[00:00:00.650] – Janet
Hello and welcome to the April–
[00:00:04.808]
[laughter]
[00:00:06.050] – Tien
19th. And I only know that because it’s on my watch.
[00:00:10.280] – Janet
Thursday, the 47th of Maprilay.
[00:00:13.470]
[laughter]
[00:00:14.930] – Janet
And we are here with the Q&A, where for the first 30 minutes we will prioritize any Q&A related to the courses that came out in the past month. And that would be, let’s see, Sampling, Crunching, and all things Weave-Along. Does that cover it?
[00:00:38.560] – Tien
Yes.
[00:00:38.740] – Dawn
Yep.
[00:00:41.150] – Janet
And then anything else you want to ask that’s within our weaving wheelhouse, which is not infinite, just laying the groundwork here for people who are hoping for [crosstalk 00:00:56]
[00:00:57.330] – Tien
If we run out of questions, you can ask [crosstalk 00:00:59]
[00:00:59.190] – Janet
[crosstalk 00:01:02] but we’ll do our best. Dawn is here to moderate. Tien and I will answer your questions that are put in the Q&A interface. We will all keep an eye, as we can, on the Chat, but it’s best if you keep the Chat interface for socializing and any “important” with air quotes and a little trademark symbol questions in the Q&A interface because we cannot miss those.
[00:01:27.050] – Janet
And you can get to the interface for the Q&A at the bottom of your screen on a desktop or a laptop. If you’re on a device, like an iPad or a tablet or a phone, it’ll be somewhere in your menus, but it varies from one to another, so we can’t tell you where to find it.
[00:01:43.010] – Janet
I’m just going to add to the spiel in case you are unaware that Zoom has added in the last several months transcription. You can turn on transcription on your end, and it does a reasonable job, not necessarily with the weaving terms and don’t hold your breath for Tien’s name to be spelled correctly, but it does a reasonable job at auto captioning. And you can also turn on a full transcript, which runs down–well, on my desktop, it runs down the right side of the screen. And that’s nice because it doesn’t disappear after a few seconds. So you can scroll back and see if you missed something or if you didn’t catch a word correctly. And it’s a nice feature. Right. So that is the spiel.
[00:02:43.750] – Janet
We had a couple of questions that were sent in in advance. And a slideshow. “For a few seconds, so you can scroll back”–and apparently I hit the Unmute button on the YouTube. Whoops. There, that’s fixed now. So slideshow, shall I share the slideshow or–
[00:03:09.520] – Tien
Sure.
[00:03:10.990] – Janet
Okay.
[00:03:11.900] – Tien
We seem to have lost Dawn briefly.
[00:03:14.670] – Janet
Let me actually pull it up in this window so you don’t see all my Admin toolbar mumbo jumbo. Why didn’t that work? Why didn’t that work? I am just going to do it with my Admin toolbar and all because for some reason the other access thing is not working all the time. All right. Dawn, you just jumped.
[00:03:46.460] – Dawn
I did. I disappeared. I hit the wrong button.
[00:03:49.450] – Janet
You were up there, and now you’re down there.
[00:03:52.080] – Tien
[crosstalk 00:03:53]
[00:03:53.690] – Dawn
I was gone and back.
[00:03:55.100] – Janet
[crosstalk 00:03:55] rearranged itself while I was looking at a different screen.
[00:03:58.090] – Dawn
I disappeared, and I came back, and it’s still recording, and I didn’t have to do anything funny and wow.
[00:04:03.310] – Janet
Yay. Okay. No, that is the wrong button. That is the one that didn’t work. Sorry, folks.
[00:04:11.090] – Dawn
I’m going to moderate.
[00:04:13.110] – Janet
There we go. First question comes from Debbie West. First two questions. First is, why do Wolfs have that ledge on the front side of the front beam? The rod gets stuck on it going around.
[00:04:34.710] – Janet
I don’t know, but I suspect it has something to do with reinforcement so that the beam doesn’t bend. If you’re not familiar with a Wolf loom, it’s got an angled beam. Both the front–like, the breast beam and the back beam are set in at an angle. And on the front beam it’s got another little piece that goes across underneath it. And I don’t know. I wondered about that, but my assumption is that it’s for reinforcement, so nothing will bend.
[00:05:12.290] – Janet
The rod does sometimes get caught on it. If you have been generous with your loom waste, you can tie onto the front apron rod and then just move the whole rod entirely past that beam before you even start with your header. That is something I have been doing lately. But you can also–I just try to make sure that the apron rod comes really close to it when I start, and then the next time I advance, I pull it all the way past, and it seems to work out fine for me. But then I’m not putting things like–not very often putting dividers between placemats or something like that, that are also going to pull over that rod.
[00:05:55.010] – Janet
It does, though, play havoc with–I like on other looms to tie my warp onto the front apron rod just with the surgeons knot, which is twice through the inverted V, like you’re tying your shoelaces, and then no second half. And that’ll work fine on other looms with round rods. And it doesn’t work very well–it doesn’t hold securely on a Baby Wolf or Mighty Wolf, Wolf Pup. And I haven’t ever been entirely sure if it’s only because the rod is rectangular rather than round, or if it has something to do with that funny-shaped front beam. Certainly the combination makes those surgeons knots that would normally hold, not hold well.
[00:06:46.050] – Janet
Anyway, I can ask the folks from Schacht, and maybe they’ll be able to tell me. But I don’t have the answer for you this month.
[00:06:55.030] – Janet
Next question is, can you make a countermarch loom weave true doubleweave using alternate tie-up methods? I’m not sure what you mean by alternate tie-up methods. If you mean like a skeleton tie-up–and to be perfectly honest, this is what I was referring to earlier in the spiel. Countermarch looms and their tie-ups are only at the very periphery of my wheelhouse, and so that is not one I can just rattle off an answer to. If anybody watching has a countermarch loom and can respond–has any information about doubleweave tie-ups on a countermarch, please share.
[00:07:43.110] – Tien
Debbie says, yes, a skeleton tie-up or some other combination.
[00:07:46.950] – Janet
A skeleton tie-up that will work for doubleweave?
[00:07:50.150] – Tien
Yeah.
[00:07:54.890] – Janet
Countermarch have extra considerations related to skeleton tie-ups compared to jacks or compared to jack looms, but you can still do quite–it doesn’t mean you can’t do things. It just means it might take more treadles on a countermarch than it does on a jack or more clever detaching–not connecting everything to all the treadles. I am quite anxious to get my countermarch loom back out of storage and set it up again so that I can really get a handle on how that tie-up business works so that I can answer questions better, now that I have external motivators to do that.
[00:08:43.350] – Tien
Sheila Roberts comments that she saw something about countermarch skeleton tie-up for doubleweave. You could just tie the lams up that go up–tie the lams that go up and get half as big a shed, essentially converting it to a jack loom, I think.
[00:08:58.010] – Janet
I wondered about that. That’s one of the things that’s been rattling around in my head since I was working on the Secrets of Sheds course and how far you could push the idea of tying up countermarch sheds that only go in one direction. You could tie them so that they go in both directions, and you’re creating a split shed. You’ve got a top shed above the threads that aren’t moving and a bottom shed below those threads that aren’t moving. And that would be a cool way to get some split-shed effects. I’m sure I’m not the first and only person to think of that. There’s probably books and books written about it.
[00:09:38.650] – Janet
But it also had me thinking about the connections between the countermarch tie-up and sheds and rigid heddle tie–well, not tie-up, but sheds, because they go both directions, too, but not at the same time. So only one direction at a time. But you could do the same thing with countermarch, it seems to me.
[00:10:01.090] – Janet
Any more comments about tying up countermarch? We got Sheila. She says she ties up that way for the draw loom. That way meaning only one direction. Is that what you mean, Sheila? So treating it like a jack? Okay. Yes. That’s what she says. Cool. Thank you, Sheila.
[00:10:33.450] – Janet
All right. There’s one more question, I think, in the slideshow from Dayamitra. And I can’t scroll down far enough for you to see the whole picture, but I don’t think there’s anything that we’re missing there. She says recently she did a project with many color changes. What is the best way to wind the warp for this to accommodate the different color changes? Usually I warp all together. I assume that means, like, one chain with all the color changes. This time I warped separately, and there were a lot of tangles.
[00:11:09.360] – Janet
So, Dayamitra, my first question for you is, are you warping back to front or front to back? Because that is going to affect my answer. I know you’re there. Where’s the–front to back? Okay. Yeah.
[00:11:32.300] – Janet
So when I am dressing the loom front to back, which, full disclosure, I have not done by choice for decades, but I used to do it all the time. That’s how I learned–how I dressed my loom for the first ten years of my weaving life. And so I would frequently wind a separate chain for each of the yarns. And I liked that partly because then I could decide when I got to the loom to sley the chains where those yarns were going to go. And things could be very random and unplanned.
[00:12:10.890] – Janet
When you do that, then you certainly want to keep all of your chains in separate kind of vertically-stacked layers so that you can shake them out and detangle them independently, and they’re not all muddled up together. It is not fast. It’s slow going because you have to manage all those chains basically independently, detangle all those chains independently.
[00:12:42.770] – Janet
If I were doing the same thing, the related thing, from back to front, I try to limit myself to two chains that need to be interleaved. I call that interleaving chains. So you have a little bit of one chain, then a little bit of another, and a little bit of third, maybe a little bit of first again. So across the width of the warp, you’re dipping in and out of different chains.
[00:13:07.050] – Janet
If I’m going to do that from back to front, I try to limit myself to two chains. Because in that situation, I have lease sticks hanging behind the castle. And I can usually arrange things so that I can see both sets of sticks easily enough and reach for them easily enough. But if I get into three or four sets of sticks, it’s harder to pick out just the thread that I want. There’s other stuff hanging down in the way.
[00:13:35.970] – Janet
When you’re doing it from front to back, it doesn’t matter so much because I would put all of my chains on lease sticks attached to the front beam. So from the lease stick down, at least, things were under control. And I would just put them side by side on the lease sticks. I wouldn’t try to interleave them at all on the lease sticks.
[00:13:56.510] – Janet
And then I would work with one and sley the ends into the reed where I wanted it to go, leaving spaces for the other. And then I would work with the next one on the lease sticks and sley all of its ends into the reed in the spaces that I had left before and still leaving more spaces if there were more threads to come, and continue that process until I had worked with all of the chains and gotten them all into the right place. You have to be careful that you’re leaving the right spaces and the right places in the reed for the threads yet to come so that everything will be at the right sett once it’s combined.
[00:14:36.170] – Janet
And then I would thread like normal and tie onto the back apron rod like normal. And then you’ve got however many chains to corral and put tension on at the front of the loom. So easier the more space you have to stretch things way out or if you have a trapeze. But I did not have a trapeze in those days. I had a husband with, thank goodness, much more patience than I personally have. So I would be cursing up a storm at the loom, but he at least would not be cursing at me.
[00:15:19.590] – Janet
So I don’t know if that helps at all. But that was my approach for if I wound a chain with–if I wound a very striped warp in lots of different chains. Nowadays, I have decided that I can live with the time that it takes to stop and cut and tie or park threads so that I can wind fewer chains in the order that I want.
[00:15:48.110] – Janet
It means I don’t have the flexibility to just stick threads wherever the heck I want them, and it means I have to plan things out more. I used to be able to just grab a ball of yarn from the stash and say, well, my warp is three yards long. I’m going to wind this little ball until I run out. Oh, look, that was 7 ends. Okay, how many ends more do I need? Doesn’t work so well when you’re planning things out. She’s laughing over there. I don’t know if she’s laughing at me or if she’s laughing at something else entirely.
[00:16:19.770] – Tien
I’m just laughing because you and I have completely opposite approaches to everything.
[00:16:26.650] – Janet
Yes. We do.
[00:16:27.760]
[crosstalk 00:16:28]
[00:16:31.150] – Janet
But that’s a good thing because that means between us, we book end of everybody else.
[00:16:36.660] – Tien
Yep.
[00:16:40.690] – Janet
So now I do plan in advance a little bit more, and so I tend to cut and tie or park and wind the chains with the stripes in. And then I don’t have to faff about with interleaving or things out of order. I have to worry more about things not stretching the same amount, which is easier to manage if they’re all in their own chains. But you pick the strength and weakness of each different option. You weigh those, rather, and decide which one’s going to give you the least grief and lead to the least swearing.
[00:17:25.630] – Janet
Does that help? If you have more questions about it or want more information about a specific part of that word salad, let me know.
[00:17:38.130] – Dawn
All righty. Let’s see. Here’s a Weave-Along question. Christine says, I have the perfect color for my Weave-Along scarf in 10/2 for one of my stripes. Everything else is 8/2. Could I just use 10/2 for those stripes less than 2 inches and create a lacier space? Or should I double the 10/2 and create some texture with the density?
[00:18:04.430]
[laughter]
[00:18:06.810] – Janet
Yes.
[00:18:07.760]
[crosstalk 00:18:08]
[00:18:12.830] – Janet
I would do one of those things. If you wanted, you could figure out what the equivalent sett would be in the 10/2 and try to sley it accordingly. But I, personally, would go with plan A, which is just use the 10/2 at the same sett as everything else, and it would be a little bit thinner there.
[00:18:35.270] – Janet
I snuck some 6/2 into my Weave-Along warp because of the–remember I gave Tien that list. These are the colors that are available. The light pink was available in the sense that a friend of mine across town had it in her stash. But to go and get it meant that I had to leave the house, and leaving the house meant that I had to put on pants. So I just decided I had some very, very light pink in my stash that was nearly the same color in 6/2 mercerized and probably nobody would ever notice if I didn’t let the cat out of the bag. But I apparently have no filter and just blabbed. So, yeah, I’m right there with you. Do the easy thing.
[00:19:29.830] – Dawn
All right. Let’s see. Dayamitra says thanks, and she thinks you have clarified things. So great. Do I have any other–Darlene has a Weave-Along question. She says, one more time, I want to do the recipe warp for a shaft loom for the Weave-Along. Can I park a thread on a warping reel?
[00:19:53.870] – Janet
Absolutely. There is a video that shows you how to do that in one of the lessons from Week Three. I will see if I can find it quickly and show you. And I think it may also be all by itself in the Toolboxes, too, so you don’t have to get it straight–or just out of the course. It is there in the course. Let me just–Winding a Warp with Complex Stripes. That’s where it is. That’s where the parking conversation is in the course.
[00:20:37.550] – Janet
So there’s pictures. Well, these top two are on a warping board. And then these–let me–there we go. These two with the clips, that’s on a warping reel. But then more pictures on the reel or mill. And then this is a video of me doing it on the mill.
[00:21:05.670] – Janet
I should point out this is a vertical mill. I have never made an attempt to figure out how to do this on a horizontal mill. I’m sure it’s possible with some ingenuity. I think I would probably figure out how to hang a little basket on the ends so that when it turned, it would move along. But then you got to figure out how to keep the basket always facing the same way so your stuff doesn’t fall out. So caveat that the video is for a vertical mill, not a horizontal one.
[00:21:43.810] – Dawn
All right, that is it for questions about–unless we could call Joy Hogg’s questions about her warp for the Weave-Along.
[00:21:53.750] – Janet
Okay.
[00:21:55.110] – Dawn
I killed one of her questions when I disappeared, but I know that it was–she had a bad warp and was she introducing twist by winding off cones? And the follow-up question is, how do you wind off cones in such a way not to add twist, if it’s a concern?
[00:22:12.890] – Janet
It should not be a concern with a cone. A cone is designed to be pulled up off the top so the manufacturers are factoring whatever twist is being added or removed into that whole experience, into that context. It is a factor on spools that are, like, just the cylinders. And those you can avoid adding twist or removing twist from if you hang them horizontally and unroll them like a roll of toilet paper. Don’t get it near Tien’s cat.
[00:22:50.620]
[laughter]
[00:22:53.670] – Janet
But you can also harness that effect for the power of good rather than evil, if you have a weft that would benefit from a little bit more twist or a little less twist. I used to–when I was weaving a lot of place mats with 8/8 cotton for my weft, I had figured out which end of the thing to pull it off of to adjust the twist so that I had nice, tidy selvedges all the time. And if I got it wrong, then my selvedges were messy looking.
[00:23:30.770] – Janet
The other thing, too, is to consider your shuttle and the bobbin storage unit in the shuttle. A boat shuttle with a bobbin that spins on that horizontal axis and the stuff that comes off like the toilet paper roll, whether it comes off the bottom–or the top of the roll or the bottom of the roll, that won’t add twist.
[00:23:53.600] – Janet
But if you have an end-feed shuttle, it will affect the twist, either add or remove. So if you know you’re headed to an end-feed shuttle and you know–you could figure out, well, if I add some twist as I wind the bobbin and then I take it back out again as it comes off the pirn, those things can equalize or the reverse.
[00:24:16.930] – Dawn
All right.
[00:24:17.430] – Tien
It won’t come out exactly equal, but will be close enough.
[00:24:22.550] – Janet
More equal than if they are adding to one another.
[00:24:25.190] – Tien
In the same [inaudible 00:24:26]. Yeah.
[00:24:29.030] – Dawn
Interesting. Back to the parking yarns on a warping mill. Courtney says, if your clamp has a long enough post–I think this goes to a horizontal mill–couldn’t you put something on the end of the clamp on your post to keep your tube on the clamp post? And then you could allow your clamp with tube to be upside down as it rotates.
[00:24:50.450]
[crosstalk 00:24:51]
[00:24:52.430] – Janet
It wouldn’t even be upside down. If it were sticking off the end of the mill, it would be horizontal. And you could put something on the end, maybe like a doorknob, drawer pull knob thing, not exterior doorknob. Okay, sorry, my head just went in funny directions. But yes, some kind of knob to keep the thing on the horizontal. Because then as the mill went around and around, it would stay horizontal all the time. See? I knew some clever buddy out there–
[00:25:27.900] – Tien
That would be Courtney.
[00:25:29.850] – Janet
Thank you. Courtney.
[00:25:31.930] – Dawn
I did say Courtney, didn’t I?
[00:25:34.110] – Janet
You did.
[00:25:35.050] – Dawn
Okay, just checking. I know who you are. All right. Now we have non-Weave-Along related. I’m not going to read all those numbers. Sheila Roberts is asking you to talk about threads that move after things come off the loom. She did a turned twill with a really fun threading and didn’t get what she expected, and she thought it was because she was using–how do you say that word? Cottolin?
[00:26:05.170] – Janet
Cottolin.
[00:26:06.300] – Dawn
Cottolin. And maybe if I used a finer yarn, like 20/2 cotton, I wouldn’t have that problem. Looking at the lesson makes me think otherwise. What causes this to happen?
[00:26:18.250] – Janet
All righty. I am going to see if I can-oh, look at that. I can put the Chat menu and my Fiberworks side by side and switch to eight shafts. And here I’ll share. Except now I can’t find Zoom. Zoom, come back. Where are you? Am I sharing already?
[00:26:43.490] – Dawn
No.
[00:26:44.360] – Tien
No.
[00:26:45.650] – Janet
Okay. Undo the fancy side-by-side thing while I find you all again. And then I’ve got the–good heavens. Are you sure I’m not sharing? Oh, exit, minimized window. There, I found you. Okay.
[00:27:10.253]
[laughter]
[00:27:11.450] – Janet
Clearly I need more sleep. Okay, share this guy. And here’s Fiberworks. And here’s Zoom. Oh, come on now. Now it’s not going to show me Zoom. Okay. Somebody, Dawn, read me those numbers, please.
[00:27:37.330] – Tien
1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1. 1 point.
[00:27:41.350] – Janet
Okay, hang on. Wait until I get my thing of a jigger in the right place. How on earth? What has happened to my weft thickness?
[00:27:49.590] – Tien
It’s basically two points on the first four threads.
[00:27:53.910] – Janet
Okay, [inaudible 00:27:55]
[00:27:56.110] – Tien
Sorry, two points on the first four shafts.
[00:27:59.290] – Janet
Oh, and it’s doing the fun thing where my number pad doesn’t work anymore. I hate that. Okay,
[00:28:07.790] – Tien
And then goes to 8 through 5, back up to 8, twice.
[00:28:14.750] – Janet
Okay, so an M at the bottom, a W at the top.
[00:28:20.910] – Tien
Yes, something like that.
[00:28:22.350] – Janet
[inaudible 00:28:22] Point out. Oops. No, that’s not point.
[00:28:26.360] – Tien
I’m not seeing anything on your screen, Janet. I don’t know if there’s–
[00:28:29.320] – Janet
You’re not seeing my Fiberworks?
[00:28:31.690] – Tien
I’m seeing Fiberworks, but [crosstalk 00:28:32]
[00:28:32.810] – Janet
Oh, that would be why it says “Your screen sharing is paused.” Why is my screen sharing paused? Why? All right. Let me try it again. Technical issues. This time I am only sharing Fiberworks. And it’s green. It says green. Okay.
[00:29:02.320] – Tien
Yes, that.
[00:29:04.350] – Janet
Is that the whole thing and then repeated?
[00:29:06.180] – Tien
That’s the whole thing.
[00:29:07.870] – Janet
All right. Let’s get a couple of repeats. And then, Sheila, what was your threading, treadling, tie-up, all those?
[00:29:16.220] – Tien
She said turned twill, but I don’t know what that–
[00:29:18.930] – Janet
Okay, so turned twill tie-up is probably like–come on. What is it do–oh. 2, 3, 4. And now tie-up. Repeat by quarters. Stop that. Turn and change face. Close. Let’s just see what happens if I do a weave-as-drawn-in treadling. That. I don’t know, now, if this is what you actually wove. But let’s have a look at this, and maybe it will answer some of your questions or at least give you a direction to go in. Or you can perhaps add some more clarification.
[00:30:06.670] – Tien
No, you have the right draft, says Sheila.
[00:30:09.800] – Janet
Oh, excellent. I guessed correctly. Okay. I have a feeling it’s going to be better if I increase my resolution so you can see the individual threads better. Let me see what happens if I bigify stuff even more. That is the wrong direction. Other direction. Please move this window away from the shared application.
[00:30:41.610] – Tien
Remember old stuff? Car alarms that said, “You are standing too close to the car. Please step back.”
[00:30:48.030] – Janet
I don’t. I don’t think I had one of those.
[00:30:50.480] – Tien
Oh, those were way back when.
[00:30:52.550] – Janet
All right, well, let me close this. I don’t know if that helped at all. Maybe it did. What if I do this? Warp thickness? Warp thickness? Let’s say it’s really big, thick, and now it’s telling me that it’s not sharing anymore. Do you still see my Fiberworks?
[00:31:16.730] – Tien
I still see something. But I don’t know.
[00:31:18.613] – Janet
Good.
[00:31:19.450] – Tien
Yeah.
[00:31:20.570] – Janet
Okay. [inaudible 00:31:21] catch up.
[00:31:23.050] – Tien
It’s still showing your warp thread thickness dialog box.
[00:31:28.190] – Janet
Okay. Yeah. The thing that says it’s paused–why is this happening? Ron, make it work. Ron is my CTO. Let’s see.
[00:31:42.640] – Tien
Tigris says it’s because she hasn’t gotten enough cat treats.
[00:31:49.250] – Janet
I’m in big trouble if my Internet depends on your cat treats.
[00:31:56.470] – Tien
Especially given that cat.
[00:32:01.350] – Janet
I’m going to need some kind of remote cat treat feeding option, if that is the case. All right.
[00:32:07.760]
[laughter]
[00:32:09.130] – Janet
It should be bigger now. All right, let’s see. I’m going to make my drawing thing blue so you can–sorry, red. It’s already blue. Right. Okay, so let’s look here. I’m going to draw some things. Do you see this blue horizontal weft float?
[00:32:30.270] – Dawn
Yes.
[00:32:31.630] – Janet
All righty. Now look at the one–I’m going to move that thing away from there for a sec. Look at the one just above it and the one just below it. This one that is just above it does not interlace any differently with the warp threads that they have in common. Which means that that one just above it can slide right under the one that is longer, that one in the center. Similarly, the one just below it can slide right under the long one above it. And this little short guy underneath, the one that just goes over one thread, can slide underneath the one that goes over three, which slides under the one that goes under five, which slides over the one that goes over three, which slides over the one that goes over one.
[00:33:28.420] – Janet
So the point is that because there’s no interlacement, that those threads don’t interlace with any of the warp threads they have in common differently, they can all move to the same space. And that means they’re going to move away from this spot that has more interlacement because they can’t move in there. And they’re going to group together.
[00:34:03.200] – Janet
So it’s going to behave a bit like you’ve got some thicker yarns in some places. And so that’s going to happen along this line. It’s going to happen along this line. It’s going to happen along this line. It’s also going to happen vertically along this line and this line and this line. Do you see what I’m saying? And of course, wherever you’ve got a blue square, all of those blue squares are going to act like this blue square, and all of the white squares are going to act like that white square. So they are going to shift on top of each other and disappear other threads.
[00:34:48.590] – Janet
That is probably–that’s my guess at what was at play in your fabric. So having said all that, I’m going to go back and read your question again and see what I’m actually supposed to be answering.
[00:35:07.330] – Tien
Yeah, you had it right. But I’m laughing at the “having said all that, I’m going to go back and read your question.”
[00:35:12.840]
[laughter]
[00:35:17.190] – Janet
Maybe if I used finer yarn, I wouldn’t have had that problem. It’s still going to be the same interlacement regardless of the weight of the yarn. What will change the behavior is if you introduce some interlacement. So one thing you can do if you have a twill that happens to be, say, threaded odd, even, odd even, odd even, odd even, as yours is, you could add a tabby between each of the twill picks. And that would keep them separate and independent. It’s also going to change the hand of the fabric some. So you would want to open up the sett and maybe be sure to use a very fine tabby, maybe something slinky like a very fine tencel or something that doesn’t add too much stiffness if you don’t want to change the hand of the fabric too terribly much.
[00:36:09.480] – Janet
And you also need to keep in mind it’s only going to affect the things going weft-wise, the weft picks from smooshing together. It’s not going to have any impact on the warp-wise one, unless you add a set of ground warp threads on extra shafts, say.
[00:36:32.300] – Janet
Usually the solution is not necessarily better than the–the cure is not better than the disease. It’s not really a disease. It’s just a fact of life that that is how threads move. They move away from areas of interlacement and towards areas without interlacement. That is what makes lace happen. If it’s not happening to a serious degree, you can often just flatten that stuff right back out again with a good hard, hard press. That’s how waffle weave works. Basically, that thing we just looked at were little, teeny, tiny waffles. At any rate, that’s the cause of it. How to solve it will depend on what you want the fabric to be like.
[00:37:31.300] – Janet
I see that the Handwaving Academy has asked a question. You can enter threads in Fiberworks–
[00:37:38.363]
[crosstalk 00:37:38]
[00:37:38.840] – Janet
What was that? Was that you, or was that Dawn?
[00:37:41.170] – Tien
No, that was Dawn.
[00:37:42.760] – Janet
Yeah, you absolutely can. And that is one reason why I will not get a keyboard that doesn’t have a number pad.
[00:37:48.500] – Dawn
I didn’t type that. It’s a mystery person. I did not type that.
[00:37:53.340] – Janet
You didn’t?
[00:37:54.860] – Dawn
No.
[00:37:57.660] – Janet
Okay. Yes, you can. You can also use the number keys across the top. Do you guys not know this stuff? Let me tell you this stuff. Fiberworks is the bomb, folks. Let me see. Okay, share screen.
[00:38:14.180] – Tien
Oh, it’s Kathy.
[00:38:16.340] – Dawn
Oh, there she is.
[00:38:17.690] – Janet
It was Kathy. Hi, Kathy. Are we all here? So here I am. My number pad is not currently working because it’s a Windows glitch that has been happening for some time. But the number keys always do. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Well, I don’t have that many shafts. Let me give myself more shafts. 24. Okay. So home. So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
[00:38:57.040] – Janet
Now to get 11–let me see here. Here on my keyboard, 1 through 10 goes across, right? If I come down one row and use the same keys that are below the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 and just a smidge to the right, so Q-W-E-R, dah dah, dah, that gives me 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 20, et cetera, et cetera. You can go down row by row. Works in the tie-up, works in the threading, works in the treadling.
[00:39:28.860] – Janet
You can also, if you see here–let me annotate. I just love annotating on my screen. These little characters beside the color palette. Can you tell what I’m boxing?
[00:39:50.891] – Tien
Yes.
[00:39:50.990] – Janet
Okay. That’s what you can type. If you put your–stop annotating. Stop, stop, stop, stop–cursor up here in the color majigger. And then if I type–let’s see. E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-E-R-T-T-T-Y-U, dah, dah, dah, dah.
[00:40:12.760] – Tien
What does Janet do, Janet?
[00:40:13.896] – Janet
Huh?
[00:40:13.950] – Tien
What happens if you type Janet? You do a different kind of code.
[00:40:20.400] – Janet
Janet is so, so, so smart and knows all kinds of nifty things about Fiberworks.
[00:40:34.652]
[laughter]
[00:40:35.840] – Janet
The other thing I have been known to do when I want random color stripes is just to [Janet rubbing her hand back and forth on the keyboard] color smash. Doesn’t work so well for the threading, but it works fine for the colors.
[00:40:50.399]
[laughter]
[00:40:51.380] – Janet
And then another thing I like to do once I have–let me put back some things, go back to eight. There we go. If I have a color way, and I’m not sure I love it, I will switch to Select Color Palette. I will just start cycling through the other options. And sometimes I get something I never, ever would have put together, but something I like a lot better. So fun Fiberworks tricks. All righty. What else we got?
[00:41:36.740] – Dawn
We got nothing else.
[00:41:38.660] – Tien
Well, Joy is saying something about not tying off each inch at the cross. Do you?
[00:41:44.840] – Janet
I do not tie off each inch at the cross either, Joy. I only have one cross unless I’m doing a folded warp. I have a counting string in there, if I’m doing a whole lot of threads the same color. If I’m doing a lot of stripes, like in this Weave-Along warp, I don’t bother with a counting thread because I just have the color changes to use. But if I’m doing 250 threads of white, then I have a counting thread in there. But I take that counting thread out before I take the warp to the loom. And I tie the cross top and bottom, left and right, and that’s the only tie I have in the cross.
[00:42:27.300] – Janet
But again, where I tie and how I tie works for my warping method. You can’t just assume that picking small pieces out of somebody else’s warping method and adding them to yours will work well. Because there may be some other part of your warping method that requires ties in different places than my method does. So my advice is always when you’re trying out new things, try one–like, add one new change at a time so you can see what the impact of that one change is. Because if you try half a dozen new things and then everything goes to hell in a handbasket, you don’t know which of those things to blame. Because it’s certainly not you. You’re not at fault.
[00:43:12.700] – Tien
I blame Janet.
[00:43:15.860] – Janet
Blame Tien’s cat. I don’t know why my nose is so itchy. Sheila, I do teach Fiberworks classes, and, I mean, there’s a fair bit of type the number, click the mouse, but mostly it’s check this out.
[00:43:37.260] – Dawn
Joy’s got another Fiberworks question. Can you duplicate your draft [inaudible 00:43:40] use it for each design in Fiberworks?
[00:43:48.720] – Janet
You can–open up the Fiberworks again. You can–I can save this. And then save a copy. Open it up, change what I want to change, what I don’t want to change. But I don’t think that’s probably what you’re after.
[00:44:10.420] – Janet
I can also–on my keyboard, it’s Control-A, which is the typical Windows key combination for Select All, but also on the Edit menu–oops. Edit menu, Select All. This is in Mac–no, not Mac. This is in Windows. So most of my Fiberworks foo is Windows Fiberworks based. I do have a Mac specifically for Fiberworks.
[00:44:41.670] – Tien
Joy says, I want to duplicate a clean draft, no colors.
[00:44:46.000] – Janet
I’m sorry. Say it again.
[00:44:47.750] – Tien
I want to duplicate a clean draft, no color.
[00:44:51.200] – Janet
But you want the threading, tie-up, treadling? In which case–I’m just going to answer that question, and if it’s not the right question, then tell me that. But in the meantime, I’ll answer this one. Under the Select All dialog box, I can select the threading, but not the warp colors, not the warp thickness, not the color palette. The tie-up and the treadling, but not the weft colors or the weft thickness. I can choose any combination of those things and copy. And then when I go to a brand new draft and paste, the things that I copied are here. So was that the thing that you wanted?
[00:45:38.830] – Janet
Oh, look, I have a Q&A.
[00:45:40.745] – Tien
She said yes.
[00:45:40.880] – Janet
Yes. Huzzah. I answered it right. I feel like I passed the test.
[00:45:48.930] – Dawn
Miriam wants to know if you can do that on a Mac.
[00:45:52.850] – Janet
I don’t know off the top of my head. But maybe one of these days we can set aside some Q&A time in advance for Fiberworks stuff. And I’ll have my Mac over here and my Windows over here. We can cross reference and see. My Mac is over there. I got it specifically for Fiberworks. And Bob, bless his heart, comped me the copy of Fiberworks so that I could learn it in a Mac and be able to teach it well, too. He’s a good [inaudible 00:46:26], Bob Keates.
[00:46:32.690] – Dawn
Everybody’s pretty excited that you’re talking about Fiberworks. So there’s a couple of votes for a class on Fiberworks. Joy says, so I can download just the basics–yeah, you answered that. And Joy Hogg thinks it’s a great idea to answer Fiberworks questions, so bring them on.
[00:46:53.460] – Tien
Any other questions?
[00:46:55.910] – Janet
No.
[00:46:56.520] – Tien
We need more questions?
[00:46:59.610] – Dawn
We got lots more time.
[00:47:01.290] – Janet
Can we have a “check this out” class? Check this out.
[00:47:05.450] – Dawn
I love it. But you have to do that at the beginning of every class to make that–check this out.
[00:47:13.650] – Janet
Fiberworks test of the day. Oh, you mean just the check this out part?
[00:47:18.060] – Dawn
Well, yeah, it’s like the intro to the course or the session.
[00:47:23.410] – Janet
Do I have a–let me see if I have my–one second.
[00:47:30.690] – Tien
Meanwhile, bring out your questions. Dayamitra votes yes for this “check this out” session.
[00:47:40.710] – Janet
Somewhere I have–it’s a big–Canadians who are familiar with Staples, the office supply chain, may remember the television commercial from years ago where somebody would be having an office supply crisis, as you do in a 30-second commercial, and then Staples would solve it. And this big, red button that said Easy would appear. And they’d press the button, and it would say, “That Was Easy.” I have one of those buttons.
[00:48:15.190] – Dawn
Me too. I love that button.
[00:48:20.290] – Tien
I just have a magic 8 ball. I use it for answering all my weaving questions.
[00:48:24.470] – Dawn
Perfect.
[00:48:25.990] – Dawn
I have a similar device, but it would have to be censored if I shared it.
[00:48:32.213]
[laughter]
[00:48:32.240] – Janet
Maybe I’ll take a picture. And I’ll cross off all the bad words and share that.
[00:48:42.970] – Tien
And then it will be blank?
[00:48:45.370] – Janet
Yeah, all the dice will basically be blank.
[00:48:48.890] – Dawn
Okay, well, [inaudible 00:48:49]
[00:48:50.020] – Janet
That is where I am, where my head is. I’m still looking for that Easy button.
[00:48:53.680] – Tien
Kathy has both an 8 ball and a “That Was Easy” button.
[00:48:57.340] – Dawn
She’s got magic powers.
[00:49:00.370] – Janet
Of course you do. Do you also have an app on your phone that makes the sad trombone sound? Wah, wah, wah, wah. Because that’s an important one to have.
[00:49:12.360]
[laughter]
[00:49:15.570] – Dawn
She does have the alarm one.
[00:49:17.640]
[crosstalk 00:49:18]
[00:49:20.070] – Tien
Who is easily amused. All right. No more questions?
[00:49:25.830] – Dawn
Not a peep.
[00:49:27.830] – Tien
Should we start answering questions they didn’t have?
[00:49:29.960] – Dawn
Here’s one. No. Here’s a new one. Different topic. Two at a time.
[00:49:33.450] – Tien
Ooh, a color one.
[00:49:34.890] – Dawn
Debbie West says, this is a different topic. Can we talk about winding the warp? Often the edge threads get looser as I weave and then my selvedges look janky. Any thoughts? I like that word.
[00:49:49.340] – Janet
Yeah, that is a thing. It has to do–well, there are different things that could be contributing to it, and I’ve never been able to just say, okay, that is definitely this thing. The good news is that if your selvedge threads are getting looser, the simple solution is just to hang a weight from them, so a big S-hook if you have one. Or if not, then my preferred thing is actually a shower curtain ring because they have a little bypass closure, and they can’t hook on anything else. They’re a closed system. And if you need more weight than just the ring, you can add some washers to it. So a little extra weight will take all that extra slack out of your selvedge threads.
[00:50:37.230] – Janet
Sometimes you wind up getting selvedge threads that are tighter as you go. And that is often related to, or sometimes anyway, related to if your warp on the warp beam, if the selvedge threads have slipped off the pile of warp as it accumulates and it turns into sort of a tapered shape at the ends, then those edge threads are shorter than the ones in the middle, and therefore they will get tighter and tighter as you go.
[00:51:09.530] – Janet
But that is not your question. So somebody else out there, if you had the opposite question–well, there isn’t an answer. Just an I’m sorry because that stinks when that happens. But for the loose one, just add a weight.
[00:51:26.510] – Dawn
Great. Let’s see. So here’s your color question. Beth wonders, is there a green color that would pop when combined with a blue gradient and plum?
[00:51:39.570] – Tien
Yes, although it can be a little bit challenging because blue and green are close to each other on the color wheel. And if you’re going all the way from dark to all the way light, then you can run into problems because you can’t get good contrast everywhere. I am actually setting something up right now, but it’s going to take me another minute. Are there other questions?
[00:52:07.290] – Dawn
Unfortunately not. We’re going to watch you type.
[00:52:09.950] – Tien
Okay. Let me share my screen.
[00:52:15.070] – Janet
Okay, if you’re ready. I have [crosstalk 00:52:16].
[00:52:16.830] – Tien
Oh, no, go ahead. I’m not ready.
[00:52:19.600] – Janet
[inaudible 00:52:19] related to Debbie’s question that I can show while you’re typing.
[00:52:23.800] – Tien
Sure.
[00:52:24.710] – Janet
This is in my last blog post from–well, it’s on the Dashboard right now–about hacking a stripe that I completely forgot to wind into the warp. And this is not just on a selvedge thread. This is on a whole bunch of–the whole little, tiny warp chain of ten threads. But here’s one of those shower curtain rings and the washers. And it’s a closed system, like I said, nothing here to hook up on any other threads, which is especially good if you have it hanging right next to other threads on your warp beam.
[00:53:07.070] – Janet
And if you loop this just around those loose threads, it’ll hang below the warp beam. And then when you advance the warp, it’ll just keep sliding down. Gravity will just keep pulling it down so you won’t ever have to go back there and adjust it once you get the weight right. And these are great big washers. I buy them by the pound or by big box of 50 or 100 or whatever at the hardware store. That give you enough time, Tien?
[00:53:40.510] – Tien
No, but I’m plugging away. I’m almost to the point where I can at least show something. So hang on just a moment. You can make funny faces while I’m doing that.
[00:53:57.620] – Janet
Oh, yeah, I can do that. I’m good at those. Too bad I don’t have an app to play the Jeopardy music.
[00:54:03.250] – Tien
What about the sad trombone?
[00:54:05.730] – Janet
Well, I looked. Apparently I don’t have that on this phone. That must have been a couple phones ago. I used to have it as a WAV file.
[00:54:18.710] – Tien
All right. Hold on a minute. Let me just do this on the fly then. So I’ll share my screen. And I’m going to get the Q&A and the Chat and all of that off. This is the old draft that I had from a previous thing. So I’m just going to–
[00:54:41.140] – Janet
That is the draft that is on my loom.
[00:54:43.730] – Tien
It is. It’s the draft that I made you weave.
[00:54:46.850] – Janet
[crosstalk 00:54:47] got blue stripes. Yes.
[00:54:50.610] – Tien
All right. So let’s create a small color gradient in blues. And first let’s just get rid of this stuff. So let’s say I start with black, thinking of it as like a navy blue or something like that. And then we go to–and I’m just showing the color gradient here, but obviously you could go with as big or as small a gradient as you would want. I put that in the wrong spot. Let’s copy/paste, Copy/Paste Colors. And we’ll just mosey this one down, this one here down over to here. Okay. And now we’ve got a gradient, almost, if I could actually–okay.
[00:55:54.710] – Tien
So now we’ve got a blue color gradient here or a value gradient in blues. Now, the challenge is that if you create a green, and let’s say you create a dark green, it’s not going to pop against every–and if you put it in the weft, it’s not really going to pop because it’s not–and it’s also going to blend in in the darker areas because it’s just about the same value as the blue.
[00:56:26.510] – Tien
Now, if you wanted–now, what makes something pop is how light it is and how saturated it is. So if I were to take this dark green, which is neither very saturated nor very light, and turn it to a brighter, let’s say, medium green–and obviously, if I put it in the warp, I can get it to pop. This is going to show much more clearly because it’s much more saturated than the blues.
[00:57:01.840] – Tien
If I were to take this and make it lighter–and let’s go for a green again and go with, like, a mint green–now it’s not quite as saturated, but it’s much lighter. And if I were to throw it into the weft, you can see that this is now popping. So basically you want to go lighter and more saturated if you want to pick a color that’s going to pop.
[00:57:31.330] – Tien
Other than that, the other thing you can do if it’s not as saturated or not as light, is by increasing the amount of contrast that you have. So let’s go back to this forest green here. If I put the forest green over here, it’s going to mostly disappear into the black and the dark blue because they’re almost exactly the same value. If I take that same dark green and I stick it in here, then there’s a lot of value contrast between that and the white, and it pops out a lot more than it does if you stick it over here next to another color of the same value. So hopefully that was helpful. I’m going to stop sharing my screen.
[00:58:17.490] – Dawn
All right. We have another question. Miriam is wondering–she says, when I make placemats, the ends often don’t lie flat. Is this because the tension was not even when weaving? Pressing helps, but is there something else going on?
[00:58:38.330] – Janet
So, Miriam, to answer that, I would want to know what structure you’re doing, what yarns you’re using. Is there something about the structure and the yarns that, like, have floats? Are there floats at play? Are you putting hems on them? And is the hem in the same structure as the body of the placemat?
[00:59:08.290] – Janet
While I wait for those answers–ah, with hems. Are your hems plain weave?
[00:59:21.070] – Tien
The other thing is that [crosstalk 00:59:24]
[00:59:25.160] – Janet
Okay, darn. Well, plain weave hems on a twill body, whether it’s a placemat or a tea towel or whatever, will flare and ruffle because plain weave does not draw in as much as twill does for many of the same reasons as the conversation we had earlier with Sheila’s turned twill warp. The twill threads, because they share some threads in common, can move together. They don’t have as much interlacement between them. So all the threads in the body of the thing, like your 3/2 various twills, can move together.
[01:00:07.230] – Janet
But in the hem, if that’s plain weave, they are pushing apart like crazy as much as they can. And so that will be wider, that fabric will be wider, and therefore it won’t lie flat. It will either flare out like a thing that flares out, or it will ruffle. Excellent similes there, eh? But that is not your situation. Are you doing your hems in the same structure as the body of the placemat?
[01:00:47.770] – Tien
Sometimes twill can curl. Or is it [crosstalk 01:00:53]
[01:00:55.550] – Janet
A 3/1, 1/3 will can curl at the selvedge, yes. And a floating selvedge can help with that to some degree, although it’s sort of like trying to get the curl out of stocking stitch in knitting. But let’s see. Here we go.
[01:01:19.270] – Janet
Thinner yarn for part of the hem, such as sewing thread. So you can use a thinner yarn, or you can beat it in at fewer picks per inch, which will make a thinner fabric even if it’s the same weight. Or you can do both. Thinner yarn, fewer picks per inch. That way you just get less bulk. So if you’re turning under hems, even if it’s just a littlest bit, that’s still going to be two or three times the thickness of the middle of the placemat. So it will bump up some.
[01:01:49.790] – Janet
I, personally, mostly, largely because I am barely on speaking terms with my sewing machine, but also for these reasons, do not hem placemats. I put fringes on them because it’s really–same with runners on a table. Because if you have something three times the thickness at the edges, it’s just going to be thicker, and it won’t lay flat.
[01:02:17.870] – Janet
I have some here. This just recently hemmed, not by me. I traded threading for hemming. Mostly I just demanded. Please hem these, and I will thread your loom for you. And it just is thicker because there’s three thicknesses here than there are here.
[01:02:44.590] – Tien
Miriam is asking whether your placemats with fringe ravel.
[01:02:50.270] – Janet
No, I hem stitch them, and they’re very secure. They don’t come apart. I have–lordy, I have placemats that have been around for decades.
[01:03:02.950] – Dawn
And the yarn doesn’t shred or disintegrate.
[01:03:06.190] – Janet
It depends on the yarn. An 8/2 cotton or an 8/2 Orlon, those won’t shred much. If they do, the very little tips will fluff a little bit. If you hate the look of the fluff, you could trim them off just an eighth of an inch. And if your fringe is an inch long, you can have a couple goes trimming off an eighth of an inch once every ten years or so, and you haven’t lost too much fringe over a reasonable lifespan of that placemat. But I’ve never done it. I’ve never worried about the fringe. I mean, if they are a placemat that I use constantly, I’m not worried about whether they’re looking pristine. Nothing was pristine in my house.
[01:03:52.770] – Tien
Miriam would rather sew than hem stitch.
[01:03:55.990] – Janet
Understandable. Miriam, when I first started weaving, I hated hem stitching so much, especially on placemats. It would take me 10 minutes to weave the placemat and 15 minutes to do the hem stitching at either end. And it made me so cranky to spend more time in hem stitching than I did on weaving the damn placemats. Pardon my sweary bits.
[01:04:18.510] – Janet
So I used to take them off the loom. I wouldn’t hem stitch on the loom. I’d take them off the loom, and I would do it by hand. Well, that actually takes, like, nine times as long. It’s just delayed frustration. And it meant that I got to weave at a steadier rate, and so that was fine for me.
[01:04:39.170] – Janet
Fun fact, the first time my husband wove a set of placemats, I set the loom up for him, and he wove the placemats, and I had him do his hems like that. He managed to sew all of the placemats together and to his clothing.
[01:04:52.010]
[laughter]
[01:04:56.730] – Janet
Hem stitching, not really in his wheelhouse. He has many other excellent skills that are far more useful. You don’t really need two people in a household that are good at hem stitching.
[01:05:08.910] – Janet
So if you are hem stitching placemats, here is my number one tip. Instead of starting, hem stitching–starting, stopping, hem stitching, weaving the placemat, stopping, hem stitching the other end, advancing, weaving the next bit, stopping, hem stitch–stop. Okay. Finish a placemat. Leave the tail for the hem stitching. Don’t hem stitch yet. Leave your space. Start the next placemat. And when you’re ready to hem stitch it, hem stitch both the beginning of the next one and the end of the one before. So you’re only stopping to hem stitch once per placemat.
[01:05:52.730] – Janet
And in my experience, it’s faster and easier to hem stitch not at the end of a piece of fabric, but at the beginning of the next one, if you see what I’m saying. Is that true? There was something about that whole little system that–when I was weaving placemats for sale, and it was all I could do to make myself stay at that loom and weave those placemats, I did everything I could come up with to make the hem stitching be as fast as possible. And I got it down to a science. Anyway.
[01:06:31.110] – Dawn
All righty. Beth says thank you. She has both light and medium green, so she’s going to play with her project. And Miriam says thank you. And Debbie says, on a similar note, how do you keep the selvedge straight if, say, the main part is plain weave, but you have borders of twill on each end? I always get bulging in the plain weave and divots in the twill.
[01:06:57.890] – Janet
I don’t combine them for that reason unless I am happy to have the hourglass selvedges, the bulging, the divots, the seersucker effect. I don’t combine a warp-wise stripe of plain weave and twill if either one of them–if both of them are going to be very wide because they don’t take up the same way. If I want a flat, uniform fabric, that is not a combination.
[01:07:26.000] – Janet
Instead of plain weave, use basket weave. Because a 2/2 basket weave and a 2/2 twill have the same interlacement, both warp-wise and weft-wise, so they will take up the same way.
[01:07:37.790] – Janet
And for hems on a twill towel, I will do whatever I can get that is as close to a half basket as my threading and treadles will allow. So one of the twill sheds and then the opposite twill shed, just alternating those two, rather than doing two in the same shed, two in the same shed, two in the same shed. Because then you have to faff about with the selvedges and things. If you just do one pick in each shed, it’s taking up like plain weave warp-wise. It’s still interlacing a lot that way. But it will take up like the twill width-wise, and that’s what’s going to establish the width of your hem.
[01:08:22.490] – Tien
Janet, couldn’t you keep the selvedge straight by using a thicker–or maybe a thinner. I’m not sure which way it goes–yarn for the weft? Because I have a piece, actually, that has warp-wise stripes in plain weave and twill, and it lies flat. But the designer deliberately used a thicker thread in the twill sections, so the sett came out the same.
[01:08:45.650] – Janet
Exactly, yeah, for sure. A finer thread will draw in more. A thicker thread will draw in less. So if you use the thread that will draw in less in the structure that will draw in more and vice versa, then, again, like the adding and removing twist with the pirns and the cones, one is additive and one is–they’ll balance each other out to some extent.
[01:09:15.310] – Dawn
All right.
[01:09:16.080] – Janet
Which is why doing plain weave hems in a sewing thread can give you hems that don’t flare. But to do that, you have to commit to which part of your fabric is going to be a hem. I would much rather sit at my loom and weave yards and yards and yards and yards of fabric, not worrying about exactly where I’m going to cut my tea towels apart, for instance. Because then if I have a warp skip or a weft skip or some little goober that I want to avoid, I can just say, well, that’s the end of that tea towel right there. Chop. And I’m using the twill then to be the hem.
[01:10:02.250] – Tien
So here’s the piece that I was talking about that has twill in some places and that has plain weave in others. And so what it’s doing is it’s using a thicker yarn in the twill sections to make the sett come out the same. Sorry about the weaving mistakes. This was, like, my second project or third project or something like that. But anyway, I just wanted to show how that works.
[01:10:29.620] – Janet
Yeah, for sure. So that’s going warp-wise. The same thing will work weft-wise, too. And another contributing factor is the flexibility of the individual threads. So if you have a thread that is stiffer, it won’t draw in as much. So you could use a stiffer, more wiry weft or warp in your twill-y parts and a more flexible thread in your plain weave parts. But to get the perfect combination would require sampling.
[01:11:05.490] – Tien
Sampling. Yep. Lots and lots of sampling.
[01:11:09.330] – Dawn
Debbie says that was super helpful. Thank you.
[01:11:16.710] – Tien
Oh, yes. I was just thinking about the–oh, that’s the end of that tea towel. My thing with sewing, of course, has been that you can always just cut around the flaws in the fabric. And so with my wedding dress, I wove enough fabric for an extra panel, which made something like 18 yards in all. And then I just arranged things so that if there were any flaws in the fabric, I just, you know–because trying to needle weave something at 60 ends per inch is basically not going to happen.
[01:11:54.930] – Janet
No. But you wouldn’t have been able to do that if you’d had a plain weave hem right in the middle of it.
[01:12:02.870] – Tien
Well, true. Yes. [crosstalk 01:12:04]
[01:12:04.650] – Janet
Why I don’t put plain weave hems or any other hem in the middle of my tea towels so that I have maximum flexibility, efficiency.
[01:12:21.366] – Tien
Options. I was talking to a friend who was a professional weaver, as in made 100% of his living weaving. And he said what he did was he put a complex draft onto a 16-shaft loom. Are you eating Cheetos again with chopsticks? But what he did was he put on a draft that was complex enough that you couldn’t really see small skips. Because he said when you have to weave, like, 100 yards a day or some large number of yards a day, you can’t stop, go back, and check over every last thing to see if it’s right. So pick something that will hide small mistakes.
[01:13:11.610] – Tien
And it was interesting talking to him because I’m all the way on the other side. I’m sort of doing art weaving and am a perfectionist. And so we were talking from opposite sides of the spectrum, and it was a very interesting conversation.
[01:13:28.850] – Dawn
I bet.
[01:13:30.040]
[crosstalk 01:13:31]
[01:13:34.130] – Janet
Efficient. And forgiving fabrics. The things that really get me super excited is digging way into structure. But when I was weaving for sale, I did hardly anything but plain weave, just because it was fast and you have to produce a lot to make any money at it. It did not suit my temperament.
[01:14:04.830] – Dawn
So explain the chopsticks, Janet. Debbie’s asking.
[01:14:08.590] – Tien
Saying why do we–
[01:14:09.700] – Janet
The Cheetos, you get your fingers all cheesy and orange. You can’t type on your keyboard or touch your touch screen or pet your cat.
[01:14:20.050] – Tien
Janet and I were discussing food earlier because I was eating some homemade Gravenstein applesauce with butter that I had canned myself, like, last year, and Janet was eating Cheetos. So opposites in [crosstalk 01:14:38].
[01:14:38.370] – Janet
Again, opposite ends of the spectrum.
[01:14:45.310]
[laughter]
[01:14:45.850] – Dawn
[inaudible 01:14:46] interesting.
[01:14:48.890] – Tien
Any other questions? Going once.
[01:14:57.790] – Janet
You guys, how are you doing with your Weave-Along projects?
[01:15:00.370]
[crosstalk 01:15:01]
[01:15:03.310] – Tien
Courtney says Cheetos make a great emergency fire starter if you haven’t got any tinder to start one.
[01:15:08.290] – Dawn
Are you serious?
[01:15:10.130] – Janet
Well, sure.
[01:15:11.730] – Dawn
Wow.
[01:15:14.370] – Janet
[crosstalk 01:15:15] Styrofoam. Oh, man, now I’ll light one.
[01:15:18.120]
[laughter]
[01:15:27.030] – Tien
Kathy says it’s true. I was in search and rescue.
[01:15:30.250]
[crosstalk 01:15:31]
[01:15:34.710] – Janet
Another excellent reason for eating your Cheetos with chopsticks.
[01:15:38.970] – Dawn
Oh, I love this.
[01:15:40.320] – Tien
Why is it that everybody knows that they’ll start a great fire except for, like, us, Janet.
[01:15:44.390] – Dawn
I don’t know. We have really cool people who are doing interesting things in our [inaudible 01:15:48].
[01:15:49.060]
[laughter]
[01:15:53.870] – Janet
Look what happens when you don’t have questions for us.
[01:16:00.350] – Dawn
Okay, then.
[01:16:03.405] – Tien
[crosstalk 01:16:03]
[01:16:03.540] – Dawn
Epic.
[01:16:06.210] – Tien
Now you’re smoking Cheetos, Janet?
[01:16:09.670] – Janet
Now my smoke alarm is going to go off, and Ron will think dinner’s ready.
[01:16:14.220]
[laughter]
[01:16:21.350] – Dawn
Kathy actually would like to ask a question in the middle of the flames. She says, I’m changing colors a lot on my Weave-Along. Actually, this is not a question. Yeah, changing colors a lot. How are you doing it? How’s it working for you?
[01:16:35.550] – Janet
Both warp and weft or one or the other? Are you doing anything that’s new for you to you, or are you doing it the way you’ve always done? Inquiring minds want to know.
[01:16:51.090] – Tien
While eating Cheetos.
[01:16:54.050] – Janet
Well, one of the reasons I eat the Cheetos is because this little lady over here absolutely loves them. Yes. Would you like one? Go ahead.
[01:17:12.230] – Tien
I had a cat once, the predecessor to Fritz, who would kill for, like, an ear of corn on the cob. I couldn’t eat corn around him unless I broke off the tip of the ear and gave it to him.
[01:17:24.720] – Dawn
Here’s Kathy–
[01:17:26.510] – Tien
Kathy was saying the warp was easy, 80 end. The weft is slow, and she’s taking apart the plies.
[01:17:32.590] – Janet
Yeah.
[01:17:33.790] – Dawn
Pretty girl.
[01:17:35.790] – Janet
Changing colors weft-wise is not speedy. It’s not a thing–oopsie daisy–that you do if you’re production weaving. But I’m making myself do it.
[01:17:52.610] – Tien
Poor Laura Fry volunteered to weave some gradient samples for me and was making color changes, warp and weft, like, every other pick.
[01:18:01.010] – Dawn
Oy.
[01:18:02.130] – Janet
No, no, no, no, no. Not my cup of tea. I don’t have the attention span for it.
[01:18:10.170] – Tien
Oh, I don’t mind. But when I do that, I weave very slowly.
[01:18:18.910] – Janet
Okay. I don’t have the patience for it or the attention span. Scarf might be off road. If you’ve got very much of the magenta, that might take it off road. But things are pretty off road. Nice and brightly colored over there, nothing wrong with that.
[01:18:38.230] – Janet
We’ll have the contest–the entry submission forms ready for folks to use starting tomorrow.
[01:18:47.750] – Tien
Yep.
[01:18:48.220] – Janet
So we will shortly see how many of the projects are on road and how many are off and all that jazz. I’m excited to see what people are doing.
[01:18:59.210] – Tien
I am, too.
[01:19:04.830] – Janet
She’s just waiting for a chance to spring and run. There it is.
[01:19:12.260] – Tien
There it goes. Debbie asks, what’s the best way to post our finished project?
[01:19:18.510] – Janet
You can upload pictures right to the Show and Tell activity feed like we’ve been doing all along. But you can also–we’ll have the interface set up for you, available, accessible tomorrow, for you to upload your pictures of your project into several different categories. So either way or both. And you can always upload pictures into your own photo albums and your own activity feed and share the links with people, too, if you want to be able to find them on your own member page without having to troll through a class. All of the above.
[01:20:04.470] – Dawn
That’s a good thought.
[01:20:09.010] – Tien
We’re out of questions.
[01:20:10.360] – Dawn
We are.
[01:20:12.050] – Tien
Should I go find Fritz?
[01:20:22.390] – Janet
She disappeared, but she took the Cheeto with her. I save her all the little, tiny ones.
[01:20:35.450] – Dawn
Lucky girl.
[01:20:37.690] – Janet
Yeah.
[01:20:38.640] – Tien
Here he is.
[01:20:40.970] – Dawn
There’s the man.
[01:20:42.730] – Janet
Oh, hello. Hello, handsome man.
[01:20:45.230] – Janet
How do you do a photo album. Robert, if you go to your own page, so My Academy–I’m pointing with my chopsticks. My Academy is in the left sidebar. And if you click on that, it takes you to My Profile and across sort of the middle of the page, below your profile banner, there are some tabs for, like, Timeline and this and that and the other. And one of those tabs is Photos, and one of the tabs is Albums. So you can upload individual photos or you can upload them into albums. And the interface is pretty self explanatory if you get to the right tab.
[01:21:29.930] – Tien
Tigris would like you to know that I need to put down Fritz and give her cat treats. I don’t know if you’ve been hearing her meowing at me.
[01:21:37.040] – Dawn
No.
[01:21:40.910] – Tien
Oh, well. Are we all done?
[01:21:46.860] – Janet
I think we’re done. We have burnt the Cheetos. Not a euphemism. We have petted the cat and the other cat. I think we have covered all the bases.
[01:21:59.240] – Tien
I think that Cheeto burning is going to go down in history, Janet.
[01:22:05.910] – Janet
Okay, Sharon. I’ll stop calling you Robert. You might have to remind me. You can change your name in the list. If you right click on your name, I think you can change it. But I actually have not been a participant in a webinar, so I’m not positive how that interface works. I could change your name, but it’s a little late now.
[01:22:31.710] – Tien
Anyway. All right.
[01:22:33.940] – Janet
All righty, everybody.
[01:22:37.870] – Tien
Come back next week. Come back next month and see what we burn then. [inaudible 01:22:47] as a variant on will it blend?
[01:22:50.370] – Janet
My husband’s going to have to hide all the lighters from me. I think I have the barbecue lighter somewhere.
[01:22:59.110] – Janet
What do we have coming up for webinars in the next little while? You had [inaudible 01:23:04] sessions last weekend. Is there a peer support coming up? There’s a Weave-Along one tomorrow.
[01:23:12.730] – Dawn
Come on computer.
[01:23:14.330] – Janet
I’m just going to take a gander. Oh, I’ve got it right here. Peer support design help on the 24th. Peer support. Yeah, that’s what’s coming up in the next little while. All right, then.
[01:23:30.340] – Tien
All right, then.
[01:23:31.060] – Janet
The instant replay of this webinar in all of its glory will be posted shortly. And we’ll get the edited and transcribed version up because we can. There has been a little bit of a glitch going on with the transcription service that we use. It’s been a little troublesome. So we keep kicking it in the shins and wagging our fingers sternly at it, and sometimes that helps. So it might be a little slower to get the official transcript up, but the instant replay will be there shortly.
[01:24:04.590] – Dawn
Yep.
[01:24:05.150] – Tien
All right. Shall we go?
[01:24:06.910] – Janet
Okie-dokey.