[00:00:00.580] – Janet
Okey-doke. I am going to spiel a little bit because we might have some new folks. First of all, you’ll notice that Tien is cleverly disguised as Carly this month because it was Carly and I that had new courses come out. So Tien will be back next month because she’ll have courses. She has a course coming out just any moment, doesn’t she, Dawn?
[00:00:26.420] – Dawn
Yeah, soon.
[00:00:29.930] – Janet
Sorry. The spiel. You already know Carly. You know Dawn. I’m pointing in the direction they are on my screen. I don’t know where they are on your screen. This is the lecture to cover the classes that were released in the previous month. So that is What Is Twill and Rigid Heddle from the Ground Up. I keep calling it Ground Up Rigid Heddle. It’s like they’re turned into [inaudible 00:00:53]. But that is not what it’s about.
[00:00:56.160] – Dawn
The Freudian slip.
[00:00:59.400] – Janet
No, no, I’m doing it intentionally. It’s funny.
[00:01:02.610] – Dawn
Okay.
[00:01:03.720] – Janet
But it does not reflect my views on rigid heddles. I love rigid heddles. Okay. Those are the topics. We’re going to do our little lecture thing. It’s not a Q&A. But if you have questions related to what we’ve just said, you can fire them in the Q&A interface, and we will answer them as time allows. Any that don’t get answered during the lecture will get saved and addressed during the Q&A, which is coming up on the 21st, I think, [inaudible 00:01:36]. Maybe Dawn can confirm that date for us. But it’s coming up in a couple of weeks, and it’s on the calendar.
[00:01:42.590] – Janet
So if you want to ask a question that you certainly want me, Carly, and Dawn to see, be sure to use the Q&A interface. There’s a button at the bottom of your screen below our pictures, if you are on a desktop or a laptop. If you’re on a device, it will be somewhere in the menus. Don’t know where because that depends on many factors. For socializing, which we absolutely encourage, keep that in the Chat interface. But be aware that we are focused on what we’re talking about in the Q&A. So if it’s something that we absolutely need to see, we might not see it if it’s in the Chat. We’ll keep an eye on it while somebody else is talking if we can and if we’re not madly trying to do things in another window.
[00:02:29.650] – Janet
But anyway, so there. That is the spiel. [inaudible 00:02:33] the spiel. Dawn, do you have [crosstalk 00:02:38].
[00:02:38.320] – Dawn
I’m going to moderator space. I want you to say welcome to the live lecture, and then we’ll get started.
[00:02:45.330] – Janet
Welcome to the June 4th live lecture.
[00:02:50.010] – Dawn
Thank you.
[00:02:51.660] – Janet
That’s the cue for when the edit gets kachoonk in the transcription service. I usually forget it. Okay. You will have noticed that we have our very first class written by not me or Tien come out within the last month. It was a rigid heddle course that was from our Carly, there to my left on my screen. It is the first sort of foundation course for all of the rigid heddle content and some other related content to come that Carly is building for us. We’re super excited about that. So, Carly, I will let you take it away and lecture for as much time as you need. And Dawn and I will keep an eye on the Q&A to say, oh, here’s a question to clarify something you just said, or whatever. Otherwise, we’ll try not to interrupt.
[00:03:45.560] – Carly
Okay. So I am going to attempt to share a screen. I’m doing this one. Just give me a second here. Oh, we like to get the slideshow. Is that it? Can we see it?
[00:04:01.480] – Janet
You did it.
[00:04:02.650] – Carly
This is my first page. It’s going to be filled with typos because I wrote it at 4:00 in the morning. Okay. So my lecture–because the class is very–if I were to give it as a lecture, the lecture would be five minutes long. So this is an opportunity to talk about why this class exists and where–it’s, like, all the stuff that went around this class, like why I feel like the class is important, the questions about rigid heddles that I have had as I’ve worked with them, that this course answers, and why I believe it’s an important foundation for the work we’re going to do in the future, as well as talk about the concepts of the course.
[00:04:53.570] – Carly
A long time ago when I–well, it wasn’t even not long ago. When I got my first rigid heddle, I tried to do lots of research about what you could do with them. I was really interested. I could see that you can do things. I could understand that that could happen, but I couldn’t understand how to do them. When I was trying to answer that question, I kept coming across a lot of these really common assumptions that people would write. This is Facebook posts or people’s blogs or whatever.
[00:05:24.330] – Carly
I would either get hit with the attitude that rigid heddles were like child’s toys or they’re beginners’ looms. That they do plain weave and that’s what they do. They’re very simple devices. And if you want to do anything else, you go get a shaft loom. So that was the other one.
[00:05:39.490] – Carly
And then another thing people would say is you can do anything. A bazillion-shaft loom could do on a rigid heddle. [laughter] I was like, okay, I’m not sure what that means. So that’s been my journey is trying to figure out which of these things are true. It’s not only what can you do in a rigid heddle, but also what makes sense to do on a rigid heddle and how to use its functionality to its best strength so it can become a partner with a floor shaft loom. And we’re no longer thinking of either/or–I either work on this loom, then I move on to this loom. But you can use them both because they are just like inkle looms or tablet looms or tapestry looms. They are different looms that do different things.
[00:06:32.520] – Carly
A lot of this stuff, too, is things which I’m going to go through some history, which is fun, which I didn’t put into the class. I’m not sure. It’s just things that I have found. It’s going to be a little bit editorial, but hopefully it will all work. I don’t know how to–there we go. I did it.
[00:06:53.280] – Carly
Obviously, one of the first–this is kind of the history of rigid heddles in America that I have found. There’s not really an official, like, this is what they are, this is how they have come about. But it seems that in the ’50s, the Spear’s Weaving Loom was a common rigid heddle for people to get. And it was actually packaged up as a children’s toy by Spear’s Games. Sometimes people find these at garage sales, and they use them.
[00:07:19.630] – Carly
But in America, during a certain time, these were the rigid heddles that people would purchase and play with and give to their kids and make fun little weavings. And they weren’t necessarily taken very seriously because they also weren’t really built very well.
[00:07:36.030] – Carly
But meanwhile, in Europe, around the same amount of time, there’s a company, the Kircher company, which is still in business, and actually I’ve ordered custom heddles from them. They make them all the way up to 20 EPI, and they’re made out of wood, and they’re gorgeous. They’re a loom company, loom-making company. They make different kinds of simple looms and even some shaft looms and different things. But this was in their history page, which I have that link there.
[00:08:07.660] – Carly
But what I think is really cool about these pictures is that you could see, on this side, sort of the beginnings of the rigid heddle. You could see it’s a frame loom with the rigid heddle creating the sheds. But you can only weave what was on that loom. Then this image–oh, shoot—which is about 30 years later, shows the rigid heddle being developed into an actual loom that can hold cloth on both sides of the beams.
[00:08:38.460] – Carly
You could see these are not being promoted as children’s toys. They were actually promoted as–they were accessible looms that could be easily afforded and be easily stored in a home. And you could use them for your own hobby, or you can make goods and tableware, things that you could sell to supplement the income because this is also during the wars in Europe and America, I guess. Anyway, wartime relief, basically, was what these looms were about.
[00:09:10.090] – Carly
So you can see that it’s these two different cultures sort of developing at the same time, right? The child’s loom and then you have this loom.
[00:09:17.680] – Carly
But what I found really fascinating is I collect a bunch of old Prairie Wool Companions, and they have this amazing article. This is in April 1982, if you happen to have this magazine. And it is about Suzanne–I don’t know how to pronounce her name–Gaston-Voûte, who was a rigid heddle teacher that worked with Beka and worked with Beka to develop the SG series because she was very curious why there weren’t rigid heddles in America. She’s, like, we have these looms in Europe, and we use them. Weaving is more common because you don’t have to get a big shaft loom. She’s, like, we don’t have that here.
[00:09:55.010] – Carly
So she was kind of like a figure we don’t really hear a lot about her. She has a few articles here and there in some magazines. I know she worked with Betty Davenport and David Xenakis in the ’70s and ’80s during that craft revolution. But she’s also the instructor that was credited with developing and teaching two-heddle weaves, such as double weave.
[00:10:14.140] – Carly
Really interesting. It was such a cool, interesting little snippet, actually, to be, like, oh, wow. This is like a point in time where rigid heddles started to take hold in the US for the first time.
[00:10:27.950] – Carly
And now that people had access to higher quality looms, the weavers in the ’70s and ’80s could start doing the more complicated weaves using pick-up techniques and multiple heddles. There were a few champions, mainly David Xenakis and Betty Davenport. And this is a couple of other people.
[00:10:48.250] – Carly
But then they had this other problem, which is, you can do this really amazing work. This is a rigid heddle piece right here done in 1982. But then how do you communicate that? How do you get that piece onto a rigid heddle and then teach people how to do it in a magazine format? And you could see he really tried here. Drafts are just such a great way of communicating your structures. Then how do you tell a rigid heddle weaver how to do it?
[00:11:22.900] – Carly
So he does all these little blocks. I still don’t actually–I’m sure if I really focused on it, I could figure out what he’s doing. But [inaudible 00:11:28] don’t understand what this means. I really know this loom really, really well. I feel like my assumption here is that there’s a communication error between how to get the thing on the loom and making it accessible for people so they can do it without it being so hard. I have actually had people come over to me. They’re like, we loved him. We had no idea what he was talking about. And in future magazines, he actually apologized for confusing everybody and started to do somewhat simpler structures.
[00:12:02.440] – Carly
So this is what I am basing my teaching around is this kind of thing. How do we teach these things without overwhelming and confusing people? So that’s why I started with this very basic class, where we talk about how the rigid heddle works and then also about how to use–sorry, my brain is starting to fast forward a little bit–how to use drafts that are written and used by shaft loom weavers.
[00:12:35.860] – Carly
Because at this point in time, we still don’t really have a really easy way to communicate rigid heddle patterns. A lot of times, magazines or whatever will do different diagrams or actually spell out how to do things or have a video of how to put something on the loom. But it’s all pretty onerous. I know from writing patterns that the language that I need in order to efficiently write a pattern and communicate it is just not there right now.
[00:13:10.470] – Carly
I know some teachers have their own ways of showing drawdowns and showing structures. And they’ve adapted them in different ways to allow for pick-up stick patterning and things like that. One of my decisions that I’m really rooting for is that we all start with the same draft, no matter what loom you’re on. If you’re on a rigid heddle or a floor loom, we’re all working with drafts.
[00:13:35.600] – Carly
Because if you can learn to read a draft and you can learn to adapt it and you can learn how it relates to your loom, then you can work with any of the materials that are out there. You could get Anne Dixon’s book. You can get Erica de Ruiter’s Weaving on 3 Shafts. And you can use all that content without having to have a specially draft made just for you.
[00:14:02.660] – Carly
Anyway, in this class I do cover–it’s really simple because it’s just two shafts, but these same concepts will start to build as you add three shafts. You’re going to have to figure out which shaft here–and I’m sorry if I’m switching my words around a lot. I have a hard time sometimes looking at things and talking.
[00:14:24.240] – Carly
You have to figure out which shaft in your threading is going to be your eye threads and which ones are going to be your slot threads. Then you have to start to think about what your heddles are doing in order to make this equivalent shed. So I’m hoping that that is clear. If people have questions, please ask me. But I think the two-shaft drawdown is a really great way of starting to think about that.
[00:14:51.580] – Carly
Then in the next course, we’ll start looking at three shafts and how to adapt three shafts. Then it gets a little bit more complicated. Then we get to four shafts, and it’s the same. It’s much more complicated to go from three to four. The threading could get a little bit–yeah, we’ll get there. We’ll get there.
[00:15:14.080] – Carly
So that’s why in this class, we’re working with floor loom drafts. And I’m going to really fight against making specialty drafts for students because you’re all going to learn this.
[00:15:27.250] – Dawn
Can I interrupt for one second? Folks are asking, or Fay is asking if anyone’s having trouble hearing. I hear one coming through loud and clear. Anyone else out there having trouble hearing? Say something in the Chat.
[00:15:41.140] – Carly
Okay. Go ahead, Carly.
[00:15:42.660] – Janet
I forgot to mention in the spiel, too, that you can turn on captioning on your end. That will print the words being said on the screen at least as well as it can figure out. It’s not that great with weaving terminology. And we also have–since that’s on, you can turn on the full transcript. It’s somewhere near captioning in the menus and buttons. And we’ll have a transcript to go with the video when it gets posted, once it’s been edited and transcribed. So even if you can’t hear clearly right now, there will be an easier-to-understand version coming. But hopefully, we can also resolve whatever the issue is. Okay. Sounds like most people are having it just be fine.
[00:16:41.010] – Carly
Okay. Most people are fine?
[00:16:42.850] – Dawn
There’s a little buffering that comes down is affecting. But that’s computers. There’s a lag sometimes, and we just have to grin and bear it.
[00:16:52.210] – Janet
I think that’s it. I think there might just be a little bit of delay in the feed, maybe because you’re in all that cinder block. Maybe it’s on the receiving end because some people are hearing it fine. Anyway, carry on.
[00:17:10.330] – Carly
Yeah. Okay. We talked about drafts, so that’s the draft section. Now we’re going to talk about what I call the rigid heddle paradox. This is something that I’ve come across. It’s kind of fun to watch other rigid heddle weavers trip on it, too. They’re like, wait, what is this?
[00:17:32.530] – Carly
When you start getting into structures, you see all these four-shaft structures, you’re like, I [inaudible 00:17:40]. I want to do these four-shaft twills. They look so great. They look so fun. And they totally are. Then you start learning to adapt. You get your book by David Xenakis–I think there’s another person, too. I’m forgetting his name right now–where they talk about how to do that. Then you practice it and make some four-shaft things, and it’s really, really fun.
[00:17:59.890] – Carly
But once you set up your loom with three heddles with four shafts, you lose these–these are kind of these are the slot threads, and the slot threads are unassigned. Because the slot threads are unassigned, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want. The less of those you have, the less freedom you have over your design.
[00:18:20.200] – Carly
Sometimes I think about it–I’m not sure if it’s a very good translation, but it reminds me a little bit of Peter Collingwood’s shaft switching, where you can manually switch your shafts to create some more complex designs. But when you do your rigid heddle and you thread all those eyes, you’re really locked into what you threaded your loom to do, which gives you more efficiency because you’re just lifting and lowering heddles, just like it’s a table loom.
[00:18:52.170] – Carly
But there are some threadings that you can do, like the double density threading, that give you both access to two different heddles that you can manipulate and you can put them in up positions, down positions. So that’s already your front heddle can go up and down. Your back heddle could go up and down. Then you have all of these every other slot thread could then be controlled with pattern sticks to create different kinds of structures that maybe would be a little bit harder to assign to shafts.
[00:19:26.690] – Carly
An example of this is–ta-da, these are a couple of weavings that I did. This one right here on the left is a summer and winter pattern that is done on that double density threading. I’ve gained a higher EPI, but [inaudible 00:19:47] able to work at 25 EPI, which is really nice because it gives you a really nice–it needs to be ironed obviously, but it gives you a nice cloth.
[00:19:56.620] – Carly
Then instead of having shafts control the summer and winter patterning, I’m using a graph. And each square of the graph is, like, two threads, two of my slot threads. Then I could select those and then lift those when I need to get that pattern lifted and tied down. It’s actually a tied weave.
[00:20:17.420] – Carly
It’s really cool that this one threading can now become the basis of a lot of different designs. And I’m very free to design whatever I want. I could draw it out. I could put it on a paper. I could get cross stitch patterns. I haven’t even started playing with color and weave with this yet or polychrome summer and winter, because I’m sure that’s going to be super fun. So very, very fun and exciting.
[00:20:42.020] – Carly
Also is exciting is being able to do overshot. This was one of my first overshot samples that I did. It’s a little honeysuckle, I think. But in this, the loom operates much like a floor loom or a table loom, where I can do all these different patterns, but it’s very, very–what’s the word? It’s limited in a little–it’s limited and not limited. But I can’t do the same kind of figurative work, and I don’t have as much freedom of design because all of my things are locked in. Also with this weave, just the way that the heddles work out, I have to work at 100% density, so my highest EPI is going to be 15. So I’m a little bit more limited in how fine of threads I can work, as well.
[00:21:28.140] – Carly
There are two different ways of working with the loom, and they have their advantages and disadvantages. But, yeah, I see a lot of Chats. Is there anything going on? I just want to make sure that–
[00:21:44.540] – Dawn
No, we’re all good. We’re all good.
[00:21:47.360] – Carly
Okay. I’ll try to talk a little slower. Sorry.
[00:21:51.180] – Dawn
Carly, I don’t think it’s about your speed. Honestly, it’s about internet buffering. It’s really not your speaking speed. But if you can speak a little slower.
[00:22:01.690] – Carly
Okay. I get nervous and I start to be, like, I don’t know. [inaudible 00:22:05].
[00:22:06.100] – Dawn
You’re doing great.
[00:22:08.900] – Carly
The other misperception that this class wanted to address is that quite a few people say that the rigid heddle’s tension isn’t high enough to handle linen or certain kinds of weaves. But the issue is that the rigid heddle, the way it operates with the heddle that goes up and down, moving one thread at this angle, is that that thread needs to be slightly longer. So that warp end needs to be slightly longer than your stable warp ends. So if you’re tensioning them all exactly the same, you’re going to have to move the loom down a notch to make it a little less tense so you can actually move your heddles.
[00:22:53.900] – Carly
Because if you tension it to where you think it’s going to be, all of a sudden you’re, like, I can’t. My heddle, you’re like, shoving it up in there. You’re afraid you’re going to break it. So if you know how to handle that, then the tension becomes less and less of an issue, I have found. And you can work with things like linen.
[00:23:13.330] – Carly
There’s some debate about being able to do tapestry. I think you can do tapestry. Now I have to do tapestry, so I can prove it can be done. So that’s part of what we covered.
[00:23:24.090] – Carly
And then I also have photos of how this looks in real life. So this is a linen warp that I put on. And you would think that that image on the left is not well tensioned. You’d be like, that is a mess. And it is kind of a mess. But look what happens when I move my heddle. That’s a pretty awesome shed. I am not mad at that shed, especially since I haven’t done any of my–oh, that one, actually, I’ve woven a little bit.
[00:23:51.050] – Carly
That mess does kind of even out as you weave. It does kind of find a balance after a foot or two or even a few inches of weaving. But it’s just to show it looks really wrong, and you’re going to be like, this is not right. But then you’ll be like, oh, look at how great my shed is.
[00:24:13.530] – Carly
And then I also didn’t mention this in the class, but one issue that I have, I did mention the dowel trick of putting your heddle low and then shoving the dowel in the back, which I think Janet also mentioned a long time ago, is a really good way of handling the differentiation of warps when you have a supplemental warp. Right? I remember you saying that. I was like, yes, you do the same thing.
[00:24:39.908]
[laughter]
[00:24:40.520] – Janet
And I will sometimes have two or three or four dowels back there under different groups of threads. And on a floor loom, if the difference is increasing over the length of the warp, then I’ll take out the one dowel and replace it with a fatter one.
[00:24:59.910] – Carly
And I do. It’s totally the same thing. But the thing with putting the little dowel back there, too, is what will sometimes happen is that–you know, the rigid heddle is a pretty short length that you’re weaving. So sometimes you just need a half a notch. I don’t know if that makes sense. But the full notch will be too tight. And then you go back a notch, and it’s too loose. It’s like the notches need to be–if I were to design a loom, they would be very, very small so you can get more minute things, which will probably be a letter that some poor manufacturer is going to get from me. Or maybe I could just get something printed. I don’t know. But I’ve been thinking about it quite often.
[00:25:51.870] – Carly
Sometimes it’s not necessarily that it doesn’t hold the right tension. It’s just the tension that you have options for, sometimes it’s not the right one. You’re like, I need it to be right here. So the dowel in the back helps soak up that extra when you just need a little bit more tension, but you can’t go a full notch.
[00:26:12.240] – Carly
So between this and then tensioning with either your heddle up or down, which we talked about, usually tension it down, because if you try to tension it with your heddle up, it’s going to flop around.
[00:26:22.171]
[laughter]
[00:26:22.810] – Carly
So putting in the bottom, adding a dowel, and doing these manual little hacks, I think, really helps even out the tension. Sometimes it saves some warps where it’s like, I can’t do this warp, and I do that, and it works. In forums and stuff, people are like, I’m [inaudible 00:26:42] this warp. I’m like, try this. And they’re like, it works. So I feel like it’s been tested.
[00:26:47.980] – Dawn
Hey, Carly.
[00:26:49.176] – Carly
Yeah?
[00:26:49.770] – Dawn
Your evil plan is working. Beth says that she might get her rigid heddle loom out again.
[00:26:54.940] – Carly
Oh, yay.
[00:26:54.940] – Dawn
She went to a shaft loom because she got tired of doing just plain weave. But your class makes me think I can do it.
[00:27:03.040] – Carly
I mean, do it if you want to do it. Work on the loom that you want to work on. I think–I just got a shaft loom.
[00:27:11.900] – Janet
It’s really old.
[00:27:15.140] – Carly
It’s very, very wonky, which is really fun. Yes, it’s an old handmade loom, so it’s having some challenges. It’s not very–yeah, anyway. But I don’t know. I think that–I don’t know. I like the rigid heddle for being able to do some of the slower works. I think even if I had all the looms in the world, I would still want to do some kinds of work on a rigid heddle because you don’t really want to take over your whole floor loom to do something with a lot of inlay or a lot of hand work. You could just have that off to the side, work on that for a little bit, and then have your loom to do other stuff.
[00:27:50.850] – Carly
I hope people get it out. I hope people have fun with it. That would be awesome. But if you don’t, that’s fine, too.
[00:28:01.730] – Carly
This is my conclusion. Basically, because of this history of the rigid heddle being presented as a children’s toy, the challenge of communicating complex patterns and some educational gaps with the mechanics of the loom, I think it’s really easy to see why people say you could do both very little and absolutely everything because there’s evidence of both of those things.
[00:28:27.290] – Carly
But what I think is interesting is you could also say the same thing for any floor loom. You could say, well, you could do anything on a four-shaft loom that you can do on a 25-shaft loom–24? 24-shaft loom. You need to pick up the things, right? I don’t know. There’s no rule saying that the things that you could do on a rigid heddle are not necessarily things that you can do on any loom.
[00:28:52.430] – Carly
I also think that the charm of the rigid heddle is that it does allow the space–just its mechanics allows the space for a loom to be both loom controlled, you can control your warps with a device that lifts and lowers them, and you can hand control it by manually picking up your patterns. Instead of being, like, a tapestry loom, you’re–well, tapestry looms sometimes have controls.
[00:29:15.030] – Carly
But instead of taking, let’s say, a frame loom and picking up every single warp end to make your structure or a loom where every single warp end is assigned to their shaft, the rigid heddle kind of has this sort of in-between space where you’re assigning some things and you’re manipulating other things. And it kind of brings the weaver’s hand in. I mean, the weaver’s hand is always in the weaving, but it’s more like–it sort of combines more of a hand-worked process, which I think is why a lot of crocheters and knitters end up in this space.
[00:29:54.420] – Carly
Because if you’ve knitted a sweater, you’re like, this takes forever. Then you weave a scarf, and you’re like, I did this in four hours. Very, very, very exciting. And then usually I find people that are like, I just wove 10 scarfs this week, and what do I do? Help. I’m in trouble. I’ve never purchased so much yarn in my life as I do as a rigid heddle weaver. So I think that’s it. I think that’s all I got.
[00:30:23.950] – Dawn
Well, I have a comment for you.
[00:30:25.180] – Carly
What?
[00:30:26.900] – Dawn
I have a comment for you. I don’t have a question. But Julie says, totally off topic, but she loves that you have an Ink Spots album behind you.
[00:30:35.850] – Carly
Oh. I don’t get to take credit for this. I share a studio with a designer, and this is her dressing room. So my actual studio has terrible internet. It’s all cinder-blocked in. So I do these meetings in her dressing room. And she has great taste. But, yeah, I love it. It was $9.99.
[00:31:00.099]
[laughter]
[00:31:00.360] – Dawn
Back in the day.
[00:31:01.900] – Carly
Yeah. She’s way cooler than me. I feel like I’m hanging out with the cool kids in my cool-kid studio. All right. I think it’s your turn, Janet.
[00:31:13.960] – Dawn
We got Janet.
[00:31:15.080] – Carly
Stop sharing.
[00:31:16.900] – Janet
The thing that went through my head as you were talking there at the end about how the rigid heddle has that space for both loom controlled and hand manipulated. You could do all that same stuff on a shaft loom. But then–you could leave unassigned threads there. But then if you ever wanted to use the pick-up stick or the [inaudible 00:31:42] rod, you’d have to stand up and run around behind your loom and push it up and move it around. It’s just not well designed for it at all.
[00:31:49.820] – Janet
So, yeah, you could do any of those things on any loom, but certain looms are very well engineered for certain kinds of things. There’s this whole fascinating set of weaving structures that rigid heddles do better than other looms because they’re designed for it, which is super cool, or just the flexibility that they have that other looms don’t have in a convenient way at all.
[00:32:20.280] – Janet
I’m with Beth. I now have my rigid heddle doing stuff other than plain weave, and it’s a lot of fun. I can’t wait for more of Carly’s classes to see how to do that with less struggle.
[00:32:36.640] – Janet
I did have my heddle up. I had heard somehow this thing about having an open shed when you tied on for tensioning, but I somehow did not absorb, because I hadn’t read Carly’s class yet, that down would be easier than up. And I had my heddle up when I was tying on my last warp. Oh, my goodness, there was some swearing.
[00:33:01.920]
[laughter]
[00:33:01.920] – Carly
[inaudible 00:33:02]
[00:33:03.020] – Janet
Down is a good thing.
[00:33:04.490]
[crosstalk 00:33:05]
[00:33:05.940] – Janet
There’s no tension to hold it up there. Anyway, okay.
[00:33:13.800] – Janet
Now, moving on to the class What Is Twill. You may have noticed, if you have read the class, that there are no drafts anywhere in it. It’s all drawdowns. All we are looking at in this class is the structure. What is the structure of twill? Not how do you weave a twill? We’re not talking about instructions to produce it, i.e. threading and shed diagram. We’re talking about here’s the twill fabric. What makes this a twill, but that not a twill? What do these twills have in common, etc?
[00:33:57.260] – Janet
So there’s a lot of terminology. This class is really more about terminology and some fundamental properties of the twill structure that apply to all of the different twills we’re going to be looking at in the coming learning path. Let’s look first at some of that terminology. Let’s see here.
[00:34:26.000] – Janet
And I want to point out that in the first–so there’s an introductory lesson, What Do We Mean by Twill? Talking about the structure, not the fabric, and how the structure lives in a sort of virtual space where the yarn and the sett and the other properties don’t figure in. So we’re just talking about the implications of the interlacement itself as opposed to how thick the threads are, how close together the threads are, the ratio of how many warp threads you have per inch or centimeter to how many weft threads you have. I did that the wrong way. Warp threads and weft threads. Is the sett balanced or not?
[00:35:21.260] – Janet
Going on to the terminology, I tried to be good and use the term a description of twill rather than a definition of twill. The reason I did that is because in my mind, description follows. It’s the effect rather than the cause. We, generations of weavers, have looked at fabrics and said, these are twill fabrics.
[00:35:51.730] – Janet
So Emery and others looked at all those different twill fabrics and said, okay, why do we call these ones twills? What do they have in common? So we’re describing what those fabrics have in common structurally that means that we call them a twill, as opposed to defining this thing is a twill, and if it’s not like this, it’s not a twill. So cause and effect are a little different, in my mind anyway, between description and definition.
[00:36:27.320] – Janet
One of the things I will point out–let’s see. Share my screen, this whole screen–is that the boundary between what is a twill and what isn’t a twill is not a hard line. This diagram of this set equals twill, everything outside not a twill. I don’t think this is a good diagram.
[00:36:58.250] – Janet
I think it is more like this, where the boundary between what is definitely a twill, we can look at that and say, well, of course, that right there, that is a twill. And something else, of course, that certainly is not a twill. There’s a fuzzy area in between those two where, well, it certainly has got twill in it, or it’s very twilly, or it shares some of these properties. Or you can have a long conversation as Carly and I have been having in a few different contexts about is this thing a twill or is it not a twill? It follows these rules. Does it follow that one? But wait, maybe it doesn’t. What is this thing?
[00:37:41.560] – Janet
There are gray areas in twilliness. But I think to the extent that a structure walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it might as well be considered a duck. In so far as a structure has twilly areas or twilliness, whatever you want to call that, it’s going to behave like a twill. In so far as it doesn’t have those things, it’ll behave like something different.
[00:38:08.490] – Janet
But the take away is that there isn’t just an absolute hard line between this is and that isn’t, and every structure out there falls neatly into one category or the other.
[00:38:22.920] – Janet
The next thing we get into is talking about–first terminology is that twill is all about floats and where floats are located and how they are arranged. A float is an area, if you remember from drawdowns, where a warp thread or a weft thread goes over at least two threads going the other direction without intersecting the fabric between them. If it goes over one thread and then switches to the other side, that is not a float.
[00:39:03.510] – Janet
So if you look at a drawdown–let’s see here. Can I zoom way in? Yeah. This right here–let me see. I will grab mine. This is a float. These are floats. Here’s a float. Those areas where you have two contiguous white or two contiguous black, or more than two, in a row, either vertically or horizontally, those are floats.
[00:39:42.180] – Janet
Little individual single squares of checkerboard, those are not floats. We don’t have a single word for that thing. We can say it’s a place where a thread crosses over only one other thread and intersects the fabric on both sides, but that’s a paragraph, practically. That’s not a word. We could call it a cross as opposed to a float, but that cross might mean something else somewhere else. To me, it sounds more like a motif that has a cross shape than that particular specific thing.
[00:40:20.820] – Janet
We could call it plain weave, but I am very hesitant to call a single square on any drawdown a particular structure. It’s just a spot. All it is is a spot where the warp and the weft intersect the fabric on both sides of each other. To have a word rather than a paragraph to refer to that thing, I call them not-floats, floats and not-floats. So that’s the term that I used throughout this course, but it’s not one you’re going to find out in the wild. You’re not going to find it in another book. Well, you might, but it’s unlikely.
[00:41:06.560] – Janet
In a twill–let’s see. Let me clear all my drawings and close the annotation–those floats are arranged in a diagonal way. That is part of the description of a twill. It doesn’t say too much about exactly–well, it goes on to say a lot more about that, but the basic thing is that those floats are arranged in a diagonal way. It doesn’t tell you how long the floats are. It doesn’t tell you whether the floats are all the same length or different lengths. All of those possibilities fall in that big, orange, fuzzy bubble of twill.
[00:41:49.970] – Janet
Having those individual not-floats in there doesn’t make something not a twill either. Though it means in the areas of the fabric where the drawdown looks like a little checkerboard, as many of these do, here and there, these have them along here. This one has them along here. In those little localized areas, those fabrics will act like they have more interlacement because they do instead of like they have more float.
[00:42:33.310] – Janet
The next part of the definition–or the description of twill is that the floats are arranged in a certain pattern and that that pattern is repeated pick after pick after pick, or warp end after warp end after warp end, from side to side, or top to bottom, or bottom to top, whatever. But it’s offset by a single thread. Whatever your pattern of black and white squares, whether those squares are individual not-float isolated squares or a row of two or three or more in a row black or white float bits, whatever your pattern of black and white is on one row is exactly the same on the next row but shifted by one and then the next row and shifted by one.
[00:43:24.830] – Janet
And I happen to be–let me stop sharing here. I happen to be going down and to the right, down and to the right, but the direction doesn’t matter. You could go down and to the left. You could go up and to the right or up and to the left. You have those four different direction choices.
[00:43:43.810] – Janet
But where you have a float and then it shifts by one thread, because the float is wider than one thread, the new location will include at least one of the old–that’s not a good way of putting that. Let me get out a picture. Pictures are best for these things. Let me find a bigger one here. That’s not big enough. Here we go.
[00:44:18.850] – Janet
Here we have–let me get my annotations out. Here is a float that gets shifted down and to the left by one. Because it is three squares wide, it has a float length of three, and the shift is only one, two of those squares are identical in both rows. They’re black in both rows.
[00:44:48.390] – Janet
Same thing over here. Here’s a float of three, and here’s a float of three. Because it shifts by one, there are two threads, three minus one, that are identical on both rows. That creates an overlap between the floats from one pick to the next. The same thing is happening warp-wise. That overlap creates what we call a twill diagonal.
[00:45:19.420] – Janet
So you can see that in the–let’s see. I can’t. Oops, wrong button. Wrong button. Oh, bother. You can see that we have two kinds of diagonal things going on here. We have a twill diagonal here, and then there’s this diagonal line of not-floats. But that diagonal line of not-floats doesn’t have any overlap. Are you with me? Here, there’s a diagonal line of white floats, so that’s a twill diagonal. Here, there is a diagonal line of not-floats, so that little bit, again, doesn’t have any overlap.
[00:46:09.080] – Janet
And it’s the overlap that gives twill its twilliness because those are areas with less interlacement, both warp-wise and weft-wise. Where you have a diagonal line of not-floats, you have interlacement warp-wise and weft-wise.
[00:46:32.490] – Janet
The next part of the course is talking about classifications of kinds of twills. We look at regular twills, reversing twills, and broken twills. So regular twill is a term that gets used in different ways by different people. But I’m going with the definition that Emery–sorry, the description that Emery uses. She calls them continuous twills, but that doesn’t work for me. And she mentions other options for this term that get used are plain twills, regular twills, this, that, whatever.
[00:47:19.220] – Janet
I’m going to go with regular twills because continuous implies something about the connectedness, the overlaps of those diagonals, but it doesn’t imply anything about the direction of them. So for us, for our conversation in this twill learning path, regular means that the twill diagonal is not interrupted and does not change direction. If the diagonal does change direction, you get into reversing twills.
[00:47:52.820] – Janet
And there are subcategories of reversing twills. Anytime the diagonal changes direction, that thing is a reversing twill. If it changes direction at regular intervals at consistent heights, say, or width, that is what we usually call a point twill, as opposed to one that just has a change in direction over here and one over there, and maybe it’s not as long over here on this side as over on that side. When you have those changes in directions, both warp-wise and weft-wise, then you wind up with diamond twills.
[00:48:33.390] – Janet
A broken twill, on the other hand, or a better name, a less confusing name perhaps, would be a discontinuous twill is one where those diagonals have interruptions, where the overlaps don’t line up perfectly, whether or not they change direction at those spots. That is the broadest category of broken twill.
[00:49:02.480] – Janet
I like to call those discontinuous twills because, for most people, when you talk about broken twills, you also mean when those diagonals are interrupted, they also change direction. That’s not technically part of discontinuous twill, which is Emery’s–sorry–broken twill is the label that Emery gives to all discontinuous twills. I tend to call those discontinuous twills as opposed to broken twills, where the diagonals also change direction.
[00:49:37.100] – Janet
Within that, there is a category where it changes direction and breaks so often that you lose the diagonal, you don’t see it very much anymore. I’ve got a couple of examples of that. Let me scroll down to them. Here we go. So here, the diagonal is not particularly visible because it’s very, very chopped up. Little bit going this way, little bit going the other way. Little, little, little, little, little, little, little, little. Those are the ones that you use for something like a false damask.
[00:50:24.900] – Janet
A satin, I think, is technically a subset of twill, a subset of broken twill. And it’s whole purpose is to interrupt the diagonal so that you don’t see the diagonal. What you see is a surface of floats that don’t have any kind of strong diagonal arrangement. Satin is done on five shafts. When the same thing happens on four shafts, we call that a false damask or false satin. But it’s a four-shaft turned broken twill. Anyway, we will get into that later.
[00:51:08.830] – Janet
Point is, this is a smaller subset of broken twills where you lose the diagonal. Then within that smaller subset, this one thing over here on the right, that is what we usually call a 2/2 broken twill. A lot of people, when you just say, oh, I’m going to weave broken twill, that is what they mean. If they don’t say a broken twill, if they are speaking of it like there’s just one thing, oh, I’m weaving broken twill, it’s this particular 2/2 twill that they mean.
[00:51:41.060] – Janet
So the reason for all of this blather is to point out that the terminology is fuzzy. Different people use different terms in different ways to mean different things, and that’s where the communication becomes problematic.
[00:51:59.070] – Janet
So what this course is about in a lot of ways is defining the ways that we’re going to use the terms so that we can communicate effectively throughout this learning path. You may not find those terms used the same way in other places. But because of our glossary tool tips and this sort of foundational course, you’ll know what they mean when you see them in our courses, in my courses.
[00:52:29.760] – Janet
Beyond that, the course talks about twill ratios, which are the order and the arrangement of–well, the length and the order of the floats that appear in a twill. There’s a lesson that explains how to identify those and how to write them out, different formats for it, and then what the value of having done that is.
[00:52:55.180] – Janet
Then the following lesson looks particularly at how you can use those twill ratios to come up with the sett for twill, which is super handy. So I encourage you to have a look at those two lessons.
[00:53:08.950] – Janet
But the one that I really wanted to point out–I’m not still sharing, am I? No, okay–is the last lesson. In the last lesson, there are a bunch of exercises that I hope you will do, either on your own–well, whether you share your results or not.
[00:53:31.320] – Janet
But the lesson is built in such a way–I’m going to share my screen and show you that one. Here we go. This is a little different from how lessons have been done before, I think. At least, I haven’t done a lesson like this. So I hope that–just in case you didn’t spot this, if you open the Notes, there is a sort of fill-in-the-blank format there for you already where you can copy and paste pictures in in response to these exercises and these questions. And there’s a video that explains how to do that, how to put them either into your Notes here right in the lesson or how to share them in the group in the forum.
[00:54:20.580] – Janet
And I want you to see that people have been, which is wonderful, sharing in the class discussion group the different drawdowns and fabrics, twill projects that they have found on Handweaving.net or that they have woven themselves in the past. I really encourage you to do that if you have not done it yet, if you didn’t notice that it was there. Because this dialog is how we’ll all sort of clarify our understanding of what the terms mean in our context, at least.
[00:54:57.540] – Janet
Here’s a great example of it. Carly started this question, and we have very much gone off into the weeds about, well, is this a twill? Isn’t this a twill? We’re living in that fuzzy edge zone. How is it twilly? How is it not twilly? So you can see the conversation that we have had there, if you go to the group. And participate, join in, please. Okay, that is my presentation on this course. Do we have any Q&A, Dawn?
[00:55:32.220] – Dawn
We don’t. You managed that right in time. Anybody have any questions? You’ve got a minute or two to throw one out there.
[00:55:43.130] – Janet
Never sure if that means I explained things well or if I just made such a muddle of it that nobody even knows how to articulate a question.
[00:55:51.760] – Dawn
They’re thinking deeply.
[00:55:54.010] – Janet
Let’s hope. Let’s hope. And without too terribly much confusion.
[00:56:00.500] – Dawn
That’s fascinating.
[00:56:01.350] – Janet
You can certainly ask any questions that you come up with when you’re able to articulate them, or even if you’re not, in the discuss your class group, either under show and tell or start a discussion thread in the forums, too. Because we’re starting to get into a lot of–when you get into structures and things, you start to run into these murky areas that are fascinating.
[00:56:33.400] – Dawn
Our Q&A is on the 21st, so we’ll see you there. Save up questions. Bobbi Hayward says she’s thinking deeply and gratefully for the explanations beginning to make sense.
[00:56:49.220] – Janet
Yay.
[00:56:49.220] – Dawn
Yay, Bobbi.
[00:56:53.460] – Janet
Okay. You don’t have a cat handy, do you, Carly?
[00:57:01.437] – Carly
[inaudible 00:57:01]
[00:57:01.590] – Janet
And I don’t have any Cheetos either. I think we’re just going to have to–we’re just going to have to–
[00:57:09.100] – Dawn
Wave our hand. Wave.
[00:57:10.700] – Janet
Hey, Sonia, I’m glad to hear that it’s starting to clarify. These are not things–I don’t know if I’ve said this in this context, recently anyway, but these concepts are not necessarily going to be crystal clear the first time you hear them. I firmly believe that you need to hear and read and think about things three or four or lots and lots of times before they clarify and especially need to actually execute them in some way. Write them out yourself, weave the fabric yourself, whatever it is that’s appropriate.
[00:57:52.560] – Janet
For a lot of people, if this is the first time you’ve run into all of this stuff, it’s not going to be clear. But what we’re doing is getting one of those iterations out of the way for you so that maybe the next time you hear it, it’s a little more clear. Or you can go back and read it two or three times, or you can go read other books and read the same kind of stuff, and you’ll have at least some–there’ll be some familiar vocabulary. And you can think about how does her use of the term “regular twill” differ from this author’s?
[00:58:27.820] – Janet
Eventually, especially once you start using the concepts yourself, there may be some more clarity. But there can’t be any clarity at all until there’s just that first initial exposure, which is usually also somewhat confusing. So you got to get that out of the way. And it’s fine if that’s the point at which you are.
[00:58:55.960] – Dawn
I have Celia with her hand up. I’m asking her to type her question with a typo in my type your question.
[00:59:05.710] – Janet
It might not have been intentional, too. I discovered recently that my Zoom was set to pay attention to my hand motions. And if I just put my hand up, like physically lifted my hand, it would do that little raise hand icon.
[00:59:23.530] – Dawn
And Celia says you’re absolutely correct. So we’re all good. Thanks, Celia. Sorry about that.
[00:59:29.785]
[laughter]
[00:59:30.820] – Janet
Okay. I think that wraps us up.
[00:59:33.417] – Dawn
Yep.
[00:59:34.200] – Janet
You got what you need at your end, Dawn?
[00:59:37.780] – Dawn
There were no questions.
[00:59:40.100] – Janet
Okay.
[00:59:41.050] – Dawn
Awesome.
[00:59:42.150] – Janet
Thanks for coming, everybody.
[00:59:43.740] – Dawn
You’re getting [crosstalk 00:59:45]
[00:59:45.150] – Janet
[crosstalk 00:59:45] on the 21st. It’ll be Carly and me again on the 21st. Then next month, I think it’ll be–I think all three of us have classes coming out before the June lecture, so we may make that one 90 minutes rather than 60, so we all have time to talk. We’ll keep you posted. Okay.
[01:00:04.900] – Carly
Bye.
[01:00:05.380] – Janet
Bye.
[01:00:05.910] – Dawn
Bye.