Silk Double Cloth

I still have a piece of  double cloth on the Voyager which is white silk with squares of dyed silk in various bright colours. I went back to that last night to finish a sample to be washed. I think it is a little stiff as double cloth with warp and weft interchange can be and I would like a softer feel and drape. So I will re-sley it if it does not soften up in the (hand) wash.

You will notice that the second coloured square from the top looks different. It is. I transferred the shaft lists to a post-it note  and stuck it on the Voyager to speed things up - and I copied it wrong, didn't I? It is corrected in the top square.  Quite a nice effect, though

In weaving along, I discovered two nasty facts. The Voyager is very small and there is not much space at the back, so I had put the replacement threads for the abandoned lurex warp on weights, two at a time. This is a mistake as, in three cases, one thread has become  much slacker than the other. I will replace each of these weights with two weights. A nuisance because the Voyager is so small that the weights have to be adjusted every time the cloth is wound on.

The other nasty and startling fact is that the draw-in is tremendous at 260 mm in the reed to 235 mm off the loom. As a by-product, the edge threads are beginning to look fuzzy. I am not keen on a temple with silk but I think I have to try. After all, the warp silk is 8/2 and should be able to take it.

More on Black Jack

I managed to replace every lurex thread with a blue dyed thread (Debbie Bliss) and it is weaving up nicely. Now there are six plastic film canisters  dangling at the back of the loom, weighting these new threads. I use the canisters weighted with glass marbles,  winding the spare yarn round the canister, then trapping the thread in between the body and the lid of the canister. I have only once had a problem with this method which occurred when I was using a fine wool lace weight yarn as warp. The lid of the canister just cut through the yarn. The advantage of this method is that it is easy to alter the weight by adding or subtracting marbles. The disadvantage, at the moment that I have used up my stock of marbles as weights on the warp-weighted loom.

The hemming at the start is visible. This is done according to the Nancy Walker method which  I learnt during her course on linen weaving at the Denver Convergence in 2004. Very effective since you don't put any tension on the weft threads, only on the warp ones.




A comment on the Debbie Bliss pure silk yarn which is sold for knitting. It is expensive but it takes acid dyes beautifully and weaves up well.  It has an attractive high lustre and does not pill or shed fluff. I use it sparingly and this blue was some I dyed when experimenting about a year ago. I have shoe boxes (all labelled) full of 10 gm skeins of experiments in dyeing and I like to use them up.

Black Jack, Lurex and Bright Colours

Now for the second task - the demo. The weavers in our Guild (Kennet Valley) hold a 'Black Jack' project every now and then. It works out at about one every 8 months. This comes from Ann Sutton's book 'Ideas in Weaving'. One of us (Rosie Price) holds a stack of cards and each weaver is issued with two cards, then goes away and weaves what it says. You are allowed to exchange a card if the two cards are totally incompatible like 'bright colours' and 'black and white'.  After three months, every one come comes back with two samples not more than A4 size plus a page of notes. The member concerned keeps one sample and the other sample plus a copy of the notes goes into the Guild weaving book to be consulted by everyone. I scan all the samples and every one gets a bound copy of all the scans and all the notes.

The next deadline is December 2009 and I have drawn 'Use bright colours with a white background' and 'Use Lurex'. Also I was doing a demo on Monday this week at the Guild Exhibition and I wanted something on a small loom to demo next Saturday so I decided to combine all of these and put a warp on the Leclerc Voyager which is my portable loom. In addition, being a mean Scot, I wanted to use up a whole lot of 60/2 silk I had dyed in brilliant colours and then decided they would not do for the current Megado project (of which more another time). But I did not feel enthusiastic about weaving 60/2 silk on the Voyager as it would be slow and might discourage people at a demo. Sooooo -

I decided to do a double cloth in white 8/2NM silk from Fibrecrafts (Japanese spun silk) at 12 epi using 8 shafts. Stripes of bright colour could be included in one cloth only   which I could swop from front cloth to back cloth thus giving me squares of bright colour. This way I could put lurex in the warp along with one of the colours. I put on a warp of 3 metres  for a width of 0.25 m by winding a warp of the 8/2NM and also wound a warp each of orange and scarlet and two warps of pink space dyed plus lurex. Each of the small warps was for a one inch width (sorry about swopping units). I warped up the Voyager from front to back. I do prefer to warp up from back to front but the Voyager is too short between the shafts and the back beam (its only defect). The first nasty problem is that I was warping up using 8 threads of 60/2 silk through each heddle and it was easy to get in a mess. It took a long time to wind on the complete warp - like 6 hours on Sunday. The second potential problem was the Lurex which I have never used in a warp before but I was very careful and had no problems.

The weft is a white 60/2 silk. The coloured squares are an inch on a side. You can see the Lurex on the outer side of the pink rectangles. And what you see is the sample for the Guild because the Lurex unravelled on me! A real mess. I only managed  a length of 8 inches. So the moral is only use Lurex for weft.

I spent Monday evening replacing all the Lurex threads with some Debbie Bliss silk which I had dyed in light blue some years ago.
I have changed the draft as well to provide some more interchange between the white sections of the front and back cloth. I have yet to check the threading and weave a little  - probably this evening.

The 8/2 silk from Fibrecrafts is very soft and has a good lustre but does shed fluff and I wonder whether everything will clog up before I weave this off. I hope not as it looks rather nice.