[00:00:00.090] – Janet
Welcome, all, to our–have you ever seen people so excited about a lecture? Tien’s going to start because the bulk of the meaty classes so far have been color and design. And I’ll come up at the end with the Ashenhurst stuff.
[00:00:19.320] – Tien
Yep.
[00:00:20.040] – Janet
So take it away.
[00:00:21.890] – Tien
All right. I did a little slide deck. All right. Let me move this off. Okay, so let’s actually start at the beginning. This is the live lecture. Yay. Okay, now let’s go on.
[00:00:39.470] – Tien
We’re going to start with understanding value. I hate cover slides. So what is value? Value is the lightness or darkness of a color. These are all the relatively low saturation Brassard colors, which I went through in putting together the palette for the class. And these are arranged roughly in order from light to dark. And I put this together with the help of a black-and-white photo over here, because, as you can see, it’s not always intuitively obvious how light or dark color is. But basically, value is what happens when you reduce the color to black and white.
[00:01:28.570] – Tien
So why does it matter? It matters for three reasons. One is mood. And I’ll talk about these in detail. And one is pattern clarity. So if you look at these two swatches, one of them is woven with yarns of almost equal value, and as a result, it looks almost flat gray. And the other one is woven with yarns of very different values. And so if you look at it in black and white, it’s got a very clear pattern.
[00:01:56.710] – Tien
So if you go back to the color versions, you can see that the pattern in the top right, the yellow and purple one, is a lot clearer than the one on the left, the magenta and green one. Even though those are both opposites on the color wheel, you can see that the effect of value is really important here. The magenta and green kind of blends together and looks muddy, whereas the one on the right, the yellow and purple, has a very distinct pattern.
[00:02:32.850] – Tien
But that’s not the whole story, because mood, or what the overall feel of a piece and the drama of a piece, also differs depending on value differences. So if you start with mood, mood has to do with actually three–well, there are three components to mood, but we’re only talking about two of them in this class. So one of them is the dominant values in the piece, what values are used most? And the other one is the value range and what proportions of colors are used.
[00:03:11.630] – Tien
So in this particular case, these colors up here are the same value. It’s kind of a medium gray, the one in the top left, the magenta and green. And as a result, it has kind of a different feel to it than the one on the right, which is yellow and purple and has a light color and dark color. We can see that the yellow and purple feels much more dynamic than the magenta and green. And some of that is the hues, but most of it is actually the value differences. This piece just feels much more dramatic and also a little bit more unsettling because of the value range used. And we’ll go into more detail on that in Value in Design.
[00:04:07.310] – Tien
And I’ve been saying it, but of course the drama of it depends on how far the colors are from each other on the color wheel, the hue, but mostly on whether they have strong light/dark contrast or not. And here on the right with the yellow and purple, you have strong light/dark contrast. On the left, you don’t. And so the one on the left doesn’t feel nearly as dramatic as the one here.
[00:04:31.590] – Tien
Some people have asked what drama means. So drama is basically–if you think of color as a conversation, drama is how heated that conversation is. So if you take two colors that are very similar, or two people with views that are very similar, and you sit them down at a table together, the conversation is going to be pretty quiet, like this one on the left with the green and magenta. If you take two colors that differ wildly and sit them down at the table, then they’re going to argue with each other a lot more and produce a much higher drama conversation, like the yellow and purple on the right.
[00:05:17.750] – Tien
Picking out value is tricky. And so the two best ways of doing it are with a smartphone or digital camera or with a gray card. And in the class we have instructions for how to use both of them. You can also put the gray card in the photo, and that’s handy if you want to look at value contrast, because that means that you can say that this yarn here is a value 4 and this yarn here is more like a value 8. And so you can say that these are four steps away from each other in the value scale. And so that gives you an absolute idea of how much value contrast there is between two yarns.
[00:06:07.830] – Tien
Without a camera, here’s another trick you can use to figure out value contrast. It’s the yarn twist. And so all you do is you take two strands of the two yarns and twist them together. And if you got a yarn that looks like a single color, like the top one here, yellow and olive, then the two colors will blend together, and they don’t have much value contrast. Whereas on the bottom you have a dark green and a yellow. And if you twist it together, the yarn looks like a barber pole or a candy cane. I suppose barber poles are a little dated these days. But the fact that you can differentiate the two yarns clearly when they’re twisted together says that you’ve got enough value contrast to make your pattern show clearly.
[00:06:54.630] – Tien
Another thing you can do–so the eye is notoriously unreliable when it comes to figuring out values. But you can train your eye to see subtle differences in color by using some iPhone app or Android phone games. You can do this on a tablet of course, too.
[00:07:12.990] – Tien
And so on the iOS, my favorite is Chromatic Color Puzzles, which basically starts you off with a certain number of fixed places, and then you have to swap tiles until you get to the correct section. And so this is a really good way of understanding color mixing and being able to pick out colors by value. This one happens to be a gray one. They’ve got them in all colors. But it’s a really good way to get a sense for color mixing and for differentiating slight differences in value.
[00:07:51.990] – Tien
There’s what looks like a version of this called Color Puzzle: Offline Hue Games for Android, but I haven’t checked that one out because I don’t have an Android phone. Okay.
[00:08:05.450] – Tien
So value and pattern. Hold on a minute. I think this is a duplicate slide. Yeah, there we go. So if you look at these two swatches, you can see that if you have a bold value contrast between the stripes, then the pattern is much clearer than if you have a more subtle pattern between the stripes.
[00:08:34.950] – Tien
Now, this is important. It’s not necessarily the value of contrast between the yarns that you use in the warp. It’s the value of contrast in the finished cloth. Now, if you have two yarns that don’t have much value contrast, you can’t get much value contrast between the stripes because there’s just no way.
[00:08:56.410] – Tien
But if you have yarns that do have value contrast, like these two, but the pattern tends to blur them together, then you can get lower value contrast because of the way that the pattern is constructed, and you can see more of that. So this is showing the effects of hue and the effects of value.
[00:09:20.370] – Tien
On the left, you have light purple and dark purple. And in this particular design, they blend together into a pattern that is fairly visible relative to the overall pattern. You can see on the bottom what the pattern looks like in black and white.
[00:09:39.930] – Tien
Over here with the blue and magenta–the cyan and magenta, the two colors are almost equal value. And so you can see that the pattern almost disappears, especially compared to the light purple and dark purple on the other side. And again, that’s because there’s not that much value difference between the two colors.
[00:10:02.930] – Tien
Now over here, the third one has green and magenta yarns that are almost exactly the same value. You can see that at the bottom in the black-and-white version. And this is also a pretty blurry pattern, and it’s pretty hard to see. Compared to the one just next to it with the cyan and magenta, it’s probably a little easier to see because the green and magenta are color wheel opposites, so they have slightly more hue contrast. But you can see that there’s not a whole lot to be seen of either pattern.
[00:10:39.610] – Tien
And then on the right, I’ve got yellow and purple, which are two colors that are very different in value and also very far apart from each other on the color wheel. And as a result, this is one of the most visible patterns, the clearest patterns of the four. But as you can see, the light purple and dark purple and the yellow and the dark purple are the two most visible patterns, and that’s because they have different values.
[00:11:10.790] – Tien
So now I’m going to switch and talk about mood. And there are a couple of different factors in mood. One of them is the dominant value. And this is, of course, a color gamp. And it shows the effect of different wefts from black all the way up to white. And you can see that the–what?
[00:11:30.910] – Dawn
I didn’t see it. It took a long time to load. You’re fine.
[00:11:34.240] – Tien
Oh, sorry. Thank you for letting me know. So you can see that in the black it has a much more somber feel and in the white it has a much lighter feel. A lot of mood just has to do with what we think the lighting is subconsciously. And so while this one up top is not super dark, it’s significantly darker and feels more serious than the one at the bottom, which is much lighter and has a very different feel.
[00:12:10.490] – Tien
Different people are going to react differently to differences in value. So some people might have a different feeling, not necessarily somber, but they might have a different reaction. But in general, people will react to the dominant value as if it were a photo taken in about that light.
[00:12:37.170] – Tien
Value range also makes a big difference. Here are two pieces by Liz Spear of Liz Spear Handwoven. And the one on the left has mostly very light and very dark values with a little bit of middle value in the collar. And the one on the right is almost entirely dark values. And so they have a different mood as a result of the different proportions and choices of values. And we’ll talk more about that in Value in Design, which comes up next.
[00:13:09.230] – Tien
Here’s another example, but in more saturated colors, where you have, again, a very dramatic piece on the right side and a less dramatic piece on the left side. I included these because people have asked me what the difference is between what happens when you use brighter colors and what if a piece feels exciting but not dramatic.
[00:13:31.730] – Tien
So the one on the left, the red and red-purple piece, is highly saturated, so it grabs the eye, but it’s not very dramatic because the values are almost all the same and because there’s not much difference between the two colors. Red and red-purple are fairly close to each other on the color wheel. Whereas on the right side, you have something that is much less saturated in color, at least on the right side, the dark side, but is much more dramatic because the left side is red and the right side of the photo is dark. So you have a light to medium value against the dark value, and so it feels much more dramatic. Okay. So that’s my spiel on understanding value.
[00:14:34.230] – Tien
So I’m going to go into Color Recipes next. Okay. The first thing in Color Recipes is a discussion of weft colors. And there’s two things that you want to keep in mind. One is that light weft will reduce contrast between your weft stripes and that dark weft will increase the contrast. So these are woven on the same warp. One of them uses, I think, a dark gray weft, the one on the right. And the one on the left–no, it’s actually a black weft–sorry–on the right. And then on the left, it’s a white warp. And you can see that the white warp has practically obscured the stripes, whereas the darker weft is really bringing them out, and so you can see them clearly.
[00:15:22.310] – Tien
The exception to that is that if you match the weft color with–if you match the warp color with your weft color, it will strengthen the power of whatever stripe is there because it’s not blended. It’s a solid color. And as a result, on the left, you see the black stripes more clearly than the lighter stripes, and you see the white stripes more clearly than the gray stripes. Of course, as you zoom out from the fabric, the effect gets more or less depending on how closely the colors are blending together.
[00:16:03.350] – Tien
Okay. So alternating values are interesting because it’s such a broad family. Today I want to talk specifically about two colors because two colors sounds like it would be boring, but, in fact, it allows you to play with stripe spacing really effectively because there’s nothing to distract you from looking at the width of the stripes. So let me show you what you can do with just two colors.
[00:16:29.230] – Tien
So here we are. And for colors, I’m going to actually pick this light brown and this dark brown. But if you’re not familiar with the Gradients Editor, there are a lot of things you can do with it to create patterns really easily. So if I pick this as my first color and this as my second color, I can pick a lot of different possibilities for stripes. So here’s one possibility for stripes, and here’s another one. And you can, of course, change the proportions–oop, that was the size–so that you get different–and these are all alternating value stripes, but they have very different effects.
[00:17:23.390] – Tien
If you look at the linear gradient, this will give you the gradient–a way of developing color gradients, and you can make them bigger or smaller. And again, these are all still alternating stripe patterns. And so they can be very powerful, and they can give you totally different looks depending on how you choose to make the stripes. So I just wanted to pop in and point out that just because there’s only two colors doesn’t mean that it has to be boring.
[00:17:56.510] – Tien
And of course, depending on how you change the colors–let’s go back to Fibonacci One. If you have a pattern like this, then these are two fairly high contrast colors–one’s very light, one’s very dark. If I wanted to, I could make this a much more subtle–oops, Undo, Undo. If I wanted to, I could make this a much more subtle pattern by simply changing the amount of value contrast between the two colors. And this one has a much darker, more serious mood than if I were to use a different set of colors, because this is dominated by lower values. And it also has very little value contrast, so it doesn’t feel as dramatic. So there’s a lot of things you can do to create interesting pieces with just two colors that alternate in value.
[00:18:58.240] – Tien
This is different, too. Now, what I might do is change the weft color, which is a little dark. And there we go. So back to this.
[00:19:17.270] – Tien
I want to talk a little bit about value gradients and how to construct one and some of the more interesting things about them. One of the interesting things is that they tend to create a sense of depth because of the way that the eye sees light and the way that light works. So in this left-hand one, the one in color, which was done by Sheila Roberts and is in the Discuss Your Class group, this one seems to fall off. It feels like a cylinder that’s highest up in the center and then falls off nearer the back.
[00:19:58.130] – Tien
And the reason this effect works–by the way, this is really nicely done as far as creating a gradient with the sense of depth goes. If you look at the black-and-white version of it, you can see that it’s light here, and then it fades off to darker on the sides.
[00:20:17.090] – Tien
And then if you look at a cylinder that is lit from where you are, you can see that the pattern of light and dark is the same in the cylinder. You have the lighter color in the center, and then it fades off towards dark at the edges. And so Sheila has created this wonderful sense of depth, of roundness by basically using values that are similar to that of the cylinder.
[00:20:47.570] – Tien
Now, if she had done a more gradual color gradient with the same proportions of color, that would also have worked. This adds a little more variety to the eye and makes it feel more like a striped cylinder or more like a polygon cylinder, one that has facets instead of being smooth.
[00:21:11.130] – Tien
The other thing to know about value gradients is they tend to be less dramatic than other patterns. Because unlike other patterns, you’re putting colors that are very similar to each other in value. And because drama is created by having contrasted colors right next to each other, gradients are intrinsically less dramatic than other types of pattern.
[00:21:34.430] – Tien
The other thing I wanted to talk about was, how do you get a smooth gradient? You kind of have two choices. You can dye a bazillion colors. This is my Black Jewel piece, and it has 28 hand-dyed colors to get that smooth color gradation from cyan at the edges to magenta in the center. That’s a lot of work.
[00:21:56.230] – Tien
So the other way of doing it, if you are not obsessive like me, is to blend the colors thread by thread. And that’s what you see on the left. This is a piece from the Gorgeous Gradients class. And what’s been done is you take the different colors, and I think there are only eight of them in this particular piece, covering the entire rainbow, and you gradually alternate the amount of color in there to create a smoother gradient. This is also handy when you don’t have enough colors.
[00:22:24.970] – Tien
So again, the way you do that is by using the Gradient Editor. And if you, say, only have these two colors, you select the range, and you pick the gradient that you want. The linear gradient will generally give you the most bang for your buck as far as getting a smooth transition goes.
[00:22:58.510] – Tien
And so over here on the right–let me change the colors so that it’s a little more obvious–you are gradually transitioning from one color to the other. And so it’s a much smoother gradient than it would be if I took these two same colors and just put the stripes side by side.
[00:23:21.890] – Tien
And then, of course, if you want to go further with the gradient, then you can always do another color gradient with two more colors. So here we’re going to do another color gradient, this one going from here to significantly darker. Let me reverse it. There we go. And so you can see that this, while not necessarily a totally smooth gradient, is much smoother than it is on the left side.
[00:24:02.250] – Tien
This is with a relatively small number of threads. If I were doing a larger number of threads, I could get a much smoother gradient. So if I were going from here to here with these two colors, it becomes a much smoother gradient. And I can change the size and the scale of it. But that’s a good way of getting your value gradient without necessarily using 18 colors. Okay.
[00:24:30.230] – Tien
So let’s go back to the slide show and move on to a few bold stripes. The things to keep in mind with a few bold stripes is that it moves the eye around. And so if you look at this one by Mary Wood, you can see that this stripe is inviting your eye to go up and down, and it’s not really inviting your eye to explore the rest of this section. If you look at this piece by Kathy Baringer–by the way, all of these images are in the Discuss Your Class photo section. So if you haven’t hopped over to that part of the class, you should definitely do that. And, of course, post your pieces in there, too, so other people can see them.
[00:25:16.970] – Tien
So this one on the right, by Kathy Baringer, is running your eye both up and down and left to right. And so it has a more dynamic feel, or at least it moves your eye through much more of the piece than Mary’s does. That’s not good, and that’s not bad. It depends on what kind of effect you want. If you want the eye to travel mostly up and down, then Mary’s approach is perfect. And if you want the eye to cover the entire, or at least a large part of it, both left/right and up/down, then you can use an approach like this.
[00:26:01.770] – Tien
The other thing to keep in mind is that your bold stripes create a focus. It’s a place for the eye to rest, or, actually, it’s attractive to the eye. And so on this left-hand piece by Mary Wood, the stripes draw your eye to the right side, and the left side is sort of a restful blank spot. And on the right, with Kathy’s piece, there’s a focal point right up at the top right in the middle of that white square. And the reason it’s there is that it’s so much brighter and higher contrast than everything else. And so this creates a focus that draws the eye in the top right.
[00:26:50.250] – Tien
And the strength of that focus depends on the pattern clarity and the drama, which are similar if you’re working with values. Because basically what happens is your eye is following one direction here, following the other direction here, and winds up resting in the spot right at the top right.
[00:27:13.730] – Tien
So if you have an asymmetric piece, then you have a more dynamic feel. It feels a little freer and a little more–asymmetric’s visually interesting. The eye tends to feel like balanced things are complete, and the things that are asymmetric–or symmetric things tend to feel complete in themselves. Asymmetric invites you to go looking through the piece for more things and also to sort of run off the edges. So symmetric generally gives you a much more formal feel to it.
[00:27:52.250] – Tien
And of course, you can get very different effects depending on how you do your few bold stripes. On the left, you have a few bold stripes with a gradient, and so this gives a very simple feel to it. Christine here in the center is doing two sets of bold stripes. So there’s one set that runs here–that’s the black with the white in the center–or the dark blue. Sorry. And another set that is a light stripe that’s outlined in blue. And so this has a different and more complex and layered feel than the one on the left.
[00:28:29.930] – Tien
And then, of course, Sandy Galloway, on the right, has done some really interesting stuff here with moving the eye up and down with these two lines, right and left, and then is also very subtly moving the eye from left to right with these much lower-contrast lines. So the overall effect is up and down. But there’s this interesting sort of faint movement that’s going left to right.
[00:29:02.450] – Tien
And so I really encourage you to take a look in the class discussion group and see what other people are doing because it’s a great way to sort of add things to your design vocabulary.
[00:29:16.230] – Tien
Now, with random stripes, basically the rule is that the more variation, the more dynamic or chaotic something feels. So here are two pieces by Carolyn Franke, again also from the group, that sort of illustrate this. The one on the left and the one on the right use the same set of colors, but the one on the left has much less variation than the one on the right because the stripes are all the same width. And as a result, the one on the right feels more dynamic, but it also feels more chaotic. It depends on how you feel about irregularity. Some people are going to like the left one better, and some people are going to like the right one better. But the right one is more interesting to the eye and takes more time to figure out. And the more variation you have, the more that’s true.
[00:30:07.910] – Tien
Now, your variation can be stripe spacing, which here on the right you have a lot of different stripes of different widths. It can be the placement of your colors, so what colors are next to which colors. And it can be the amount of color contrast, which is what we’ll see in the next slide.
[00:30:25.710] – Tien
So here, again, we’re looking at values. So on the top is the color version, and on the bottom is the black-and-white version. And in Sandy’s piece, there is a lot of variation in the width, in the value, and in the hues. So you have green and blue and this tan, which is sort of in the yellow-orange, if you would make it more saturated.
[00:30:55.430] – Tien
On the right–in the center, Christie WN’s piece has a lot of value contrast, a lot of contrast in value. And on the right, Roxie’s has a little more change in hue, but the stripes are much more consistently narrow, and the colors are also fairly closely related in value. Or the narrowness of the stripes makes the colors kind of blend together a little bit. And as a result, it feels much less strongly contrasting than Christie’s in the center, which has much bigger value contrast and slightly wider stripes. And then Sandy’s is sort of in between, where you have some areas of high contrast, but overall doesn’t have as much value contrast as Christie’s.
[00:31:54.470] – Tien
So if you look at the three pieces, Christie’s actually looks like the most complex and visually interesting. Whereas Sandy’s, because it has less value contrast and also fewer stripes and has a much more sort of settled feel and does not feel nearly as dynamic or chaotic as Christie’s.
[00:32:25.020] – Tien
And the difference between dynamic and chaotic is all in the eye of the beholder. Some people will like this and find it exciting, and some people might find it overwhelming. And that is a matter of personal taste. That’s not a question of design.
[00:32:40.470] – Tien
So with the combined recipes, I really recommend that you go, again, to the group and see what other people are doing because approaches vary, and you can see lots of different and interesting things that people are doing with the same design and the same set of colors.
[00:32:58.030] – Tien
With warp and weft stripes, I just want to say one quick thing, which is that adding that bold stripe across the width will tend to stop vertical movement. So in this piece, your eye is really drawn up and down by all these stripes. But if you add a header stripe or a footer stripe, then it stops the vertical movement. It’s not nearly as strong. And so that’s just something to keep in mind when you’re designing.
[00:33:30.890] – Tien
And then this is Barb’s piece, which is basically taking the value gradient and sending it in both directions. So it’s cutting and pasting the warp into the weft, and so that produces a nice result. And, Janet, you’re on, as soon as I figure out how to stop sharing my screen. There you go.
[00:33:55.830] – Janet
Okay. So the two classes I have out this month are the Welcome to the Course class or Welcome to the Website How to Use Courses. So if you have questions about that one, go ahead and ask them in the Q&A. But I’m not going to lecture about it because hopefully it was all clear in the class. But do let me know if it wasn’t.
[00:34:22.430] – Janet
So what I’m going to focus on is the Ashenhurst class. And there has been a fair bit of discussion in the discussion class group as to the utility of Ashenhurst. Is it useful? Is it more useful than wraps per inch or using a sett chart or something like that? And the answer, as always, is it depends. If you are happy with the systems that you are already using, fabulous. I’m not trying to change anybody’s mind. All I’m doing is giving you one more tool in the toolbox.
[00:34:55.550] – Janet
So this is another, a different way, unless you’ve been doing it all along, I suppose, to come up with a starting sett, if you can’t find the yarn you’re looking for on a sett chart and you don’t like wrapping around a ruler or something like that. A lot of people, myself included, find that to be too subjective. How tight do you pull the yarn? How close do you put the wraps on the ruler?
[00:35:26.670] – Tien
It’s a real problem with squishy yarns, especially. But even without squishy, two people can get vastly different results with same yarn..
[00:35:34.860] – Janet
Exactly. So it’s very subjective. So Ashenhurst is not. It is objective until you get to the bit where you start applying percentages according to the hand of the fabric you want. So at any rate, one more tool in your toolbox just means you have more options in whatever situation you’re in.
[00:35:57.370] – Janet
So, without further ado, I am going to share my screen and show you. Let’s see. So this is the class, and this is the–if you haven’t seen this trick yet, if you’re in a lesson and you want to hide the sidebar where the lessons are listed, you can click these maximize pointing-out arrows over by your name and profile picture. That gives you more real estate on the screen.
[00:36:31.490] – Janet
So these are the two formulas that Ashenhurst came up with. The first one calculates D, which represents the number of diameters of your yarn in an inch, and it’s based purely on yards per pound. So however you can calculate yards per pound, whether you look that up in a master yarn chart or you find it on the supplier’s website or you calculate it from the information on the ball band or the cone, whatever, that is how you can get yards per pound.
[00:37:06.330] – Janet
And we do have, in the next lesson, some little calculators that will help you do that in the case of cotton that is designated with the size with those fractions. But it has to be cotton, and it has to be an Ne number, and we’ll talk about what that count and everything means in the low down on cotton, which is coming out later in this learning path.
[00:37:40.060] – Janet
Oh, right, the tools. And there’s also a tool there for if you have the information on a ball band or the cone wrap or whatever, you can figure out yards per pound from that.
[00:37:50.160] – Janet
So these are the two formulas we will use. First one is D. Oh, and this 9,0.9 rather, this is Ashenhurst’s fudge factor, is what I call it. I’m not sure what prompted him to choose–how he came up with this number. I imagine he ran a whole lot of calculations and figured out which number was the most useful, the most accurate. But he does say if your yarn is more lofty, more squishy, then it’s a good idea to use 0.84 rather than 0.9. He doesn’t say anything about whether it’s more stretchy. So that’s another situation in which you may need to make some adjustments.
[00:38:40.650] – Janet
Remember, Ashenhurst was working in the industry in the late 1800s, so he was working with a particular type of yarn used in a particular type of manufacturing. So your mileage with modern yarns may vary.
[00:38:59.960] – Janet
The second formula, then, takes that number that we calculated, which represents the size of the yarn, and then some information about the structure that you’re weaving. So these acronyms represent ends per inch, which is in both the numerator on the top of the fraction and in the denominator on the bottom, and intersections per inch–sorry, ends per repeat, ends per repeat, intersections per repeat. And ends per repeat is pretty straightforward. People usually don’t have any trouble figuring that part out. But it’s this intersections per repeat that is a stumbling block. So that’s what I’m going to focus on today.
[00:39:44.200] – Janet
Just FYI though, if you are weaving a four-shaft twill, you are perfectly safe to skip all of this mathy parts and just say that this fraction is 0.667, 2/3. And if you are weaving plain weave, you can skip the mathy parts and use 0.5, 1/2. All righty.
[00:40:13.760] – Tien
Janet, the star means times, right?
[00:40:16.400] – Janet
Multiply, yes.
[00:40:17.430] – Tien
Multiply.
[00:40:18.250] – Janet
Yeah, exactly. And we do have an Ashenhurst calculator that will do all of this for you. So once you have read through the lesson enough times that you have absorbed whatever degree of the content feels right to you, which could be none, you can go over and use the Ashenhurst calculator, and it will give you some of these results without you having to do the legwork. Though for the best results, you do need these two pieces of information–ends per repeat and intersections per repeat. So that’s, again, why we’re going to look at how you figure out what the intersections per repeat are. Okay.
[00:41:03.700] – Janet
So step one is to calculate D, and for that you need yards per pound, wherever you get them. And you take the square root of your yards per pound, and you multiply it by the fudge factor. So remember that this fudge factor, if your yarn is lofty, squishy, should be a little lower, 0.84. I suppose if it’s a very, very poofy, squishy yarn, you might even want to reduce it, maybe 0.8, I don’t know.
[00:41:37.580] – Janet
So this is not problematic as long as you have a calculator handy. But not all of us have calculators immediately to hand, but we almost all do have cell phones immediately to hand. But you may not be able–you may not know where to find the square root thingamy on your iPhone, for instance. Where did I hide that? Here we go.
[00:42:08.660] – Janet
On an iPhone, the calculator looks like this, if you’re holding your phone vertically. But if you turn it sideways and you have it set so that it’s not frozen in that portrait orientation, even when you’re holding your phone sideways, you have to let the display rotate. But if you do that, then the square root button becomes visible, and you can take a square root on your iPhone calculator. I assume other phones have similar behaviors, but I don’t have those phones, so I cannot confirm.
[00:42:45.780] – Janet
Another thing you can do is to go to Google and say, right in your browser search bar, square root of, well, 3,360, that’s like 8/2 cotton, let’s say 10/2 cotton, 4,200. That’s the yards per pound. And it will tell you the answer right there. And then you can even multiply it by D if you wanted, 0.9–sorry, by the fudge factor. And there’s your D. All righty. Back here and back up. So that is how you–there we go–calculate the D part.
[00:43:36.880] – Janet
The more tricky part is S, the maximum sett. And for that you need the ends and your intersections per repeat. In the class, I have the three letter acronym EPR and IPR. When I’m just doodling on my own piece of paper, I usually just call them E and I.
[00:43:58.040] – Janet
And the best ways–my preferred ways of figuring this out is either with a cross-section diagram or by looking at the drawdown. So first we’re going to look at a cross-section diagram.
[00:44:13.820] – Janet
So in the class I had said–I gave some examples. And then I said, okay, but what do you think it is for a 1/3 twill or a 3/1 twill, for instance? So a 3/1 twill is one where three shafts go up and one shaft goes down. So the shafts that are up, the warp threads will be on top and the weft threads will be underneath it. And then the other shaft, the fourth one, the warp thread, is down, so the weft is on top. And then that repeat happens across the cloth.
[00:44:54.040] – Tien
You practiced that, didn’t you, Janet? That little squiggle.
[00:44:58.680] – Janet
Might have done. Of course. So now here’s a thing I want to talk about. In the class, I pointed out that it’s easier if you make sure that you’re drawing your lines right through the center–sorry, your divisions for your repeats right through the center of a thread so you can make sure that the thread is on the same side of the cloth, the weft is on the same side of the cloth for the entire thing. And then I suggested that you count the places where the blue line, the weft, crosses the plane of the cloth, which is the orange. So there’s one here, and there’s one here. Right?
[00:45:52.780] – Janet
I realize that that may be a little confusing for some folks. So another option which might work better is instead to go ahead and make your lines between two threads–oops, not arrows, lines, not that it matters that much–between two threads right where they cross the orange line. So here’s the repeat. Still arrows, whatever. This is a 3/1 twill threaded on four shafts. So I know there’s four ends in the repeat, and I can count and say, okay, yes, I have 1, 2, 3–well, here, I’ll make it a little bit–1, 2, 3, 4. Yes. Okay. My repeat makes sense. I have the right number of warp threads in there.
[00:46:40.960] – Janet
Now instead of counting intersections, you can just count bumps. Here’s 1, and here’s 2. It works out the same way. Remember, before I had two arrows pointing at intersections. Now I have two bumps. So that means, then, your ends in a repeat are four and your intersections per repeat are two. And the fraction, remember, is ends over ends plus intersections, so 4/6, which you get out your handy calculator and determine is 0.667, which is that default number that I said, if you’re doing a four-shaft twill, go ahead and use this. It’s safe.
[00:47:43.360] – Janet
Well, that’s because just about any four-shaft twill threaded on a straight draw will give you this same number. Trying to think–are there any that don’t? No. So this number you will get for a 1/3, for a 3/1, or for a 2/1, which are kind of all your interlacement options on a straight draw.
[00:48:09.890]
[crosstalk 00:48:09]
[00:48:10.100] – Janet
Yes. Thank you. Yes. But that’s a good question. What if you are doing a three-shaft twill, as you might be if you are, say, on a rigid heddle. Let’s get rid of all that. And a three-shaft twill would look like over two under one, over two under one, over two under one across with the repeat of three ends. So then I’m going to make my line–let’s see, here’s one to the left of the twos–the two ups. There we go. And now I count the bumps–1, 2. Okay, I’m stuck in Line mode again. 2. There we go.
[00:49:05.950] – Janet
Which means now ends equals three, ends per repeat. Intersections equals two per repeat. So the fraction is 3 over 3 plus 2, or 3/5. Okay. So those are four-shaft examples.
[00:49:30.020] – Janet
There was also a question in the lesson, what about a 2/2 basket weave? Well, 2/2 basket weave has exactly the same interlacement as a 2/2 twill, so it’s going to work out the same way. Which is why, incidentally, basket weave makes such a good hem option on a four-shaft twill fabric. And the fact that plain weave and twill have different numbers is a clue as to why plain weave does not make the best hem on a twill fabric, why your plain weave will flare out.
[00:50:14.100] – Janet
All righty. So now let’s look at a more complicated example. Put this–no, wrong thing. That one. All right. These are four-shaft twills. And that is not what I’m going to share right now because we’ve looked at the four-shaft twills.
[00:50:38.940] – Tien
Janet, we’ve got about five minutes. I can stay a little later, but I’m not sure if everyone else can.
[00:50:44.540] – Janet
Okay. I want to open my eight-shaft ones. I want this one in particular and that one open. Okay. So first of all, let’s look at this 4/4 twill on the left. This one, if you’ve woven a 4/4 twill, you know, it can be quite sleazy if you’re using the sort of standard, oh, use 2/3 sett rule of thumb.
[00:51:22.180] – Janet
And that’s because of this. Let’s look at–if we do a diagram here. It goes over four, under four, over four, under four, over four, et cetera. And block off our repeat. Here’s a section, and here’s a section. So here’s one bump and two bumps. So that means we have ends equals 8, and I equals only 2. So our ratio is ends over ends plus intersections, or 80%. So the maximum sett for a 4/4 twill is 20% higher than–well, or 13% higher than it is for a four-shaft 2/2 twill. So you need more ends per inch to get the same quality of fabric. If you use the same ends per inch, it will be quite sleazy.
[00:52:39.600] – Janet
And then I wanted to show one last example. Actually, I want to show you one thing here. Another option, instead of these cross-section diagrams, is to pick one thread from your twill, say, and follow that thread as it goes across. And you can see, here’s a four–here’s a float where it’s on top. Here’s a float where it’s on the bottom. Here’s a float where it’s on top. Here’s a float where it’s on the bottom.
[00:53:11.180] – Janet
And if you mark off that section of your warp, so that starts from this thread and goes to that thread–oops, that’s actually more than one repeat. It starts there and goes to the bottom. Right? And then the next repeat starts and the next repeat starts. You can count and see that that is eight threads. So your ends in the repeat are 8. Your intersections are 2. So it’s just like this picture down here, but it’s right from your drawdown. So let’s see if I can annotate this.
[00:53:53.400] – Tien
You’re basically counting the number of times the color changes between the warp color and the weft color.
[00:53:57.850] – Janet
Yep.
[00:53:58.740] – Tien
Says the color person.
[00:54:00.520] – Janet
Yep. Right. But if the warp and the weft are the same color, that doesn’t get you anywhere.
[00:54:07.410] – Tien
Yeah.
[00:54:09.200] – Janet
So this section right here is the same as this section right here. In a similar vein, over here, if I pick one of these threads, here the pattern is one up, two down, one up, one down, two up, one down, et cetera. And if I say–oops, let’s choose another color–here’s my repeat, in that space, I can see there’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 bumps. If I had done it as a cross-section, this would be an up bump. Where the warp is on top would be a down bump. This would be an up bump. This where the warp is on top would be a down bump.
[00:55:03.370] – Janet
So the ratio on this fabric is–make this big. Select all the things. Oh, wait a minute. I got to get rid of that red box. Clear all drawings. There we go. Now clear, close. Annotate this. Select all the things. Delete.
[00:55:35.110] – Janet
So we had said ends equals 8 and intersections equals 6. So your ratio then is 8 over 8 plus 6, which equals 8 over 14, which equals, if you get out your calculator, 8 divided 14.
[00:56:03.470] – Tien
Yeah. It’s 4/7.
[00:56:04.210] – Janet
Yep. So it’s 0.57. So that’s much closer to the plain weave sett than it is to the twill sett. But it’s in between them. And if we go back and analyze the fabric, you can see that this fabric has a lot of plain weave in it. There’s a lot of places where there’s only one thread up or down. And then it has areas that are like a 2/2 twill. So it’s a combination of a 2/2 twill and a plain weave. So it makes sense that the sett would be somewhere between the sett for a 2/2 twill and a plain weave.
[00:56:46.410] – Janet
Okay. There’s more that I could say, and I have other examples, like, on point twills, but we are out of time. And I want to make sure that people have a few minutes to ask questions about the diagrams that I was just doodling. So I’m going to stop sharing and just see if there are any questions.
[00:57:05.760] – Dawn
There are no open questions at the moment, but there are a couple of Eureka moments in the chat.
[00:57:10.710] – Tien
Yay.
[00:57:11.840] – Janet
Great.
[00:57:15.350] – Dawn
Anyone? Bueller, questions?
[00:57:18.790] – Janet
Doesn’t look like. Dayamitra’s suggesting that the video could be included in the lesson. I think you are absolutely right, Dayamitra. Not the whole video, but a video explaining. And I’m also going to add the information about counting the bumps rather than the intersections because I think it’s easier to–it’s easier to articulate, so I suspect it’s therefore easier to understand, too.
[00:57:45.630] – Tien
All right.
[00:57:46.990] – Dawn
Still no questions.
[00:57:48.750] – Janet
Great.
[00:57:49.340] – Tien
Awesome.
[00:57:49.700] – Dawn
You guys are good.
[00:57:51.730] – Janet
So we will do the live Q&A, which is also–I mean, it’s a sort of general Q&A, but it’s also Q&A related to the classes that have been released since the previous Q&A. That is on–Dawn put it in the chat. It’s on December 21.
[00:58:09.380] – Dawn
I already.
[00:58:09.380] – Janet
Yeah. I know. I had to scroll back and look. So if you come up with questions between now and then, you can absolutely ask them in the discussion class forum discussion. But you can also submit questions for the Q&A that’s coming up on the 21st. And when you submit questions, you can attach pictures. You could say, okay, but what is it for this draft, please? And you can add more information than will fit in the little boxes if you reply to the email that you receive.
[00:58:46.520]
[inaudible 00:58:46]
[00:58:48.070] – Janet
As for this–now there are questions. As for this webinar, we will get the instant replay posted into the repository, into the transcripts area right away, and it will just have these live transcriptions going. But then as soon as we can get the video edited and compressed and transcribed and all that, we will replace the instant replay version with the closed caption version and the complete transcript and the higher resolution and all of that. That will probably take a few days. Yeah.
[00:59:29.810] – Dawn
Do you want to take a second and answer Eda Lee real quick? What did you say about hems
[00:59:35.530] – Janet
I said, Eda Lee, that plain weave is not the best choice–often not the best choice for hems on a fabric that is largely twill because they have such a difference in the amount that they interlace. And that interlacement is also a big part of your draw-in or the width of your fabric and the thickness of your fabric. So because a twill and a plain weave are usually quite different, that means plain weave will be much wider–the hem will be wider than the body of the–I’m thinking, like, a tea towel. But that last twill that we looked at, where the ratio was 0.57 instead of 0.67, that one would be happier with a plain weave hem because 0.57 is much closer to 0.5. All righty.
[01:00:37.430] – Tien
All right.
[01:00:37.910] – Janet
That’s it.
[01:00:40.020]
[crosstalk 01:00:40]
[01:00:40.570] – Janet
Did you get what you needed to copy, Dawn?
[01:00:43.150] – Dawn
Absolutely.
[01:00:46.570] – Janet
Then we are done.
[01:00:48.040] – Dawn
Bye, everybody.
[01:00:48.800] – Tien
So long. Farewell. We’re not going to sing.
[01:00:53.130] – Janet
Fritz could sing for us.
[01:00:55.720] – Tien
[inaudible 01:00:55] only if he wants a belly rub. And it’s not very much fun.
[01:01:00.890] – Janet
All right. We’re off. Have a good night. Or a good morning, everybody, as the case may be.
[01:01:06.080] – Tien
Afternoon. Morning, something.
[01:01:09.010] – Janet
Have a good day.
[01:01:10.420] – Tien
There you go. Bye.