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[00:00:00.000] – Janet
We have four of us here tonight, Tien and I and Carly to answer questions related to classes or weaving-related stuff, priority given to stuff related to the class, and Dawn to keep us all organized.
[00:00:16.960] – Dawn
[crosstalk 00:00:17] do a very good job.
[00:00:18.330] – Janet
[crosstalk 00:00:18] don’t miss anything important. Yeah. Okay, so that is the spiel. And then we’re just going to launch into the slideshow.
[00:00:31.714] – Dawn
Alright.
[00:00:32.560] – Janet
Does anybody have anything to say?
[00:00:36.260] – Tien
Everyone says hello.
[00:00:38.010] – Janet
Slideshow, and that is me again. Here we go [inaudible 00:00:48]. Okay, so the first slide is a question for Tien, mainly.
[00:00:56.960] – Tien
Yes.
[00:00:57.781] – Janet
So take it away, Tien.
[00:00:58.510] – Tien
Okay. So Barb Thoreson said, for the tea towels from the May/June Handwoven magazine, she took a black and white photo of the yarns in the pattern and doesn’t see much contrast, but the towels here look very colorful. So can I explain what type of draft this is and why these colors work well with the draft?
[00:01:20.160] – Tien
So the black and white is really about value contrast, and that’s more for how well you see the pattern. In terms of the draft, the draft here is in M and Ws. Actually, Janet, if I can get the screen, let me show the…
[00:01:43.160] – Janet
Go for it.
[00:01:43.710] – Tien
Okay. So let’s see, Share Screen. I did the draft. And the draft looks a little different from the swatch, so Janet can maybe explain that sometime later, but here’s the swatch. This is the draft. And I think that is correct. It’s a little squished. I don’t think it’s beating quite square. And so that’s part of why it looks different. Anyway–
[00:02:19.980] – Janet
Look at the opposite side or not look at the opposite side and then put the other one back up. Okay. Well, thank you for humoring me. I’m not sure that made a difference.
[00:02:37.180] – Tien
Okay. But anyway, the colors are similar, and this is an M and Ws draft. So if you were to look at this, I would say when you’re thinking about keeping the colors bright, you want to think in terms of how much does the draft blend colors together and how much does–and how bright a color do these colors blend into.
[00:03:07.170] – Tien
In this case, the weft is orange on the right side, and then you have an assortment of colors going in the warp. This is a cyan, sort of a less saturated cyan here, the blue stripes. And where it crosses the orange, you would expect it to dull down the orange a little bit. The same thing goes for the blue here with the orange. They’re both far away from orange on the color wheel and not in the same two primary segment. And as a result, you would expect the colors here to be less saturated.
[00:03:51.360] – Tien
Now, however, the draft is another factor. And this draft is a little hard to classify. I would describe as a semi-separating draft or right in the middle between blending drafts and separating drafts.
[00:04:07.370] – Tien
So what you have is you have a nice chunk here in the blue diamonds of three-thread-wide stripes. And you also have another section here. Then you’ve got a large chunk of orange, which is in these wider stripes here, which is also going to read as a mostly solid color. So that’s why I would say that’s mostly a separating draft.
[00:04:39.880] – Tien
This would be more obvious if I were to add a color and just show you what it looks like in black and white. So let’s take a look at this actually in black and white. Okay, and we’ll just make the warp black for one repeat.
[00:04:59.550] – Janet
Tien.
[00:04:59.550] – Tien
Yes?
[00:04:59.550] – Janet
If you just hit Warp Struct or Weft Struct, it’ll do it without you having to change the colors.
[00:05:05.680] – Tien
Oh, okay. Thank you. I don’t normally use the Draft Editor.
[00:05:11.110] – Janet
Check boxes. Yeah. I don’t know if that’s warp black or white, but–
[00:05:16.750] – Tien
It doesn’t really matter for the purposes of what I’m doing. But you can see that there are these thick lines of black, and then there are these thick-ish lines of white that are divided by black stripes, so they’re somewhat diluted. And as a result, you have some blending of color, but not necessarily–but the majority of it is either black or white. You don’t have something like in plain weave, where you’d have lots of small dots of color. So this will tend not to blend colors, which is why your swatch still looks fairly bright in color. It’s because the draft is separating warp and weft.
[00:05:59.680] – Tien
Now, one of the things here is that, going back to this, this is slightly weft dominant. So if you look at this, these are right angles here, and these are definitely not right angles there. So it’s a little weft dominant. And so you’re seeing less of the cyan and less of that blue-purple than you would normally. So that’s also something to keep in mind when you’re thinking about the color of a piece. Is it going to be a warp dominant or weft dominant? Because in the draft, it looks–well, in the Color Editor anyway, it looks like the threads are of equal width, and if they’re not, then you can get something that looks quite different. Anyway, that was everything I had to say about that. Over to you, Janet.
[00:06:59.200] – Janet
I’m also a little skeptical that that picture we were zoomed in on in your circle there is using the same tie-up.
[00:07:09.680] – Tien
I’m kind of skeptical about that too because it looks very different.
[00:07:13.860] – Janet
It has, like–it has one float of the aqua in the zig-zags, whereas the tie-up is just going to produce two because it has two black diagonals.
[00:07:26.700] – Tien
Right.
[00:07:27.440] – Janet
So I think there’s probably a different tie-up at play, which is why it doesn’t match exactly. But that–
[00:07:33.200] – Tien
I was starting to wonder if I had lost it.
[00:07:37.320] – Janet
I don’t think you have.
[00:07:39.640] – Tien
Okay.
[00:07:40.010] – Janet
Do we have closure on question one?
[00:07:44.390] – Tien
I believe we have closure on section one, but let’s just–Barb, if you’re here, just let me know.
[00:07:52.180] – Janet
Yeah, put questions in the Q&A if you have more related questions, Barb, or anybody else. Okay, so I will go back to the slideshow.
[00:08:02.110] – Tien
Sure.
[00:08:03.320] – Janet
Which is this one. This is the one. I have too many windows open. I will close them.
[00:08:09.590] – Tien
I would never have too many windows open, Janet. It’s a running joke. I always have four–
[00:08:15.360]
[crosstalk 00:08:15]
[00:08:15.360] – Janet
I did not refresh the page. Can I refresh it now? With it not–I don’t know if it’s refreshing or not. Is it refreshing? Refreshing. Refresh to get my quick and dirty reply, which is not that important because I’m just going to–there we go. Oh, it’s in a different font. That’s good.
[00:08:34.430] – Janet
So, Carla Tilghman, if I’m saying that right, I hope I am, has asked about how to construct a satin weave. A satin weave is woven generally on a straight threading and straight treadling, and the magic is in the tie-up. And a satin weave is one that has quite long floats, generally, where the thread floats over all but one–like, the weft thread on one side will float over all but one of the warp threads in a repeat. And on the other side then, the warp floats over all but one weft pick in a repeat–in a threading or treadling repeat. So long floats.
[00:09:24.210] – Janet
And then the exceptions where it’s not floating over, those are called stitchers–or they’re called different things by different people, but stitchers. Those are distributed in a uniform way so as to create a lot of space between them, never sequentially. Remember in twills, if you took the What’s a Twill class, the floats are always, like, stepping in a regimented way and overlapping with the previous floats. In a satin, the stitchers are distributed so they are never next to a previous stitcher.
[00:10:07.570] – Janet
So the way to construct a satin is to take your number–I got to get to the right–here we go. And Carla asked specifically about a 5-end satin and a 15-end satin. So what you do is take the length of the repeat, 5, which is also the height of the tie-up, and you divide it into two sections that are unequal, which is easy. If it’s an odd number, you can’t get two equal sections. But also the two numbers can’t be divisors of one another, or I don’t think you can have them have a common divisor, which we’ll see when we get to the 15-shaft one.
[00:10:51.640] – Janet
So for 5–oh, and you don’t get to choose 1 because 1 would just give you a twill. So leaving 1 out, we can look at 2. If you took 5 and you divided it into 2 and something, that would be 3. If you take 2 out of 5, you have 3 left. And so that’s really the only division you can make with 5 because the other one is 1 and 4, and we’re not allowed to have1. So we can pick either 2 or 3.
[00:11:20.290] – Janet
And what you do to construct the tie-up–let me zoom into the tie-up–is start by putting something in the bottom-left corner. And then on that same treadle, count up your number, your interval, 1, 2, and then you go over one treadle to the right, and you connect that one. And then you go over 1, 2–or, sorry, up 1, 2 and over 1, and you wrap around. So up 1, 2, 1–hang on. What am I doing?
[00:11:55.180] – Tien
Up 1, 2 in the third column.
[00:11:56.860] – Janet
Up 1, 2. Okay, there we go. 1, 2 and over 1. So that is if your interval is 2.
[00:12:04.670] – Janet
We could also do it with an interval of 3. Up 1, 2, 3 over. Up 1, 2, 3, up 1, 2, 3 over. My problem is that I’m going over when I wrap. That’s why I’m getting confused, up 1, 2, 3, and over. So that’s a little bit shallower than the–no, it’s a little bit steeper than the other one was, but it gives us a 5-end satin. Either one of them gives us a 5-end satin. So our floats here are over four, under one, over four, under one in both directions. If we look at the other side, the warp is going over four, under one. So that’s 5-end satin.
[00:12:44.350] – Janet
On 15, we have to divide 15 into two numbers that are not equal, are not divisors of one another, and don’t share a common divisor, and 1 is out. We get 2 and 13 would work. 3 and 12, that doesn’t work because 3 is a divisor of 12. And if you did 3–1, 2, 3, 1, ,2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3–see, it repeats.
[00:13:13.180] – Janet
6 and 9 are not divisors of each other, but they both have 3 as a common divisor, so you wind up with a repeat before you get all 15 treadles in. So you can’t do those either. 5 and 10, 5 is a divisor of 10. 4 and 11 work, though. So you could do 2 and 13, 4 and 11, 6 and 9 is out, 7 and 8. Those are your choices. So you have three choices on a 15-end satin of what interval to make your–well, you really have six because either one of the pair–2 or 13, 4 or 11, 7 or 8 can be your interval.
[00:14:01.220] – Janet
So let’s just look at 7–1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
[00:14:08.840] – Tien
That was six, I think. Or was it?
[00:14:12.470] – Janet
1, 2, 3. Oh, yeah, it was. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. See? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Okay. And if you have trouble seeing the little squares like I do, especially once you start wrapping around, here’s a Draft Editor trick that you can do. Once you have a couple of them in, I like to do three, then you can copy those three treadles. Oops, don’t do that. And now, do you see, if I point here at Shaft 1, wherever my finger, wherever the finger of my little pointer cursor is pointing, it’s going to put a black dot. And the others are wrapping, they’re cycling around the shafts at the interval that I want.
[00:14:56.880] – Janet
So I’m going to put a dot–okay, if I look at Treadle 2, I know that that one should be connected to Shaft 8. If I click on that Shaft 8, it’ll add the next one on Treadle 4. So now I’m just clicking on the dots that are already there to add another dot beyond the pattern. And I don’t have to do each one. I can do the last one there.
[00:15:25.520] – Janet
As you can see, in a satin there is a diagonal that’s formed in the tie-up, like, two or three parallel diagonals forming in the tie-up that do kind of create a twill-y sort of diagonal in the fabric as well. But the stitchers are never next to each other. So the floats will almost certainly cover up the stitchers and make it look like it’s just a solid weft-faced, or warp-faced on the other side, fabric. Okay.
[00:16:02.460] – Tien
I wanted to say–before you leave satins, I wanted to note two things. One, you cannot always get satin on every number. So there is no such thing as a 6-end satin, because between–basically, because none of the numbers satisfy the requirements. On 6 ends, you can get a broken twill, but not a true satin.
[00:16:28.400] – Janet
Oelsner says you can do it, have a satin on anything 5 and up, but it might be considered an irregular satin because the interval won’t be equal everywhere.
[00:16:39.620] – Tien
Right. With 6, you always get repeats unless you do some nudging.
[00:16:44.420] – Janet
Well, or if you took one of the numbers–if you did an interval and did it as long as it worked and then changed your interval.
[00:16:51.430] – Tien
That’s right. That’s what you have to do. The other thing I wanted to mention is that a 15-end satin may not actually be practical to weave because there are–
[00:17:01.020] – Janet
No. Those would be crazy floats.
[00:17:01.880] – Tien
The floats are super long, and there aren’t that many interlacements. I work a lot in 8-end satins, and they get really dense.
[00:17:11.870] – Janet
Yeah. They’d either be really dense, or they’d be really sleazy. So if you wanted to do–I mean, you could do a 5-end satin stacked three times in your 15-shaft tie-up, if you wanted to do–if you wanted to thread it on 15 shafts for some reason because of something else going on in the pattern. I suppose you might be able to somehow combine the 7-end and an 8-end satin, but I haven’t thought that through at all. So now there’s a rabbit hole for me to fall in. Thank you. [whispered] I love rabbit holes.
[00:17:49.610] – Tien
I try, Janet.
[00:17:53.390] – Janet
Okay. Dawn, is the thing in the Q&A related to anything we’ve already talked about, or shall we move on?
[00:17:59.200] – Tien
No, it’s not.
[00:17:59.980] – Dawn
You can continue. Yeah.
[00:18:01.150] – Janet
Okay. So this one was directed to me because it’s a follow-on question from an earlier conversation. Harriet has a cousin who wanted to learn how to weave, and she had asked previously what advice she could pass on to her cousin. And now she’s saying, now I’m wondering, should my cousin start out with rigid heddle before moving on to floor loom? And I see that recommended, that advice given. Do you think it’s good advice? And if so, where can she go to see about the rigid heddle stuff?
[00:18:34.450] – Janet
And I’m sure Carly can speak to this too, and she already wrote a whole blog post on it, which is a great post. But there is no hierarchy of looms. There’s no start with a simple thing and then somehow graduate to better or more advanced looms.
[00:18:51.900] – Janet
I went the other way. I started with floor looms, and then I graduated to rigid heddle. And I tell you–if you use a single heddle and you’re just weaving plain weave, then a rigid heddle is weaving some fairly basic, straightforward structural cloth. But once you start adding heddles and other structures, it’s very mind-blowy, complicated. It’s way less straightforward than a shaft loom, in my opinion, but cool. So cool. So I’ll just answer the second part of the question, and then, Carly, if you want to leap in.
[00:19:31.720] – Janet
I would say your cousin should think about what kinds of things she likes to–okay, wait. What kinds of things she likes to weave is not helpful because she hasn’t woven yet.
[00:19:44.180] – Janet
When weavers ask me what kind of loom to get, if they are also knitters or crocheters, but knitting is more straightforward, if they are also knitters and what they love to knit is the simple basic stitches, garter stitch, stockinette stitch, and they love to do that with fabulous yarn with texture and color and have that be the focal point, then generally fewer shafts and more simple structures are going to be something that appeals to them more, and they’re going to be able to be satisfied with kind of that equipment. And that would suggest a rigid heddle or a four-shaft floor loom or something that is designed to really do plain weave very well and then do other funky stuff if you get complicated with it.
[00:20:37.440] – Janet
On the other hand, if as a knitter or a crocheter, she loves or you love the fancy charts and the complicated lace and the intricate color work and all the sort of math-y bits or pattern bits, even if you don’t recognize those as being math-y, then chances are you’re going to feel limited fairly quickly by a loom that can’t do those things more easily. And so more shafts will probably give you a sandbox to play in that you’ll be happier in for a longer time. More shafts or, if you go the rigid-heddle route, more heddles.
[00:21:19.040] – Janet
Also, there’s a question, I think, of how much patience you have for things and how quickly you want your cloth to evolve. Because you can make cloth very quickly on a floor loom, and it takes longer to make cloth on a table loom or on a rigid heddle or something where you have to do more things with your hands, and your feet can’t take any of the load.
[00:21:47.280] – Janet
As for where to watch stuff, we have our own fabulous rigid heddle classes taught by our Carly. I’m pointing down, she’s down below me on my screen. Craftsy does have several rigid heddle classes. And I mention Craftsy because we’ve been talking about the floor loom weaving class on Craftsy already. Liz Gibson also has wonderful rigid heddle instruction at Yarnworker.com.
[00:22:13.220] – Janet
And there’s lots of videos about rigid heddle and floor looms on YouTube. I wouldn’t recommend YouTube, like the free YouTube things, for instruction necessarily because it’s a crapshoot as to whether it’s going to be filmed well and the instruction is going to be good, but it’s certainly a way to see how the looms operate. So if her goal is just to see which of those things appeals to her more, she might get an idea just from the YouTubes. Okay, now I’m going to stop talking and let Carly.
[00:22:45.530] – Tien
I was going to add one thing before Carly talks, which, I know, unusual for me to have anything to say about rigid heddles. But if you have limited space, then a rigid heddle might work well for you.
[00:23:04.340] – Janet
It’s also–okay, now I’m saying more before–sorry, Carly.
[00:23:07.990]
[laughter]
[00:23:07.990] – Janet
It’s also so much more portable that it’s way more social, too.
[00:23:14.580] – Tien
Yes.
[00:23:14.580] – Janet
I get together with my friends and our rigid handle looms to weave, but it is not an easy thing to just fling my floor loom in the car and pop over to a friend’s house.
[00:23:24.340] – Tien
What? You don’t want to move a 300-pound loom every time you want to get together with friends?
[00:23:28.550] – Janet
No. I don’t. No. Okay, now Carly. Let’s let Carly talk.
[00:23:32.820] – Carly
I mean, I think everything–you covered a lot of it. I think I have the correlation between knitting complicated patterns and math. It’s a little bit tricky because a lot of people who knit really complicated patterns really like the rigid heddle because they can pick up all their patterns and still [inaudible 00:23:55].
[00:23:55.750] – Janet
For sure.
[00:23:57.450] – Carly
So even though there’s not that math-y component, you could draw a picture and you could put it on your loom, which is very exciting. But I think I liken it to–a rigid heddle is a beginner’s loom in the same way that a bicycle is a beginner’s car.
[00:24:15.940]
[laughter]
[00:24:19.820] – Carly
They’re two different things. The rigid heddle loom is much more accessible for a lot of people in terms of space and just getting going.
[00:24:30.940] – Janet
And budget.
[00:24:32.190] – Carly
What?
[00:24:32.990] – Janet
And budget.
[00:24:34.390] – Carly
Yeah. But if you know somebody who [inaudible 00:24:36] with a loom, you could get a floor loom for cheaper than a rigid heddle.
[00:24:39.890] – Janet
Right. But then when you want to get more reeds and more shuttles and more, more, more, if you have to buy that stuff new, it adds up faster than it does with the rigid heddle.
[00:24:48.730] – Carly
I have, like, a thousand dollars in rigid heddle looms. It could also start to add up, as well. But just for the additional purchase, like, you can go new, have $300, have a loom in your house. You could put it together that night and have something woven before you go to bed. That, for a lot of people, for people like me, is very appealing.
[00:25:15.130] – Carly
But what I would probably do–so there’s that. There’s the lifestyle. Do they have room for a floor loom? Is that the rabbit hole that they want to go down? And sometimes you don’t know until you start actually weaving.
[00:25:28.270] – Carly
But what I would do is probably pull out some Handwoven magazines and Little Looms magazines and just see what they’re interested in. They might be, like, I just love all of these little squares sewed together to make blankets. That look so fun. And then you’re, like, well, pin looms. Or maybe they are looking at the bands, and they’re so ornate and so fascinating. You’re, like, well, your weaving journey is going to end up with an inkle loom. Or maybe they’ll be, like, I love these pictorial pieces hanging on the wall. You’re like, well, there’s a tapestry loom. There’s so many different kinds of weaving.
[00:26:01.410] – Carly
But if they’re looking at these 8-shaft, parallel threading, echo weaves that are changing colors, then start on a 4- or 8-shaft loom, either a floor loom or a table loom, whatever they have space for. But I would just sort of see what their goals are.
[00:26:19.480] – Carly
And I will always recommend Liz Gibson because her classes are extremely affordable. And she has a good–she’s been in the weaving world for a long time, so she has that ability to talk about things and shafts. And she knows a ton about yarn, which is pretty awesome. Kelly Casanova is also highly recommended. I actually learned a lot when I first started. I learned so much just on her YouTube videos. So if you go to YouTube, Kelly Casanova’s pretty reliable. Liz has some stuff there, too. That is not an answer.
[00:27:01.371]
[laughter]
[00:27:02.460] – Janet
Well, it’s a direction. It’s a direction.
[00:27:05.860] – Tien
I don’t know. I think it’s a standard weaving answer, which is, it depends.
[00:27:10.104]
[laughter]
[00:27:10.500] – Carly
It depends.
[00:27:12.190] – Janet
We all should take out stock in Depends. Anyway.
[00:27:20.290]
[laguhter]
[00:27:20.290] – Tien
Yeah, that’s terrible, Janet.
[00:27:21.800] – Janet
Okay.
[00:27:22.730] – Dawn
Before you go to your next question, can we revisit satin for one moment? We’ve got something in the questions on satin.
[00:27:30.910] – Janet
Sure.
[00:27:32.860] – Dawn
Sheila Roberts wonders, how do you determine sett for a satin weave? 6-shaft irregular? 8-shaft, satin? Or if you’re Sheila, 7-shaft satin?
[00:27:43.510] – Janet
I’d go back to Ashenhurst and use your intersections per repeat, which is going to be 2, and your threads per repeat, which is going to be however many. And it’s going to give you something close to the maximum possible number because satin is very warp-faced on one side and very weft-faced on the other, and it’s got long, floaty bits. So my answer is always going to be Ashenhurst, if I don’t have direct personal experience, and I haven’t woven a lot of satin.
[00:28:24.400] – Janet
The formula isn’t even close. Hmm. Well, I will poke at that and see. But let’s move on for now, and then we’ll come back. Maybe let’s hash it out in the forums or something or the next Q&A, when I have time to actually think about it. Because if Ashenhurst isn’t the answer, then I don’t have a ready answer.
[00:28:55.580] – Janet
Okay. Back to the slideshow. Here we go. Mary Dianne is interested in a discussion and explanation of advancing twills on a 4-shaft loom.
[00:29:17.000] – Janet
So I wanted to show you first–well, just to give you kind of an idea of how advancing twills work. And I’m going to show you first on eight shafts because it’ll be a little more clear to see what’s going on. On four shafts, it’s a little confusing to see because things wrap around to the bottom constantly.
[00:29:42.400] – Janet
So if I were to take this little run of four threads, a straight run of four threads, 1, 2, 3, 4, and I copied it, and then I pasted that same little run, but instead of starting on Shaft 2, I started–sorry, instead of starting on Shaft 1, I started on Shaft 2, it would look like that. And then if I take that same little run, but next I have it start on Shaft 3 and then Shaft 4 and then Shaft 5. That all fits within the eight shafts. But the next one, if I have it start on Shaft 6, do you see how it wraps around to the bottom and the top? The fourth thread has wrapped back around to Shaft 1. And then if I have it start on Shaft 7, two threads wrap around to Shafts 1 and 2. And then when I have it start on Shaft 8, three threads wrap around to 1, 2, 3.
[00:30:40.070] – Janet
So this is an 8-shaft advancing twill with a run of four–there’s four threads in each little diagonal line–and an advance or a step of one. You can do it with a step of two instead of a step of one. So let’s see. This one starts on Shaft 1. If I was stepping by two, I’d go up two shafts to 3, and then the next time I’d go up two more shafts to 5, and the next time I’d go up two more shafts to 7, and then I’d be back around to 1 again, here. And you can see that actually makes a little pointy thing going on.
[00:31:23.320] – Janet
If we go back to four shafts and we do the same thing–I’m going to copy this run of four, and then I’m going to have it start on Shaft 2. And already one of the threads has wrapped around to Shaft 1, the last thread. And then I’m going to have it start on Shaft 3, and two threads are wrapping around. And then I’m going to have it start on Shaft 4 and then on 1 again and then on 2 again and then on 3 again and then on 4 again.
[00:31:57.860] – Janet
So it’s always going to be the same little run of four threads, a unit of four threads, that goes four shafts around the twill circle. Remember the twill circle from Cookies and Clocks? So 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, 1, 3, 4, 1, 2, 4, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3– it’s always doing four threads around that circle in the same direction. It just doesn’t look as obvious. What’s going on is not as obvious on four shafts because they’re all wrapping to use the same shafts over and over.
[00:32:37.750] – Janet
So my advice, if you were threading an advancing twill, would be to pull over one heddle on each shaft and think to yourself, okay, this time the run starts, or I’m going around the circle starting at 1, and thread those four 1, 2, 3, 4 and push them out of the way. And then I would take four more heddles, one on each shaft, over again and say, okay, this time the run of four starts on Shaft 2–2, 3, 4, 1–and push those out of the way. And pull over four more heddles, one on each shaft, and say, this time the run starts on 3–3, 4, 1, 2–et cetera, et cetera. So each time on four shafts, every four threads is still–it’s always going to be one heddle on each shaft. So I hope that helps.
[00:33:35.100] – Janet
Nope, that is not the right button on my keyboard. Okay, back to–oh, that was it. Sorry, there we go.
[00:33:46.840] – Janet
All righty. So Maryann Drake has a question about managing the edges of rep weave and specifically how to twist the thick and thin yarns around each other. Because what happens is that the thick thread is always in the same shed and the thin thread is always in the same shed. And so if you don’t twist them around each other at the selvedges, then you drop your selvedge threads.
[00:34:13.530] – Janet
And my go-to solution for this issue is to throw the thin weft into every shed. So you have a pick that is just the thin and it goes across. And then the next pick, which would normally be just the thick, I throw the thick and I throw the thin with it. This works if the thick and the thin are the same color or very nearly the same color, or your warp truly is covering everything and you don’t see any of the weft poking through, in which case you’ll only see that there’s two colors doing something kind of funky at the selvedges where the little blips go around the edges.
[00:34:52.540] – Janet
And if you do that, then the thin is actually weaving a plain weave–over one, under one–it’s weaving in every shed, so it catches all the selvedges, and you don’t have to worry about twisting at the edges. So that would be my advice. And it’s just easier.
[00:35:10.360] – Janet
If you don’t want to do that, if your wefts are two different colors, then you have to figure out whether the thread that you are trying to twist around goes underneath the selvedge thread, in which case you have to go under it. So you sandwich that thread between the selvedge thread and the weft that’s doing the sandwiching. The sandwichee is between the selvedge and the sandwicher. Or if it’s on top of the selvedge thread, then the sandwicher has to go on top of it so that it’s sandwiched again between the selvedge and the weft that leads. Okay. I hope some of that was helpful.
[00:36:03.350] – Janet
Next question is from Carol Patton, who has found draft number 29911 from Handweaving.net and wants to know if it can be converted to overshot or how she can tell whether a draft like this can be converted to overshot.
[00:36:18.120] – Janet
And that question is coming up partly because, at least I think, this is one that she had posted to one of the classes or the forum earlier because it’s labeled as overshot in Handweaving.net. Somebody added that as a keyword. And it’s not overshot.
[00:36:36.540] – Janet
So there’s two answers I want to give you. One is that for something to have a tabby ground, a plain weave ground fabric, which overshot has, you have to be able to create a true tabby on the threading. And this threading can’t do it. There is a toolbox in the Weaver’s Toolbox that–it’s titled something like, Can I weave plain weave? Or can I weave tabby on this threading? That will take you through the steps of determining whether or not you can weave tabby on a particular threading. And in this case, you can’t get a true tabby, regardless, because there’s two threads on the same shaft next to each other.
[00:37:26.860] – Janet
If you overlook that and you’re just considering it as a, okay, well, that one’s got a little float of two, can you get plain weave other than that? Odd, even, odd, odd, odd, even, odd, even, odd, even. You’re going to get double threads in a lot of places. You’d have to go through the steps of determining whether or not you can weave tabby on the threading to see just how far off of tabby you’re going to get. But this is not going to give you a tabby. So that’s one way. If you can’t get a true tabby, you’re not going to get true overshot, but you might get something similar.
[00:38:06.020] – Janet
So that brings me to the next thing, which is that overshot is a derivative of twill. The pattern floats have the same overlapping with the float before property that twills have and the same–they’re connected to the thing to the left and the thing to the right that twills have.
[00:38:29.810] – Janet
This is not a twill draft. The threading might look kind of twill-y. It has little pointy things anyway. And the treadling is the same. But the threading and the treadling do not make something twill. Once you put the tie-up in and you look at the shed order and, in particular, you look at the structure, you can see that this draft does not have overlapping floats hardly anywhere, a little bit in these kind of circles. But everywhere else, it’s essentially a rib weave with 2/1 floats, either vertically or horizontally. So it does not have the underlying twilliness that an overshot pattern wants.
[00:39:14.690] – Janet
So I don’t think this is a good candidate to be an overshot, to be translated into overshot. I mean, there’s ways to do it. You could say, okay, I’m going to call each of these things a block and then decide, well, this has got six shafts, so I’m going to design a six-block overshot, which would take six shafts or 12 shafts, depending on how you did it, but you’re not going to get it on four shafts, not looking like this. And even then, it would be related, but it wouldn’t look quite like this.
[00:39:49.270] – Janet
So I would look to see, does it have a tabby? And is it based on twill? Does it have a twill underpinning? And if so, then to weave it like overshot, just alternate your twill pattern picks with tabby picks to create a ground cloth underneath. Just, that’s all. Just do that. Okay.
[00:40:19.960] – Janet
Now, Bobbi asked this question in the forums, and I answered there in the forums, and here’s my little quick and dirty version of it. So, Carly, do you have anything to add to this with your 3-shaft twills?
[00:40:35.090] – Carly
Yeah. Bobbi’s question was about creating tabby, and we talked a little bit in the class about that’s one of the properties of the 3-shaft twill is it does not make tabby. I have the Dixon here, and I’ve looked at the options that Dixon gives for the 3-shaft twills. And all the options that she put in allows you to do–what I do is I look at Shaft 1 and then I count in between shafts. Like, if on Shaft 1, they go 2, 3, they return to 1, then 2, 3, then I know that I could do Shaft 1 against 2, 3. I hope that makes sense. So lifting 1, lifting 2, 3, lifting 1, lifting 2, 3 to make kind of a basket weave derivative that goes over one, under two, over one, under two. So that is what you can use instead of tabby.
[00:41:36.500] – Carly
If you’re doing the extended point twill threading, what I sometimes do with my 3-shaft twills is, on the selvedges, I will, on one side, do maybe 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, and on the other side, go 3, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1, 3, 2, 1 a couple times. So then I have a nice little twill that kind of will balance out the rest of the twill going through all those peaks. Does that make sense? I just add extensions off to the side just so that way they mirror each other.
[00:42:10.040] – Carly
You don’t really need to worry about putting tabby. Well, you can’t put tabby there because you only have three shafts. You can design a 3-shaft or a 1/2 twill with four shafts that will do tabby. I’ve seen people do that. But that’s not what we covered in the class. I think you just came across just one of those things where it’s, like, oh, you can’t do this with a 3-shaft twill. So you’ll experiment with different ways of ending that, but you can’t do the over one, under two with all of the things that are in Anne Dixon’s book. Is that good?
[00:42:50.510] – Janet
I think so. And that is the end of our slideshow.
[00:42:55.440] – Tien
Bring out your questions.
[00:42:57.910] – Janet
Yeah.
[00:42:59.400] – Tien
Kind of like bring out your dead, but much less smelly.
[00:43:01.410] – Dawn
Oh, geez. Okay, so Sarah Ullenberg’s here, and she just finished weaving her smoking hot scarf, maybe table runner, from the Weave-Along. She used four shuttles, and she has maybe 48 inches left to experiment on the 4-yard warp. And she wants to figure out what to experiment with, and she keeps thinking back to Clocks and Cookies. Her project was threaded for plain weave on her 4-harness table loom. Is there another structure I can try weaving with the straight draw threading on my table loom?
[00:43:39.660] – Janet
So it’s threaded for straight draw. It’s threaded straight draw. It’s not threaded 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 to give you plain weave. And you’re getting plain weave because of the tie-up. That means you can use any tie-up you can create. You can doodle into your four by four is a good place to start, or four by six if you have–let me look at this again–table loom or…
[00:44:07.090] – Dawn
I think table loom.
[00:44:08.510] – Janet
You’ve got all 14 possibilities. So you can–I mean, you can weave all kinds of things. My inclination would be, if you want to find a draft, would be to go to handweaving.net, pick a draft that has a straight draw threading on four shafts, and say, show me what else can be done on this threading, because that’s an option on Handweaving.net, and you will find thousands or at least hundreds.
[00:44:39.520] – Carly
When I took the class with you, Janet, you set up for that straight draw twill and then they gave us, like, 36 drafts to choose from.
[00:44:52.240] – Tien
Let me just show you on Handweaving.net how one does this. Here we go. This is on a 4-shaft straight draw, and there’s a really cool button here that you can press that says Same Threading.
[00:45:17.820] – Janet
Thousands.
[00:45:19.160] – Tien
And it gives you 5,207 options, Sarah. Now, some of them don’t look like they’re on a straight draw on four shafts, for example, this one. And what that is—I don’t know why that one’s in there, but it can be a rearranged–
[00:45:33.160] – Janet
Because it can be done. It can be done on four.
[00:45:35.950] – Tien
That’s the thing. It can be rearranged to a four-shaft straight draw.
[00:45:43.180] – Janet
Yeah. It’s the same as Carly–well, as the 3-shaft point, not really a twill thing in 3-shaft twills.
[00:45:52.780] – Carly
Oh, yeah. I wonder, do you have [inaudible 00:45:54]? Yeah, that’s interesting that they include those. There’s another one in there, too.
[00:45:59.450] – Janet
Oh, his algorithm is smart enough to figure out anything that can be done on that threading, even if you have to rearrange the shafts or the treadles or the tie-up.
[00:46:09.380] – Tien
Right.
[00:46:09.740] – Carly
That is pretty amazing.
[00:46:11.590] – Janet
And it’ll find things that have your like 4-shaft straight draw in the treadling because then you could weave it by turning it.
[00:46:19.360] – Tien
Right. And it’s pretty darn amazing and pretty darn cool. And it means that you never have to get bored with a long warp again.
[00:46:30.820] – Dawn
Sarah says thank you, and she’s heading to Handweaving.net.
[00:46:34.125] – Everyone
Yay!
[00:46:35.070] – Carly
Do we have a toolbox for converting tie-ups to–I mean, yeah, you have that how to convert your tie-up into a lift plan for–
[00:46:46.720] – Janet
Yes. Well, treadling, a tie-up and treadling into a lift plan. Yes, there is a toolbox for that and how to also go the other direction. So, yeah, Sarah, once you find a draft that makes your little heart sing and you–well, from Handweaving.net, if you remember, you can download it as a lift plan.
[00:47:03.490] – Tien
Yeah, you can.
[00:47:04.220] – Janet
So it’ll give you the lift for it. And if you need to turn it, you can do that before you download the lift plan. But if you find a draft with a 4-shaft straight draw threading and some other tie-up and treadling out in the wild somewhere other than Handweaving.net that can’t just spit out a lift plan, then you can go to the toolbox to see how to convert it for your table loom.
[00:47:29.040] – Dawn
All right. We don’t have any questions, everybody. Anyone? Hello, questions? But Bobbi Hayward says, thank you, Janet and Carly. I can now go forth and experiment some more. FYI, I’m doing the 3-shaft extended point threading at the top of page 205.
[00:47:48.430] – Carly
I’m so excited. I can’t wait to see what you weave.
[00:47:51.890] – Dawn
Looking forward to it. Let’s see. Sandy says, I’m taking a dye workshop with Denise Kovnat, and she told me to choose a draft that is 2-end parallel threading, not a 4-end parallel. What is that, she says.
[00:48:10.030] – Janet
My guess is that it’s a threading with two parallels rather than four parallels. But really, Sandy, I would write to Denise and ask her. She’s fabulous to answer. I’ve taken workshops from her, too, and she’ll answer all the questions you can send her by email in advance to make sure that you’ve got your warp and everything set up. So I would clarify with her what she means because I’m only guessing.
[00:48:35.340] – Dawn
All right. Dayamitra says, hi, can you give any advice on how to add a symbol or initial into your weaving as a signature that the piece was woven by you? I want to symbolize that the piece was handwoven and not shop-bought. Can you give suggestions, please?
[00:48:56.750] – Tien
My approach when I was doing these incredible art garments was simply to have a machine-embroidered thing with my logo. I would actually have it embroidered onto the same cloth as the lining and just sew it down by hand. That may not be the most woven approach, but it worked for me.
[00:49:23.490] – Janet
You can get woven labels or I think printed labels with your name and little logos on them from lots of places that won’t necessarily match. And usually they’re sold hundreds at a time to get kind of a neutral color that will work on a lot of things. And you can attach those in various ways. Carly, what do you do for yours?
[00:49:45.370] – Carly
I have tags that I got woven for me. So I think I purchased 150 of them for a couple hundred dollars, but they’ll last me forever. It just has my logo on them. I like them because they’re woven in. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that that was [inaudible 00:50:05].
[00:50:07.700] – Carly
I’m wondering if you mean a signature. This is funny because I told Janet about this. Whenever I weave something, I always double end a thread in my rigid heddle. Always. It doesn’t matter what I’m weaving. I just started leaving it. It’s just one double thread down the side. It’s like, this is my signature. All of my weavings have this one double warp thread. There was a company that made blankets, and they would do their–what did they do? They put the little black lines on the side. They just did a little short end and wrapped it around maybe three times.
[00:50:43.490] – Carly
But maybe experiment to see if there’s a woven signature that matches your style. Maybe it’s putting a silver thread in the edge. And if you do it enough times, that will become your signature. It could just become–it starts to become almost like a branding. But, yeah, that’s my recommendation. Make a mistake every single time, and that will be your signature.
[00:51:14.828]
[laughter]
[00:51:15.080] – Janet
Yeah. Joy has suggested in the Chat that you can pick up your initials or little logos or things. That’s true, depending on your structure. Or even on plain weave, you could do some inlay. You’d have to do that judiciously in a way that didn’t somehow distort the fabric in that area, but there could be some option, depending on your structure.
[00:51:43.990] – Janet
And Courtney says that she embroidered the initials of the recipient onto something. I did a tea towel for my mom back in the days when I didn’t realize that plain weave was a bad idea for hems on twills. So I had this nice little plain weave hem, and I cross-stitched Merry Christmas and the year onto it. And now the hems are–it looks like a bell because the hems are so much wider than the middle of the fabric after it being washed so many times, but it’s an embroidered bell. So those are options too. But Carly’s idea is something that could be consistent from piece to piece to piece, regardless of structure or fibers used.
[00:52:35.210] – Carly
[inaudible 00:52:35] think of something personal, maybe a bead, that first thing. Maybe there’s, like, a stone that you really like. You can have a lot of fun with it.
[00:52:46.300] – Janet
Yeah. That’s a cool idea.
[00:52:49.690] – Dawn
Dayamitra says, exactly what she was looking for, so thank you. Let’s see. Diane’s looking for more with draft and warping interpretation. So I can probably say that that’s going to happen, right?
[00:53:07.710] – Janet
Sure. And if you have a specific question, like you did with the advancing twill, you can fire those questions off at the Q&As or the Office Hours, and I’ll do my best.
[00:53:19.440] – Dawn
Or the forums.
[00:53:20.800] – Janet
Or the forums. Yes, absolutely. And if you ask in the forums, you’ll get an answer right away. Whereas if you ask for a Q&A or Office Hours, it’ll be the next time that event happens.
[00:53:33.450] – Tien
I know we’re short on time, but I just wanted to quickly show the embroiderry that I was doing on my things. So this is my wedding dress, the infamous thing. And what I did was I had somebody machine embroider my name, my website, and so on, on basically the same lining fabric, and then I just embroidered it down. And that worked for me. You could do something similar if it’s a really big project, or you could get woven labels if it’s a smaller one.
[00:54:09.300] – Dawn
Beautiful. Okay, we have one more question, from Beth, who says, in the current Handwoven, there is a pattern, More Echoes. She’s trying to figure out how to do it with just eight shafts and 10 treadles. Is this possible? I’m totally lost trying to figure this out.
[00:54:28.820] – Janet
I got to log in and find the–wait a minute. No, I downloaded that one when I got it in my email, so let me–
[00:54:37.800] – Carly
I actually have it open on my–I was just looking at this issue, so if you want me to screen share–
[00:54:46.580] – Janet
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:54:47.970] – Carly
Okay, wait for me to figure out how to screen share here.
[00:54:51.350]
[laughter]
[00:54:52.780] – Carly
I got Zoom. I got Share Screen. I’m going to do this one. Huzzah!
[00:55:00.600] – Dawn
Well done.
[00:55:03.970] – Carly
You’ll have to–I wish I could just give you control.
[00:55:07.870] – Janet
I just want to look at it.
[00:55:10.670] – Carly
All right. So that’s the scarf and question.
[00:55:17.980]
[crosstalk 00:55:17]
[00:55:17.980] – Janet
So this is a parallel threading. And it’s got six, it looks like, parallels with an interval of two between them, and it’s on 12 shafts. So to come up with something that was similar-ish, you could try four parallels on eight shafts, also with an interval of two. So that would basically be–you would use the–let’s see. Would it work to just use everything that was Shaft 8 and down? It might. It might.
[00:56:05.180] – Janet
But you could also–it would be 3, 5, 7, wrap around to 1, and then it steps up to 4, 6, 8, wrap around to 2, and then steps up to 5, 7, wrap around to 1, 3. Do you see what I’m saying? So really, it looks like you would be using everything that was just Shafts 8 and down.
[00:56:39.470] – Janet
And then you do the same–well, you’d have to make up a new treadling that was related somehow. And for that, what I would do is look at the overall shape of the treadling and then try to reduce that shape to eight shafts rather than 12. And you can do that either by having anything that wraps beyond 8 come back to Shaft 1, which is called telescoping. Or you can digitize, where you say, okay, anything that’s on Shafts 1 and 2 is going to be Shaft 1, and anything that’s on–sorry–Treadle 1 and 2. You divide your 12 treadles up into eight sections and rename them somehow.
[00:57:29.190] – Janet
There’s an entire class in that paragraph, so it’s not going to be clear for me just trying to explain it in a couple of sentences. So probably easier for you to just say, okay, I’m going to try to take the general shape or design an entirely new shape to be your treadling. But that is how you could turn the threading into something related on 8. It wouldn’t give you the same look exactly, but it would give you something like it.
[00:57:59.010] – Carly
I also–a lot of times when I see these, they only have maybe two colors, [inaudible 00:58:04] looking at the four-shaft echoes, but I wonder if the color–you may have to reduce the amount of colors as you reduce shafts.
[00:58:13.823] – Janet
Oh, yeah.
[00:58:14.390] – Carly
[inaudible 00:58:15] color theory works on this one because I would just say go to something like Handweaving.net or get a book on echo weaves and find a weave you like and then apply the materials and color inspiration and sort of merge. Like, look at that draft, look at this draft, and then try to figure it out. But I’m wondering if the number of colors–I don’t know what I’m talking about, so I should probably be quiet.
[00:58:39.287]
[laughter]
[00:58:40.250] – Janet
For this one, yeah, if you have four parallels, each parallel would be its own color. If you look at this–let me see if I can annotate here, Annotate and Lines. Here’s one parallel, and they’re all that kind of wine color. And then here’s a parallel that’s all that kind of gold color. And here’s a green parallel, and here’s a light blue that wraps around down to somewhere here.
[00:59:20.630] – Dawn
Right at the bottom.
[00:59:22.750] – Janet
Yeah. And here’s one. So there are six separate parallels here, each of which has its own color. If you’re going to knock it back to four, each of those four would have its own color.
[00:59:34.950] – Janet
Beth says, thank you.
[00:59:35.770] – Carly
[crosstalk 00:59:37] be answering the question we had earlier about what it means to have a 4-end parallel versus–
[00:59:42.900] – Janet
Yeah. That’s my guess, but–
[00:59:46.860] – Carly
It’s a guess. Because I know she usually has you dye two different color themes, and then you weave those in parallel. So that’s what I’m guessing. But you should ask her.
[00:59:59.120] – Janet
Yeah. Check in with Denise to see what she says.
[01:00:03.760] – Tien
All right.
[01:00:05.490] – Dawn
[inaudible 01:00:08] on Handweaving.net. So, yay.
[01:00:10.660] – Janet
Great.
[01:00:11.750] – Tien
Fritz has made his cameo.
[01:00:14.500] – Dawn
That’s it.
[01:00:15.870] – Tien
I guess that’s it.
[01:00:19.420] – Janet
Then we’re done. Thanks for coming, everybody.
[01:00:22.760] – Tien
Thank you.
[01:00:23.480] – Janet
We’ll get the instant replay up as soon as we can and then the edited, captioned version.
[01:00:31.820]
[crosstalk 01:00:32]
[01:00:35.280] – Janet
Yeah, like that. Great.
[01:00:40.310] – Dawn
Good night.
[01:00:41.190] – Tien
Good night.
[01:00:41.810] – Janet
Bye, everybody. Courtney, I would write it four to time.