Yeah, so, it should not have been a surprise when I ran out of warp and had to fudge a second warp out of a solid grey to blend into this handpainted warp.
Then, for some reason, I neglected to make the mental leap to realizing that if my warp is now a yard longer than planned I might not have enough weft! That only occurred to me after I started weaving, about 2 weeks ago. Really, I amaze myself sometimes.
So I’ve spent this morning thinking about what I might use as weft for the rest of this yardage. I have not yet run out of handpainted JOY weft, but it was time to decide if I should switch to a solid color now so I had enough yardage that is clearly different to make a significant part of my garment–like sleeves or front bands.
I spent some time this morning digging through bins stacked pretty high, looking for a bin of tencel. Luckily most of these bins are clear so I can what’s in them. But wouldn’t you know the bins at the bottom of my various stacks are not clear so I had to unload everything to check out what is in those bins at the bottom of each stack. No luck in finding any tencel. I have lots of tencel, but at the moment I have no idea where it is!
So I moved on to looking at color cards for tencel, and found that there is no coral shade that comes even close to what I want. That led me down the rabbit hole of looking through my silk bins and silk color cards. I have the perfect shade of coral that I’d love to use, but not nearly enough of it! So I called Treenway and have placed an order for two 1000-yard skeins of a loely coral color #27. Those skeins will not arrive for almost three weeks. Sigh…Does this happen to you? Please say it does!
Fast forward to the end of the day. I wove another half yard today, in plain weave now, with the handpainted weft. Just moments ago, when I advanced the warp, I saw that I am only about a yard away from the end. That means I will have 5 yards of fabric instead of 6. The mistakes just pile up faster than I can keep track of them! I could swear I made a 7 yard warp and that’s why I ran out of materials. I have no idea what happened last fall, and I don’t know where my notes are! I hope this sounds familiar to you. Now I think I need to call Treenway and cut my order in half!
Luckily there have been some marvelous experiences lately to balance the derangement going on in my weaving. While others are busy heading off to Milwaukee for Convergence, I have gotten to enjoy some inspiring events much closer to home.
First is an exhibit in Providence that will be closing soon. I wish I’d seen it sooner so I could have spread the word earlier. I believe it closes this weekend. There is a small gallery called The Reading Room of the AS220 gallery, on Matthewson St. where Kate Barber has a wonderful exhibit of her recent work, called “Forward Folding.”
This postcard image is a detail of one her works on display, and it is stunning. Her exhibit is in an intimate setting with beautiful lighting. I stayed longer than I would have imagined to view her 22 pieces. There was such zen in the room I could not tear myself away. Kate is doing wonderful things with shibori on the loom which she uses to create crimped cloth. Some of the works are also dyed and embroidered.
There is a wonderful mascot at the gallery who watches for visitors and then greets you at the entrance. I’ve now forgotten her name. She is so calm that I almost mistook her for a ceramic dog!
Across the river, in Old Lyme, my local area weaving guild members are hard at work getting ready for the annual town festival where some of us will demonstrate various textile techniques. The big Clemens loom is ready for demonstrating the weaving of a traditional Canadian rag coverlet bed covering. Jody will the be first weaver, although she needs three helpers to do this. This is her coverlet that will be woven first. It will be 9 ft. wide by 9 ft. long. It’s a big undertaking!
This Saturday, July 30, Jody and her crew will be weaving on this behemoth loom, and others in our guild will be demonstrating various textile techniques. I plan to bring my spinning wheel to spin some lovely tussah silk sliver that a Connecticut woman who calls herself HoneyBuns prepares and dyes. I am spinning a wonderful colorway of rosey coral and gold.
Yesterday Jody and I went to see a wonderful film about an exhibition that is currently traveling through Europe. It was a stunning film and almost made up for the fact that I won’t get to see this exhibition in person. The exhibition is called “Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse,” and the film has the same name. The Royal Academy of Art put this exhibit together. It was quite moving, and I enjoyed sharing it with Jody and two other weavers from my local guild who also attended.
There were scenes of the exhibition itself, including a large room where Monet’s waterlily triptych has been displayed together for the first time ever, since each of the three pieces is owned by different museums. There is current footage of the gardens where each of the artists painted a century ago, and there are wonderful old photographs of the artists. The best image was Renoir’s portrait of Monet in the garden at Giverny, doing a painting of his own. I did not know that this portrait is owned by the Wadsworth Atheneum, so sometime in the future I will be able to view it in person!
Here is a short excerpt from the film:
Here is one more video with the curator discussing Monet’s Agapanthus triptych.
To all of you heading off to Convergence, have a wonderful time! I’ll be thinking of you and what I’m missing. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the down time of being at home in the studio. Maybe I’ll soon get to start the next project I’m dreaming of–I didn’t even tell you what it is!
After a winter of dreaming about weaving, it was hard not to get right down to it when I returned home. During the 8 weeks of waiting for surgery, then recovering and waiting for the pathology reports I distracted myself with knitting. Last week I finished the warping process and got down to weaving! Boy, it feels great!
Some weavers have asked for more info on this project, so here it is. The warp and weft are two entirely different colorways of Just Our Yarn “Almaza,” which is an 8/2 tencel thread. One colorway is a bit on the cool side, with blues and purples, jazzed up with a bit of acid green and soft roses. This is my warp.
The weft is a rather bright analogous colorway of watermelon, coral, pale peach, and cream that is very slightly yellow. It looks like candy. It’s NOT a colorway I would ever buy on purpose! And yet I did, at the suggestion of Cathie and Diane from JOY.
Here is a bit of plain weave showing the color interactions.
The weave structure and the two very different colorways are creating an amazing fabric!
I planned the fabric at 35 ends per inch to weave a fabric with enough body for a garment. If I were weaving a scarf I would have used fewer ends per inch. My weave structure is a blend of plain weave with lace floats in the warp and weft. I am using one of the designs in the book Sixty Scarves for 60 Years that the Greater Baltimore Weaving Guild published a few years ago. The name of this pattern is “Raku” by Carol Bodin. I am sorry to learn that this book is now out of print. Time to consult your guild library!
Carol Bodin describes this structure as a lace overshot. I can’t follow that. To me it seems like a lace structure with advancing lace modules of 1-2-1, 2-3-2, 3-4-3, 4-5-4…etc with a plain weave structure surrounding the lace elements. Make sense??
I put the basic weave structure into my PCW program which I wrote about here. Then I had to make the BIG decisions. The pattern moves across the warp in one direction only. Did I want that or did I want a mirrored repeat at the halfway point across the warp? Did I want to mirror every pattern repeat? After sampling these ideas in PCW, I decided to leave the structure in its simplest form. Mirroring every repeat made a very busy fabric that looked like a headache waiting to happen!
The width I have on the loom is 16″ which means I’ll be using two lengths of fabric for fronts and backs. I can mirror the weave structure when I put the garment together. To make any mirrored design elements in the fabric would have made the overall design too fussy.
This is less fussy:
I’ve woven 3 1/2 yards of the lace structure, and now I think I’ll switch to plain weave for the next 2 1/2 yards. This way I’ll have some complex fabric for the body of a jacket and some plain weave for front bands and sleeves. It would have been so smart of me to choose a garment pattern before I began to weave, but that’s just not the case. This is a case of wanting to weave the fabric and the devil make care what it becomes!
When I’m not weaving I’m enjoying the garden. August is almost here, and the heat is starting to build.
I’ve had a couple of wonderful experiences that have inspired my weaving ideas lately. More on that next time!
Area 4 of the Connecticut Guild of Handweavers is setting up a monumental weaving display in Old Lyme, at the Historical Society on Lyme Street. This location is the old grange building.
One of our members, Stephanie, has temporarily brought a large Clements loom to the building in order to demonstrate weaving traditional coverlets for the next few months or longer. It is a behemoth of a loom, with a 9-foot weaving width! It takes four people to weave: two people sit on the bench and coordinate working the two sets of treadles, while another two people have to stand at the sides of the loom to throw the shuttle, catch it, and send it back. This will be a challenging exercise in team work! I can’t wait to try it!
Right now we are winding a 9-ft. wide sectional warp of moderately fine cotton. We have 54 2″ sections to wind.
Photo by Jody Brewer
As you can see, it takes a few of use to beam the warp as well. It will certainly be a project that involves all of us helping out in various ways. Several members plan to weave coverlets for themselves, and the rest of us will be needed to stand in as the team of four weavers.
Jody got a photo of me at the other end of the loom. The loom is on a stage so there is terrific lighting.
Photo by Jody Brewer
We are meeting on Tuesdays and Saturdays to work on this, and we plan to be weaving the first coverlet by the last week in July. If you are in the area, stop by on one of those two days!
Meanwhile, at home, I have been working on an old Torchon lace project from a few years back. I cut off about a yard of this lace a couple of years ago to embellish a linen tank top. It’s a small lace edging that would be perfect on a baby garment. With the baby arriving in December, I need to churn out this lace, especially if I’m also making the garment to go with the it!
This has led me to time how long it takes me to make this little lace edging. Two repeats of the pattern is one inch long. I can do two repeats in about 25 minutes, give or take. Hmmm… that amount of time sounded pretty discouraging to me until I then calculated that one yard of this edging would take about 15 hours to weave. That sounds much better to me. I’ve been working on it a couple of hours a day since Saturday at my monthly lace meeting.
When I cut it off for my linen top a few years back I only left about four inches attached to the pillow. Today I measured it and found that my efforts here and there over the past few days have advanced the edging to 20″!! That should mean that I have less than eight hours to go!
Last Friday, when I attended Kathi Spangler’s funeral mass, I met three very intriguing women in Kathi’s life: her daughter, her sister, and her mother. I was moved by how much they looked like her, how much of her I could feel emanating from each of them. It was quite comforting to know how she lives on in each of her close relatives. Of course she lives on in each of us, but it shows in her female relatives because you can see Kathi looking out from their eyes–young Kathi in her daughter’s eyes, a very familiar Kathi in her sister’s, and the Kathi we will never get to know in her mother’s eyes. These three women were wearing scarves Kathi had made for each of them, and the women of our guild had a good showing of Kathi-inspired ‘surprise’ scarves. It was a moving celebration.
One day last week, two friends stopped by my house for a bit. Jody returned my little container of limpet shells that I collected in the Bahamas, and we spread them out on the kitchen island to pick out a few buttons for the first baby sweater I’ve knitted. Here they are!
The little limpets on the bonnet will be used to attach a ribbon on each side for tying. I just need to find a good color of cream …or maybe one of the warm colors in the limpets…for the ribbon.
In my studio I have some yarns that Kathi shared with me that are waiting to become fabric. I will enjoy thinking of her as I dress the loom and weave. Right now I’m struggling to thread the pattern and wondering what has happened to my brain. I’m making a LOT of mistakes in what should be a simple huck threading. I’m hoping its just a temporary residual effect of anasthesia and not that I’m truly becoming feathery…
Regret is an emotion I try not to nurture, but I almost named this post ‘regret’ — I’m fighting the urge to give into it. I got the shocking news last night that one of my local area weaving friends died…. unexpectedly to me. I did not even know she was sick.
Some of you know that I am a relative newcomer to this area, so I haven’t known the local weavers here for very long. Some of them have been so generous in including me in local events and welcoming me into their magical circle of friendship. Kathi has been that kind of friend to me. In the small amount of time I have lived here, only four short partial years, Kathi has been a good friend, and I have seen first hand what a marvelous weaver she was.
In this photo she is wearing one of her handwoven scarves, which reminds me how she loved jewel tone colors like what she is wearing here.
When Convergence was in Rhode Island, in 2014, she was in charge of setting up an exhibit that would greet visitors who entered one of the sites off the conference grounds. It was the entrance to a building downtown Providence that, I believe, is part of URI. The exhibit on display within the building was ATA’s small format tapestries, and all the windows at the entrance to this building were filled with various kinds of weaving done by Rhode Island guild members. It was a visual feast and it let you know immediately that you had arrived at the right location. It was a grassroots effort to get more weaving in public spaces, and it was beautiful.
One day last fall Kathi invited me to meet her in Rhode Island, where she lived. We met for lunch and then she took me on tour of URI’s textile department at the Kingstown campus. First she showed me the exhibit on display in the gallery, called “These are a Few of My Favorite Things,” which was a lavish collection of pieces chosen by the staff and the curator, Margaret Ordonez.
I hope Kathi realized how much I loved this entire experience. The exhibit included so many amazing textiles from the past several centuries that included handwork from many cultures. We met Norma Smayda there who was visiting with a few of her students. When Kathi introduced to me Ms. Ordonez, we were treated to a tour of some of the textiles currently being restored by students and also took a look at some of the classrooms. Boy, if I could do it again, I’d be a textile student at URI!
Kathi did a lot of work for the Connecticut state guild, and this is something I can barely record since she was involved long before I ever moved here. While I have lived here she was the head of a committee to grant scholarships for weavers to attend various conferences around the country.
Last fall our local group had a long weekend workshop with Sarah Fortin. We all brought handwoven yardage that we then assembled into jackets based on patterns that Sarah had developed over the years. Kathi’s jacket was one of the most interesting. She had woven a variety of twills on one warp using neutral creams, greys and blues. Because she had changed her treadling throughout the yardage, she had quite an interesting mix of pieces to go into her jacket. I kept hoping I’d see her wear it one day. I never saw it finished.
My local weaving group remembers Kathi for her easy going attitude and terrific sense of humor toward trying new techniques. I was lucky to take two workshops led by Kathi where we made what she termed “Surprise Scaves.” For these workshops Kathi brought a rainbow of ProChem MX dyes in little squirt bottles, a large pot black acid dye, and a pot of dye discharge.
The process she taught was folding silk chameuse scarves (dry!) in shibori style manner, and binding the folds with rubber bands. We then used the squirt bottles to apply color to our folded scarves. We set the color on our dry scarves with vinegar from another squirt bottle After that we put our folded scarves in the hot black acid pot. Then we took off the rubber bands and readjusted them in a random way and dunked our scarves in the exhaust bath. After removing and cooling a bit we undid our little bundles and everyone had a stunning scarf! It was completely unpredictable and yet also magical! I participated twice in this workshop, but but the time I joined this group this was already a popular workshop, so the group does it almost every summer. In fact, we plan to do one in the near future in remembrance of Kathi.
This is not a great representation of her ‘Surprise Scarf’ technique. I was looking for a photo of all of us happily squirting dye while scarves were drying on the racks, ruffling in the breeze….alas. Maybe someone from the group will send me a photo. Meanwhile:
I know that Kathi was very active in both guilds in Rhode Island and Connecticut, so many of those members have far more memories of her than I do. I regret that I will not get to know Kathi longer. She was one of my favorite friends, however new our friendship was, and she was also one of the most creative and experienced weavers I have known. I am trying to focus on how lucky I am to have gotten to know her, however briefly. Her funeral is Friday, and I intend to wear a surprise scarf to the service.
