[00:00:00.000] – Janet
Here we go.
[00:00:02.080] – Tien
The four musketeers.
[00:00:04.330] – Janet
Here they come. Hello, folks.
[00:00:07.650] – Dawn
Hello.
[00:00:08.680] – Tien
Or we could be the Fab Four, but I don’t know which of us wants to be Ringo.
[00:00:14.050]
[laughter]
[00:00:19.030] – Janet
They’re not really the right glasses.
[00:00:21.250]
[laughter]
[00:00:22.920] – Janet
And nobody wants me to sing. I promise.
[00:00:26.760] – Tien
Me neither.
[00:00:28.130] – Dawn
Nor me.
[00:00:28.972] – Tien
Okay.
[00:00:29.080] – Dawn
I think reminders are good.
[00:00:37.780] – Janet
Reminders are the bomb.
[00:00:39.570] – Carly
Yeah.
[00:00:40.610] – Tien
So we were debating–for the folks who have arrived, we were debating which of us should go first, and we went around and around and around. We couldn’t decide. So we’ve decided that we’re going to spin the Wheel of Fortune to decide which of us goes first. And Janet is praying it isn’t her, so she has more time to eat snacks.
[00:00:57.820]
[laughter]
[00:00:59.630] – Tien
All right, shall we spin? All right. Here we go. Here we have the magic Wheel of Names, and we have Janet, Carly, and Tien. I’m going to spin the wheel.
[00:01:15.390]
[laughter]
[00:01:18.680] – Tien
Guess what, Janet?
[00:01:20.495]
[laughter]
[00:01:20.720] – Dawn
Look at all the confetti hugs.
[00:01:26.190] – Tien
All right.
[00:01:26.740] – Janet
Confetti is a lie.
[00:01:28.940] – Tien
Carly and I get to–
[00:01:31.161] – Dawn
Spin again.
[00:01:32.160] – Janet
I think she plotted. Look, she even has it all set up with just her and Carly left.
[00:01:40.020] – Tien
Looks like I’m second and Carly gets to be third.
[00:01:45.690] – Janet
Yay.
[00:01:46.760] – Tien
So it’s unclear whether Carly or Janet actually won.
[00:01:53.260] – Dawn
Hi, Dayamitra.
[00:01:54.600] – Tien
I will hand it over to Janet to spiel and then–
[00:02:02.120] – Janet
And then blab. Talk. Starting with the spiel. You guys, you know the drill, but I’ll go through it quickly for anybody who hasn’t been here live for a while. For socializing, use the Chat. For questions that are directly related to the lecture contents, use the Q&A–I am all fuzzy. Oopsie–use the Q&A interface. The button is at the bottom of your screen unless you’re on a device. If you’re on a device, it’ll be somewhere in your menus.
[00:02:39.090] – Janet
You can turn on closed captioning. It does a reasonably good job of putting the words that we’re saying on the screen. Where it screws up, it’s at least entertaining. You can also view the full transcript. So if you miss something that we said, you can scroll back and see what it was. Even though the closed captioning disappears off the screen, the transcript stays there for the entire webinar.
[00:03:05.000] – Janet
This is the lecture in which we are covering Cookies and Clocks–sorry, designing in the tie-up with a straight threading and treadling (Cookies and Clocks), and the double density threading on rigid heddle, and hue and saturation in the Color and Visual Design path. We’ve got a lot to cover, so we’re going to talk fast, and we’re not going to talk a long time, and there’s not going to be a whole lot of time for questions.
[00:03:35.870] – Janet
If there’s anything pressing and we can’t move forward until the question is answered, we’ll deal with that. If there’s time at the end, we’ll answer questions. And any questions we run out of time for will get saved for the Q&A, which is on the 19th. Did I forget anything else?
[00:03:52.570] – Tien
No.
[00:03:53.470] – Janet
Okay. I’m going to share my screen so that you can’t see how fuzzy I am.
[00:03:59.080] – Dawn
The Doris Day look.
[00:04:01.760] – Janet
Yes. I always think of it as Cybill Shepherd in Moonlighting, that soft focus.
[00:04:09.710] – Dawn
Yeah.
[00:04:10.100] – Janet
Okay. Share my screen and look at this one. That is not the one. Where’s my one? Okay. Somebody do something entertaining while I get myself organized.
[00:04:28.790] – Tien
We’ll launch into song. Oh, wait. We just said that we shouldn’t.
[00:04:33.550] – Janet
I shouldn’t. Oh, I see what I did. Oops. Oops, oops, oops. Okay, found it again. Now I can reattach that, and now I can do that, and that, and–okay. Sorry about that. Technical difficulties. Why am I at the end of my slide show instead of the beginning? Back to the beginning. Here we go. See, this is why I shouldn’t go first.
[00:05:11.710] – Janet
All right. Cookies and Clocks. Onward. Really, the class is about designing in the tie-up on a straight threading and a straight treadling. So the first thing we need to talk about is what the heck is a straight threading and a straight treadling?
[00:05:29.380] – Janet
A straight threading is any threading that starts on the front shaft and works shaft by shaft by shaft by shaft all the way to the back. Or it starts on the back shaft and works shaft by shaft by shaft by shaft all the way to the front. You don’t skip any shafts. You don’t skip any threads. And when you do that, it looks like this on a threading grid, all these little diagonal lines. They might lean left, or they might lean right, but it’s a diagonal that goes from the bottom of the grid to the top of the grid.
[00:06:02.570] – Janet
Whether you think of this one at the top as starting on the left side at the back shaft and working its way forward or you think of it as starting at the right side on the front shaft and working its way backward is immaterial. In either direction, that threading is leaning left. If all of those were vertical lines and then they tipped over, they would be leaning left.
[00:06:31.390] – Janet
The four-shaft one, if you look at the left, if you assume it starts on the left, it starts on the front shaft and works to the back. If you assume it starts on the right, it starts on the back shaft and works to the front. That doesn’t matter at all. What’s important is that it’s leaning right. And the eight-shaft one is leaning left.
[00:06:54.960] – Janet
They all look like diagonal lines with a lean to them. So we can use this notation, the diagonal slashes, which are on your keyboard as a forward slash and a back slash. I honestly can never remember which is which. I think the one leaning right is a forward slash and the one leaning left is a back slash, but I’m not sure. But we can use that symbol to represent a straight threading and one repeat of a straight threading.
[00:07:24.620] – Janet
And when you just look at the symbol, you don’t know how many shafts it’s on. So you need that piece of information too. Or you know it’s just a straight threading on however many shafts you’re talking about.
[00:07:37.030] – Janet
So the one on the top there–let me annotate–so this here, that’s like five repeats leaning to the right. So if you had a six-shaft threading, like this, and you were starting from the right side, it would go 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. There’s one repeat. Then 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. There’s a second repeat. Five of those starting at the back on the right and working to the front on the left. Or you could think of it from the left side going 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Doesn’t matter. It’s the lean that matters, not whether it starts left, right, front, back. End the annotations. Back to this one.
[00:08:38.740] – Janet
It’s important to realize, to notice that the threading is cyclical, like on a clock. So on that clock in the middle–it’s a 12-hour clock. 1 o’clock comes after 12 o’clock. 12 o’clock comes before 1 o’clock. So if you’re going around the clock with time moving forward, clockwise, 1 follows 12. If you happen to be going around the clock in reverse, you’re able to rewind time–wouldn’t that be nice–then 12 follows 1. But 1 and 12 are side by side, regardless of which direction you’re going.
[00:09:15.690] – Janet
The threading is just the same. Even though on the grid they look like separate, distinct little diagonal lines, leaning one way or the other, they are still actually cyclical. So on the left, Shaft 1 and Shaft 4 are neighbors, and they follow each other. On the right, Shaft 1 and Shaft 8 are neighbors, and they follow each other. The highest number shaft is the neighbor of Shaft 1. However many shafts you have in the threading, then that highest number is the neighbor of Shaft 1.
[00:09:55.020] – Janet
What matters is how many shafts in the threading, not necessarily how many are on your loom. You might have an eight-shaft loom, but you’re using a six-shaft straight draw. That would go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, or it would go 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 6, even though you’ve got two more shafts back there that you’re not using. So it’s all relative to the threading, not necessarily to the loom. The same thing again.
[00:10:29.120] – Janet
A straight treadling is exactly the same thing, but vertical instead of horizontal. Now you’re going across the treadles from left to right or from right to left. If you number your treadles from the left and you’ve got six of them, you would step on them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, if you’re going that direction. But you might be going the other way–6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Or maybe you’re only treadling straight across five of the treadles–5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, etc. Again, what matters is how many treadles are in play, how many treadles are part of the draft, not how many treadles are on your loom.
[00:11:19.000] – Janet
Remember, too, that treadles represent shaft combinations. So if you’re taking this idea of a straight treadling to a loom like a table loom or a direct tie-up loom, then you need to translate the straight treadling and tie-up that goes with it to a lift plan.
[00:11:42.930] – Janet
So why do we care about this straight stuff? What’s the big deal? Part of it is that it is the most flexible, most useful threading and treadling that you can use. And it’s real easy. Very versatile. If you go to Handweaving.net, say, and you find a draft that has a straight threading and you say, show me other drafts with the same threading, you’ll find thousands of them. Those are all things that you can weave without changing the threading on your loom, which is often a nice thing to know.
[00:12:19.780] – Janet
I’ve woven–I put on 10 yards. I’ve woven 5 yards of the stuff I had planned to do, but I have 5 yards left. What else can I do with this warp? A straight threading is super versatile. I have a sample somewhere that I wove on my 24-shaft loom, and it’s a straight threading. I wove three different overshot patterns, and then I wove some Bronson lace, and then I wove some summer and winter, all of that without cutting off, rethreading, doing anything because they all could use the same threading.
[00:12:57.790] – Janet
But in addition to that, one other reason that’s really useful and fun for having a straight threading and a straight treadling is because it turns the tie-up into a blueprint for every repeat in your drawdown.
[00:13:22.070] – Janet
So here’s my tie-up. When you do drafts in the Draft Editor, which is where these pictures were taken from, the tie-up has lots of little black squares with sort of a white border and then a gray border around that. The grid is gray, and there’s a white line around the black squares. Whereas in the drawdown, it’s solid black unless you have turned on Lines, and then that shows you the edges of floats.
[00:13:48.880] – Janet
So you can tell the difference between the two, but you can, I hope, also see that they’re the same shape. There’s this sort of number symbol, like a double plus sign, in the corner, and then a whole bunch of checkerboard, which we know from drawdowns is plain weave, around the edges. We also know from drawdowns that these series of black squares in a row are floats. When I said we know from drawdowns, I mean from the Drawdowns class from a few months ago.
[00:14:26.700] – Janet
In this particular drawdown where we have a series of five black squares in a row, those are floats. They might be warp floats. They might be weft floats. It depends on whether this is a warp drawdown or a weft drawdown, and we don’t know that from the information given. But regardless, there are floats, and it’s going to behave the same way. It doesn’t matter which side of the fabric the float is on.
[00:14:56.120] – Janet
You may also see that–oh, yeah, it’s like a cookie cutter. This is where we get into the cookies. We’ve already seen the clocks. Now we’re into the cookies. Time, cookies. Here it’s me, and I want a snack again. It’s like a theme running through my life. Okay, onward.
[00:15:17.100] – Janet
The cookies are rotated. What is vertical in the tie-up is horizontal in the drawdown. This bit right here in the drawdown, I’m calling that the cookie. The threading and the treadling are technically the cookie cutter, but they take their shape from the tie-up. So whatever is in the tie-up gets stamped–you could also think of it as like a rubber stamp–gets stamped into the drawdown.
[00:15:53.220] – Janet
But what is vertical in the tie-up is horizontal in the drawdown, and what is horizontal in the tie-up is vertical in the drawdown. That’s not easy to see unless you have a tie-up that is not symmetrical in any direction, which is why in the class, the tie-up we use all the way through is a little smiley face with eyes that point left or right.
[00:16:17.820] – Janet
Turns out the direction the eyes point are sort of like that–is the blue dress or is it–sorry, is the dress blue or is it white or gray? I don’t know what the other color was, but it’s like an illusion. Some people think the eyes are pointing one way. Some people think the eyes are pointing the other way. But you can still tell when they change. So when you’re reading the course, just assume the eyes are pointing whichever way they look like they’re pointing for you.
[00:16:51.070] – Janet
The cookie in the drawdown is rotated. It’s tipped on its side compared to the tie-up. And then it’s mirrored vertically or horizontally according to the angle of the threading and the treadling. So I wanted to show you over here–let’s see if we go here. I’m going to upload that draft. Here we go.
[00:17:26.150] – Janet
This is that same draft that we just saw in the slide. If I change the direction of the straight threading, it’s going to flip the drawdown horizontally. If I Undo, it goes back to the other direction. Do you see the difference, how that flips horizontally? When the threading flips horizontally, so does the drawdown. When the treadling flips, so does the drawdown. Now it’s flipping vertically. Put it back the other way, you’ll see it flips again.
[00:18:02.030] – Janet
So by changing the orientation, or the angle, of the threading and the treadling, I can rotate the cookie, so the copy of the tie-up down in the drawdown, I can rotate that around. But it’s always going to be on its side compared to the tie-up.
[00:18:22.370] – Janet
If you want to turn it vertically–so rather than flipping it, if you want to rotate the drawdown, you need to rotate the tie-up. There are instructions for how to do all of these things in the class, step by step with little links that take you to Toolboxes that tell you this is how you flip your threading, this is how you flip your treadling, this is how you rotate your tie-up, etc. So be sure when you’re working through the exercises to follow those little links if you’re not sure how to follow one of the instructions.
[00:19:05.840] – Janet
Going back here and here. Here we go. We already saw that. If you add more repeats in the threading or in the treadling, you get more cookies. You get more copies of the tie-up. I think of it as like a cookie sheet. Every time you add another threading repeat, you get another cookie on every row on the sheet. Every time you add another treadling repeat, you add a whole another row of cookies. I like the treadling repeats. That’s more cookies.
[00:19:47.820] – Janet
So going back to this guy, if I add threads and add threads, and then–let’s see, I will copy and add it. Copy. I don’t want to flip or rotate. There. And I can put another copy down here. See, every time I’m getting another copy–another column or another row on my cookie sheet. And I want to add just a few more threads here and add one more repeat.
[00:20:41.710] – Janet
Then the thing is, remember now, if we–we’re done with that. If we rotate the tie-up–whatever we do to the tie-up affects all of the cookies. So watch the cookies now. Right now, the double plus, that’s actually a five-end huck spot. The huck spot is in the top left corner of every cookie. If I rotate the tie-up, the huck spot moves to a new corner. If I just flip the tie-up vertically, it moves to other places. But it’s happening to every one of the cookies.
[00:21:29.480] – Janet
If I choose a piece of the threading, one threading repeat, and I flip it, then just that column has flipped horizontally. Do you see? If I do it in the treadling, just this row will flip vertically. You could control each column and row independently, or you could affect all of the cookies up in the tie-up.
[00:21:59.740] – Janet
There’s a catch, of course, which is that in this drawdown, I have blank spaces between the repeats, but you don’t really have that. Your weft threads will cross from one cookie to the next, and your warp threads will cross from one cookie to the one above and below. So you have to pay attention to what the threads are doing where the cookies join.
[00:22:28.900] – Janet
You can see that in the Draft Editor when you turn on lines. Now, it shows the lines with little black edges. So if your threads are black, you can’t see the lines. If you’re trying to see floats and you’re looking at black on white, then it’s a good idea to change the color of the black threads to a medium gray. Then you’ll be able to see the lines on the edges of those threads, too. Do you see what I’ve got? Now on the edges of the warp threads I have lines as well.
[00:23:07.430] – Janet
Now with the lines on, you can see, well, that’s a problem. Of course, it’s a problem. There’s no thread there at all. On the opposite side–oops, no. Lines On, Colors Off, Opposite Side–this is a problem. We need to take out those blank threads, like that, and then we have a better idea of what’s happening at the joins.
[00:23:33.920] – Janet
But now we still have this crazy long float that’s going across from one to the other. For the purposes of this class–in a future class, we’ll talk about point threadings. But for now, we’re only focusing on straight threadings that don’t have points in them. So I’m going to put that back, and I’m going to put this back like that.
[00:24:02.220] – Janet
With this–I’m going to take out that one last thread. When they’re all pointing the same way, there are floats of length five going across on this side, weft-wise on this side, and on the other side, floats of length five going vertically. You can decide, is a float of length five a problem or is it okay? If you’re working at 20 EPI, it’s probably just fine. If you’re working at 4 EPI, it’s probably a problem.
[00:24:35.620] – Janet
Then, of course, any place where it floats for the entire vertical or horizontal, the entire height or width of the drawdown, that’s a deal breaker because that’s a thread that is just not part of the cloth at all. It never intersects. There’s a lesson for dealing with the deal breakers and also dealing with floats that are too long and floats that go from one motif across to the other.
[00:25:08.210] – Dawn
I’ve got a question from–
[00:25:09.190] – Janet
Huh?
[00:25:10.450] – Dawn
I’ve got a question from Dayamitra real quickly on those blank spaces that you just had between the cookies, the blank threads.
[00:25:17.938] – Janet
Okay.
[00:25:19.000] – Dawn
Could you use that as a place to cut and separate if you want to?
[00:25:24.030] – Janet
Yeah, sure. You could leave gaps in the reed and you could leave a gap in your beat or even put in a spacer that you take out, and then you could cut on those lines or not. But if you don’t cut on them, the threads to either side will slide into the gaps. Because if you think about Drawdowns again, Drawdowns, Part One, that class, threads move to the areas–they move away from intersections, and they move to areas where there isn’t interlacement, and there’s no interlacement at all on those gaps. So the threads will just slide in there. That’s how deflected doubleweave works. Everything heads for the gap.
[00:26:08.910] – Janet
Yes, you can, like in this picture, and then you could cut, but you would need to somehow secure these edges because they wouldn’t be selvedges. They’d just be raw edges and would probably–I mean, depending on the fiber content and how it was wet finished and all of that, would probably just unweave themselves, come apart, unless it was wool that was fulled tightly or something. In which case, the gaps would probably disappear anyway.
[00:26:35.200] – Janet
You can use designing in the tie-up on a straight threading and straight treadling to design cute, little motifs, but they are tricky because they blomp, all merge together. Blomp, that was my verb. Blomp together. They make that sound right on your loom. You step on the treadle and they go blomp. No?
[00:27:02.710] – Janet
And because you need to watch out for the float length. Do you see here that these white floats that go from one smiley to the next smiley, they connect right over to the next smiley, they are really long. They are seven ends. Again, you have to make a judgment call. Is seven-end floats too long? That’s going to depend on your sett. It’s going to depend on your yarn, and it’s going to depend on the intended function of your fabric. If it’s going on the wall and will never, ever be touched and nobody will ever brush against it with a button or a ring or something that could catch, maybe it’s okay. If it’s going to be a scarf that you wear next to your earrings, then a long float could be problematic.
[00:27:54.180] – Janet
You also have to watch out for floats that will slide under their neighbors. They do that, the little darlings. They will just disappear underneath–a short float will disappear underneath a long float that’s next to it if it doesn’t stick out beyond the end of the long float on one end or the other.
[00:28:15.410] – Janet
So you have to analyze–well, if you analyze in advance, you may have an idea of how your motif will actually appear once you put it on the loom and then take it off the loom. If you don’t analyze it in advance, you may find that your smileys have melted or somehow become disfigured. They’ve turned into that Goethe scream, ahhh, which is never a good look. So it’s a good idea to pay attention to whether it looks like some of your floats may disappear.
[00:28:51.050] – Janet
That is an acquired skill. It takes practice, and it takes training your eye to be able to predict. But if you weave a fabric and you notice that the little tips or points–it happens in twills, too, in a point twill–if the points are disappearing, if you go back and you look at a draft in this format with the lines on, you’ll probably see that those short little floats are disappearing under longer floats. All right.
[00:29:25.150] – Janet
So motifs are very tricky. What is easier to work with are diagonals. And so for diagonals, just set up your tie-up however tall and wide you want it and slap a diagonal on there. It doesn’t have to be down the middle, it could be on a corner, so cutting off a corner a little bit. But remember that diagonals wrap around the edges of the tie-up. And that’s discussed and explained in the lessons.
[00:29:52.930] – Janet
Then after your first diagonal, add some more diagonals. Because look at the float lengths there. The gray ones are fine, but the white ones are pretty long. So keep adding more diagonals until you get a relationship or ratio of floats that you like and no floats that are too long for your comfort zone, whatever it is for your fabric, fiber, sett, and function.
[00:30:23.460] – Janet
Another option is to start with plain weave, which by definition has all the interlacements. It’s going to be as stable as you can possibly get. Then start turning the little squares in the tie-up on and off to create a float pattern of some kind. It may evolve into a twill. It may not. This is a little diagonal lacey spot. It’s three-end huck spots or a three-end lace spot on a diagonal. I could adjust that some by turning off some black spots and turning some of the black spots white, turning some of the white spots black. I could change where those little plus signs appear. But you always need to watch your float length.
[00:31:10.140] – Janet
Another thing to keep in mind, just the last few thoughts, your tie-ups, all of our examples have been on square tie-ups, but they don’t have to be square. You can doodle any shape–well, any rectangle that you like, and then put several repeats of straight threading that is the same height as your tie-up and several repeats of straight treadling that is the same width as your tie-up, and your little rectangle will be tiled all over your drawdown, like cookies on a cookie sheet that all run together.
[00:31:46.380] – Janet
So you can do any little rectangle that you design. And you need to pay attention to how the edges connect up, and you need to pay attention to the float lengths. I’m going to stop sharing and check in. I don’t want to go over my allotted time.
[00:32:11.420] – Dawn
No questions at the moment.
[00:32:15.320] – Janet
Okay. Great. If there’s time at the end and people want to see some examples or whatever, then we can do that. Otherwise, we’ll save them for Q&A. I’m going to turn it over to–
[00:32:26.940] – Tien
Tien.
[00:32:27.270] – Janet
Tien.
[00:32:28.720] – Tien
All right. I’m going to talk about Hue and Saturation, so I put together a very, very, very short slide deck. Let’s see here. View, Slideshow.
[00:32:42.620] – Tien
The first thing is, what is a hue anyway? There are three characteristics of color. This diagram here represents the space of all possible colors. It’s done up in blocks of individual color, but it’s really more of a continuous semisphere. Hue is what we think of as the color wheel. It’s our color names. And it’s a single vertical slice of this color space.
[00:33:14.500] – Tien
Value is how light or dark the color is, and it runs up and down. Saturation runs from left to right, and we’ll talk about that in a moment.
[00:33:22.670] – Tien
All of these colors here on this page here are basically that single vertical slice out of that color sphere, and these colors are all the same hue.
[00:33:34.080] – Tien
Then saturation is a horizontal slice going this way. It goes from gray to the most brilliant possible pure hue, over on the right.
[00:33:52.730] – Tien
You can think of every color as a pure hue plus some amount of gray. For example, in this thing that goes from highly saturated to unsaturated, you have this one here, which you can think of as being the pure hue, this one here, plus gray, this gray. Because it’s less saturated, it’s less of the pure hue and a larger amount of gray.
[00:34:20.480] – Tien
In this square here, you have more of the pure hue. It’s more saturated. So you can think of it as being a larger amount of the pure hue and a smaller amount of gray. So the more of the pure hue you have in here, the more saturated it is. I’ve represented the amount of gray versus the amount of the pure hue by the size of the squares. So this is a big square of pure magenta plus a little bit of gray. This grayed-out version here is a little bit of magenta plus a lot of gray.
[00:34:54.980] – Tien
Why does it matter? Well, it matters a lot for color mixing, but I’m going to cover that later this month. So I am excluding the discussion of color mixing for the moment. But hue contrast contributes to the amount of drama in a piece. Drama is one of those things that is somewhat hard to define, but I define it as the sense of emotional tension in the piece. It’s kind of the sense of excitement. But really what it is is that there is contrast between the two colors, and the higher the drama, the more the two colors kind of argue with each other.
[00:35:35.810] – Tien
In this particular case–let me pull up my color wheel–you have this purple and light purple, which has no hue contrast. They are the same hues. They’re both purple. Then you have this purple and yellow piece which has a lot of hue contrast. Because if you look over here on the right, purple is over here on the color wheel and yellow is up here. They’re practically opposite colors. And as a result, the purple and yellow feels much less harmonious than the purple and light purple piece over here.
[00:36:13.760] – Tien
And in the same way, on the right-hand side, you have the magenta and the cyan, which are a couple of steps apart from the color wheel. But if you look at the magenta and green, then they’re directly opposite on the color wheel, which is why this swatch over on the bottom right has more of a feeling of excitement or tension than the swatch up here with the blue and the magenta.
[00:36:51.950] – Tien
Saturation matters, as well. So if you look at these two swatches, they’re both opposite each other on the color wheel. This is blue–is sort of cyan-blue and red-orange, probably closer to orange. These are diametric opposites on the color wheel. These are the same colors, only less saturated. Again, it’s the same thing. But there is more of a sense of emotional tension in this one in the top left than there is in the one on the bottom left. The reason is that it is contrasting more of the pure hue.
[00:37:35.370] – Tien
This is a little tricky, but basically, if you think about contrast, the contrast between these two colors is coming from the hues. The grays are the same gray, so that doesn’t make a difference. There’s no contrast there. But there’s a lot of pure hue in this and this–sorry, in the top two colors. There is much less of the pure hue in the bottom two colors because this sort of brownish rust is a little bit of orange plus a lot of gray. And this sort of slate blue is a little bit of the bright blue plus a lot of gray.
[00:38:21.120] – Tien
And so in this case, what you’re contrasting is a lot of pure hue on the top and a very little bit of pure hue on the bottom. And so the effect of hue contrast isn’t that strong on the bottom. And so you have less drama, even though the hues are exactly the same. I hope that made sense.
[00:38:42.880] – Tien
And the idea that every color is a hue plus some amount of gray is interesting. And we’ll come back to that in color mixing because color mixing is a little bit like algebra or addition. And so we’ll get into that in a couple weeks.
[00:39:04.930] – Tien
Now I want to talk about color harmonies. And so color harmonies, here, are basically a way of saying, here are colors with a certain level of hue contrast. You can have monochrome, which is just one hue. You can have analogous, which is where the colors all fall within two steps of each other on the color wheel. Then you can have complementary, which has very high hue contrast.
[00:39:36.070] – Tien
Then you can get into split complementary color schemes, which is a color and it’s the two on either side of the color wheel, which gives you an option for low hue contrast and high hue contrast.
[00:39:50.680] – Tien
Then there’s the triatic where they’re spaced evenly around the color wheel, and so you have equal hue contrast between all the colors and so on. If you go further down this rabbit hole, you can get to square harmonies, hexads, and a whole bunch of other things which I think is starting to reach the point of a color fetish.
[00:40:11.700] – Tien
What’s really important here is how much hue contrast you have between the colors that are involved. The more hue contrast you have, the more emotional tension you’ll get in your piece.
[00:40:27.050] – Tien
Let’s take a look–okay. So let’s actually get rid of this one for the moment and maximize this one. This is an example of a–let me just size it up a bit. This is an example of monochromatic harmony. It has a lot of–all of these are different shades and tones of pink–of the magenta. It has a certain sense of harmony to it because there is no hue contrast.
[00:41:02.630] – Tien
Now, if I were to take that and turn it into a complementary color scheme, which this is, it’s pink–it’s again magenta and two shades of green, the green that sits opposite on the color wheel. You can see how the mood of this has changed dramatically from its previous mood. This used to be very harmonious, and now we’re turning it into something that is has much more tension to it. So that’s the complementary color scheme.
[00:41:36.100] – Tien
If you want to modify the complementary color scheme slightly, you can use colors that are on either side of the complement. So instead of using green here, I’m using blue-green and yellow-green. This has a little bit less contrast, but it’s still a very high contrast. The main thing is that you’re using more than two hues, and so you can do more visually interesting things with combinations of hues.
[00:42:12.050] – Tien
Then you can go to the triadic, which is all of the colors are evenly spaced around the color wheel. It’s three colors. Again, as you do this, what you want to do is look at the amount of hue contrast that’s in there and think about how much emotional tension you want. If you want more emotional tension, you move colors further away on the color wheel. If you want less emotional tension, then you move colors closer together on the color wheel.
[00:42:40.770] – Tien
For example, this has a fair amount of emotional tension to it. If I want to reduce the amount of tension, then maybe one thing I can do is go from this magenta and yellow to magenta and purple, which is next to magenta on the color wheel. Then if I do the same thing with blue, now this suddenly feels like it’s got a lot less emotional tension because it’s now an analogous color harmony.
[00:43:11.300] – Tien
Now, having said all of this, I’ve picked a draft where you can get all the different harmonies. You can’t do that in all drafts. Let’s go to this one here, and we’ll put it next to the other one. Let’s see. This one.
[00:43:29.740] – Tien
Now this one, this draft blends colors. And so that means that with certain colors it’s going to work and with certain colors you’re going to get a different set of color harmonies. This is why I think that color harmonies in weaving are of limited use.
[00:43:44.510] – Tien
So if I were to replace colors here and make it green in the center and gray-green on the outside, then what happens is that once I scale it down, the colors start to blend together, and I get gray colors. Whereas if I were working in this draft here, which does not blend colors much, I would have a very different look. You can see how the colors are staying brighter here and they’re dulling down here.
[00:44:18.480] – Tien
That’s a problem for many other harmonies. The only ones that work reliably when your draft is blending colors are the analogous color harmony, which always mixes into other colors in that harmony. So those are colors that are two steps apart on the color wheel. If I do this, you can see that this produces kind of a purple-y look because you are blending magenta and purple and magenta and blue. Then the monochromatic color harmony also, because there’s only one hue, also stays in the harmony when you start mixing colors together, like this.
[00:45:04.890] – Tien
I think that’s all I have to say. Let me just say one other thing in wrap up, which is that color harmonies are helpful, but they’re less helpful in weaving than they are in many other fiber arts because we don’t have the luxury of being able to put red next to blue and decide to do red next to blue next to yellow without worrying about all the other colors that are in our warp or weft. So frequently, we can’t get the nice, clean areas of color that you can with a quilt or knitting or something like that. I would think more about hue contrast as opposed to specific color harmonies.
[00:45:56.650] – Tien
Over to you, Carly.
[00:46:01.910] – Carly
All right.
[00:46:03.250] – Tien
Let me see if I can figure out how to unshare my screen, somewhere around here. Okay. Thank you.
[00:46:10.570] – Carly
Okay. So can you hear me okay?
[00:46:13.970] – Tien
Yep.
[00:46:14.880] – Carly
Okay, great. Let me go to my Share Screen. So I’ll just go through this one fairly fast. Come on. Let me click slideshow. All right. So can everyone see that? We all good? Sorry, I’ve got a lot of words on here because sometimes I get lost when I talk, and it’s just to reground me to what I’m talking about.
[00:46:42.930] – Carly
This class, we talked about double density on a rigid heddle. This is when you thread your two heddles so you can double your EPI and do plain weave.
[00:46:54.170] – Carly
But this class also brings up a couple of newer terms. One is the term density, and the other one is the term standard threading. These are things that are sort of percolating about. They’re not really necessarily definitions that are set in stone and are in books and are agreed upon. But they’re ones where as people continue to talk about rigid heddle weaving and putting structures on it, we tend to say the word density a lot. We tend to talk about like, oh, a standard threading. It’s sort of an organic language, this organic thing in language develops as techniques and technology develops. So that’s sort of where we’re at right now.
[00:47:36.050] – Carly
The term density with rigid heddles means that it’s the relationship between how many threads you have–here I’ve got four threads, four warp ends–and how many eyes and slots they occupy on that front heddle. We’re ignoring this back heddle here. We’re only looking at this front heddle.
[00:47:59.810] – Carly
So since this one doubles, it’s pretty self explanatory. We have four ends, and it goes into one slot and one eye. So four ends into two is 200%, so I could take whatever heddle size I have and put it in the calculator, times it by 200%, it will give me my EPI, which is great.
[00:48:24.210] – Carly
Let’s say both of these illustrations, if these were both on 10-EPI heddles, both of these you could say are 20 ends per inch. This is why we need to have–sorry, I’m going to backtrack a little bit. The reason why we need to have this term density is it helps differentiate between what’s going on with these two threadings. Both of these are doubling. This one is 20 ends per inch. This one would be 20 ends per inch if my heddle was 10 EPI.
[00:48:54.070] – Carly
But the structure that they’re weaving and the resultant cloth is going to be highly different. In one of them, we’re actually threading it so it can do a plain weave for a tabby interlacement, plus some other structures, at 20 EPI. This one, we’re simply doubling.
[00:49:11.840] – Carly
Both of them are solutions. If you have a finer thread that is too fine for your heddle, both of these solutions work. They’re both going to sett slightly differently. If you put these in the Ashenhurst calculator, if you put in the calculations for this threading versus this threading, you’re going to get two different EPIs. So there’s some things to worry about there or not worry about. Anyway.
[00:49:39.590] – Carly
But anyway, density is probably–I’m not going to say it’s difficult, but it definitely creates complications or puzzles when you look at a structure because every structure actually has its own density fingerprint. Every structure, just depending on how many repeats you have of certain shafts because your front heddle is your–it controls a shaft and it sets your sett. It sets your EPI, and it controls a shaft. And because it does both of those things, you’re constantly balancing how you cram or how you space these threads in order to accommodate the shafts as you start adding heddles back behind your first heddle.
[00:50:37.590] – Carly
That’s something that we’ll talk about more, especially as we start getting into twills. Twills tend to have the most density options for you, as opposed to things like overshot, which tend to–you only thread those 100% density, so they’re a little bit easier to kind of work out in your head. But anyway, that’s density. That’s the long version of density.
[00:51:04.970] – Carly
Wait, no, I’m not going there. Yeah, actually, no, I’m done with this page. Oh, my gosh. Okay.
[00:51:10.120] – Carly
The other thing we started talking about are standard threadings. This is another one of those terms which isn’t–I, personally–I don’t know. It’s one of those terms that isn’t set in stone quite yet, but you can see I put this little snippet that I stole from, or just I’m sharing, from–it’s just a little booklet from David Xenakis. He calls these his standard three-heddle threadings or his standard two-heddle threadings, which is–this is just a point. It’s 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1. So these he put out, and he said, oh, this is just a standard threading. This is how you thread for a straight draw twill–that’s this one–or straight draw, sorry, straight draw.
[00:51:53.680] – Carly
And this one’s how you start do a three-shaft point. That’s just the way you thread it. And it’s known and people know how to do it and they’ve taught it. Like, if you take this–I’m tripping on my words a little bit. If you take this double density threading, if you give eight different rigid heddle weavers two heddles and said, okay, figure this out, we need to get this kind of structure, this is pretty much the only way you can thread it. It’s one of those things where you learn it once here, and it’s going to be kind of the same no matter where you learn it. Right?
[00:52:29.930] – Carly
There’s a couple other ones, like the double weave threading. Usually when you do double weave–you could actually do double weave on the double density threading, but you do a hole and a hole and a slot and a slot, a hole and a hole, a slot and a slot. This threading is something that if you’ve ever taken a class on double weave or–yeah, a double [inaudible 00:52:50] rigid heddle, you’ve done this threading, as well. I would say this is also a standard threading.
[00:52:55.830] – Carly
The beauty of the standard threadings is that you can learn them. They can go into your repertoire. And then once we know them as a community, directions could just say thread for double density or thread for this kind of structure, in the same way that floor loom weavers could use–they could say, okay, thread a straight draw, which is 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, or thread a rose path. So it’s just a very easy way of communicating where you don’t always need to have a draft to talk about what you’re doing.
[00:53:27.530] – Carly
Anyway, that’s the base, standard threadings and nonstandard threadings. Nonstandard threadings are going to be things like taking a draft and putting it onto your loom. It’s not standard. You might have eight different ways of doing it. So those are two terms that we talked about.
[00:53:48.760] – Carly
I’m not going to really talk about how to thread your heddles because I don’t think that would be very helpful in a lecture, and it’s all there in the class. But the other thing that we started talking about is how to take what is happening on your heddles and then convert them over to a draft.
[00:54:06.110] – Carly
For this, I made a key, where I said, okay, Shaft 1 is going to be my front heddle. The one at the bottom is the one closest to me. Shaft 2 is going to be my slot threads. Shaft 3 is going to be my back heddle.
[00:54:19.380] – Carly
Then I translated that onto a draft. I said, okay, Shaft 1 is going to go here. Shaft 2 is going to go here. Shaft 3 is going to go here. Shaft 2 is going to go here. Then I end up seeing how this threading looks in draft format.
[00:54:35.890] – Carly
Really, when we started having people read over the class, a lot of people were, like, why do I want to know this? One of the reasons why I think it’s interesting to look at what’s happening with your heddles and then translate them to a draft is then you could start putting them–wait, did I lose? Oh, yeah, no, this is the second one. Wait. Okay, there we go. Ta-da.
[00:54:57.010] – Carly
You could start putting it into software. And if you could also translate your heddles into a lift plan, you could start to play with different structures, just like the floor loom weavers get to. You get to start adding colors, and you get to start playing with them. That’s one thing you can do.
[00:55:17.740] – Carly
The other thing that you can do is–I’m going to backtrack again. I had that threading, had that one key. This threading has this key, which is different, where I changed Shaft 1. I changed this yellow shaft, my slot threads, to actually Shaft 3, and then the teal one is Shaft 2. You could see even the structure, the threading, everything’s the same. But now my threading looks different because I’ve switched those shafts around or the shaft translation. I changed my key, and then this changes. So it could look like this, or it could look like this.
[00:56:04.010] – Carly
The reason why that is interesting is if you look at this structure right here, if I were to go into Handweaving.net, I’d have this structure. I know that up here, these are all slot threads. And slot threads, which we learned in Rigid Heddles from the Ground Up, are controllable through pick-up sticks, so my free agents, they can do anything I want them to do. They’re not connected to a shaft at all. If I look at this [inaudible 00:56:34] right here, I’ve got one, and then I’ve got three, I’ve got two, I’ve got three, I’ve got one. So that looks exactly like this.
[00:56:43.660] – Carly
Now, these kind of keep going up and up and up and up and down, down, down, down. But. I can move all of these to be–what am I trying to say? I’m trying to say that they’re similar. If I look at a draft in a magazine, I’m, like, oh, my gosh, these things look the same. Can I do this weave with these cute little hearts on this threading? And I can, which is really exciting because, obviously, a rigid heddle does not have eight shafts.
[00:57:18.190] – Carly
So that’s why sometimes I like to look at it in–it’s much, much easier to see this correlation than it is to try to make this mayhem of all these different threads match what’s going on over here.
[00:57:37.400] – Carly
Then another puzzle, which takes a little bit of time getting used to, is you have to figure out how to make these sheds where your pick-up sticks are going to go to move all of those different–like, these are the little paired threads to make this tied weave. Obviously, I think this one’s missing–it’s a summer and winter pattern. It’s missing the plain weave in there.
[00:58:03.830] – Carly
Anyway, I think that that is it. I feel like I’m spinning out a little bit, so reel me back.
[00:58:11.140]
[laughter]
[00:58:12.500] – Carly
I thoroughly confused everybody. I also–
[00:58:15.610]
[crosstalk 00:58:15]
[00:58:15.610] – Janet
Previews of coming attractions.
[00:58:17.640] – Carly
What?
[00:58:18.450] – Janet
Previews of coming attractions.
[00:58:20.320] – Carly
But look, it’s a little cookie. Look at our cookie cutter up there. So you can use cookie cutters with other things, too, which is so exciting. So yay. Okay.
[00:58:30.000] – Carly
Oh, wait. There’s some other stuff. There’s more. I have pictures of things I’ve woven with this threading. I’ve done a little bit of rep by doubling my doubling two threads through each heddle in each slot on two heddles so I could go up to 48 or 60. Yeah, 60 EPI if I wanted to do a two-shaft rep weave. You could do, of course, fabric, which is really nice.
[00:59:08.070] – Carly
And here I did some experiments with just some summer and winter lift systems and then playing with just different kinds of lifts to create some patterns. This little sample piece, this is 20 EPI. Of course, you could just add pick-up sticks, just like you do your normal standard one-heddle threading. And you could get [inaudible 00:59:30]–be able to use the finer linens to do huck and to do different kinds of laces. All right, I think that’s it. It’s a good [inaudible 00:59:42].
[00:59:44.160] – Carly
And then how do I stop sharing?
[00:59:49.500] – Janet
That was a lot.
[00:59:55.840] – Tien
And we got things in on time.
[00:59:58.260] – Janet
We did. How fast can we talk? Even with the Wheel of Fortune, who’s going first, at the start? Yeah.
[01:00:07.380] – Dawn
People must be thinking very hard because there’s no questions. Or you’re going to get a whole lot of them on the 19th. I’m not sure which way.
[01:00:16.950] – Janet
Maybe they’ll need to watch this three or four times before they can parse it out enough to figure out what the question should be.
[01:00:26.070] – Dawn
No one’s ever going to look at a cookie sheet again the same way.
[01:00:29.580] – Janet
Yay.
[01:00:29.580] – Carly
Yay.
[01:00:29.580] – Dawn
Mission accomplished.
[01:00:29.580] – Janet
I think Tien has gone to fetch the closing ceremonies.
[01:00:46.400] – Carly
Are we all sharing?
[01:00:48.800] – Janet
Do you have one to share?
[01:00:50.260] – Carly
I got one.
[01:00:53.232]
[crosstalk 01:00:53]
[01:00:53.430] – Carly
I do. I do.
[01:00:55.520] – Dawn
Hi, sweetie.
[01:00:57.240] – Tien
There you go.
[01:00:58.110] – Carly
There we go.
[01:00:59.080] – Dawn
Hey, Fritz.
[01:00:59.870] – Carly
There we go.
[01:01:02.660] – Tien
Is Janet off getting a cat?
[01:01:04.760] – Dawn
Look at that sweet face. I hope so. We’d have three animals at once. That’s a first.
[01:01:10.850]
[crosstalk 01:01:11]
[01:01:15.410] – Tien
Get a screenshot quick.
[01:01:16.521]
[crosstalk 01:01:17]
[01:01:17.160] – Dawn
Screenshot.
[01:01:18.590] – Janet
Here, I’ll put it on Gallery.
[01:01:30.070] – Dawn
Are we all set?
[01:01:32.120] – Janet
Yeah, I think so.
[01:01:33.830] – Dawn
Okay.
[01:01:34.890] – Janet
Thanks for coming, everybody.
[01:01:38.075]
[crosstalk 01:01:38]
[01:01:38.300] – Dawn
Everybody’s smiling. Good night.
[01:01:41.640] – Tien
Bye, everyone. Good night.
[01:01:43.120] – Janet
Bye, everybody.