[00:00:00.160] – Tien
First question is from Sheila Roberts, who says, I would like to talk more about the red and green sample that appears in the Value and Mood Lighting lesson. And she wants to know how to make something like that happen in her weaving. So let me pull up that lesson and share my screen. Okay.
[00:00:20.190] – Tien
So here’s the swatch that Sheila was talking about. And you can see how there’s motion in it. There’s actually motion in it for two reasons. One of them is that it is actually not entirely on grain, and that’s because I’ve got a 2/2 twill going up and down this one section of warp, and I’ve got a 2/2 twill in the opposite direction going down the swatch. And that actually pulls it a little bit askew. And so with this one, I was doing my best to get it flat and straight, and because of the structure, it just doesn’t do that. Janet could probably tell you more about that, if you want, she said. Gleefully throwing Janet under the bus.
[00:01:10.510] – Janet
Yeah, I was looking at the answer to the next question. What am I discussing? The zigzag of the twill?
[00:01:15.840] – Tien
The zigzag of the twill.
[00:01:17.440] – Janet
Yeah. So my guess is that that is due in part to the angle of the twill lines, because those do have an impact on the way that the threads mesh together. And it may also be in part due to the twist of the yarns themselves. It’s possible that the green and the red are not twisted in the same direction. You can get some very cool collapse and other nifty effects from the twist of your yarns or from the threading of your fabric to create furrows. Probably these are all the same yarns, and so that angle is coming from just the twill lines, because it has a bias, and it wants to stretch in a certain direction. And so that’s probably what’s going on.
[00:02:12.040] – Tien
That’s my guess, too. And if you’re using a 1/3 twill and a 3/1 twill, you would get pleats, again because of the way that [inaudible 00:02:18].
[00:02:21.750] – Janet
If an entire column was 3/1, say, and then the next column, yeah, then you’re going to get warp-wise collapse-y pleats, deeper or shallower, depending on your fiber and the flexibility and how hard you pressed it and all of that.
[00:02:37.030] – Tien
So that’s part one, the physical part of why there’s so much movement in this particular swatch. Janet, go ahead and carry on. The rest of it is about color.
[00:02:45.570] – Tien
So the other thing that’s going on in this swatch is that–let’s see, Enhance Colors–if you look at it in black and white, like that, you can see it in almost, but not quite, flat gray. And in particular, there’s an interesting effect where if you take two colors that are color wheel opposites that have very high hue contrast, and if you make them the same value, what happens is the eye gets confused.
[00:03:19.450] – Tien
And so what happens–let me just show you a better example, which I have here. This one almost looks like it’s pulsing. And the reason why is that the red and the green are almost exactly the same value, but they’re opposites on the color wheel. So what’s happening is that–Janet?
[00:03:41.590] – Janet
I’m sorry.
[00:03:42.510] – Tien
Did you want to say something to the class?
[00:03:44.220] – Janet
No, I just switched back to this window. And you’re right, that just wah-wah-wah in my eyes.
[00:03:49.900]
[laughter]
[00:03:52.990] – Tien
And the reason is that you have two color or visual processing centers in your brain. One of them works in black and white, and it does depth perception. And it’s not that long and complicated story, so I’ll tell you.
[00:04:11.590] – Tien
The reason you’ve got two visual centers in your brain is that the part of your brain that handles things like depth perception, motion sensing, finding the edges of things, and so on, basically all the things that keep you from getting eaten by lions, is common to all the mammals that evolved a couple million years ago. And it only sees in black and white because most mammals have limited to no color vision.
[00:04:36.560] – Tien
And then there’s the other section of your brain, which was installed–it’s the browser extension that the primates installed, and it sees color.
[00:04:46.800] – Tien
And so what’s happening is that the black and white part of your brain is saying, gosh, this is flat. In fact, it’s absolutely featureless. Let me show you. You can see that in black and white it’s almost exactly the same colors. So one half of your brain is basically saying this is completely flat and the other half of your brain is saying, no, it’s not. It’s radically different.
[00:05:14.890] – Tien
And so when that happens, you get almost this sort of pulsing thing as your brain sort of struggles to make sense of the whole thing. I call it sort of opening the hell mouth, just because it has that sort of “we’re about to open a portal into another dimension.”
[00:05:30.560] – Tien
Now, the degree to which you get that effect depends partly on the design that you’re using. So this design has the same effect, but it’s not as pronounced because you’ve got big blocks of red and big blocks of green. If I go back to this one–and then if I show you this one, this is a similar swatch, and it also tends to pulse, but you’ll notice that–let me arrange this here and next to this one.
[00:06:06.110] – Tien
If you look at these two, you can see that both of them have the same pulsing effect, except that it’s stronger on the right side because the design itself is more detailed. Over here, you have blocks and they tend to vibrate at the edges where you have red and green together. But the effect is not as pronounced on this side.
[00:06:25.690] – Tien
Now I’m going to pull up Handweaving.net, which is in one of these tabs–here we go–to show you what this looks like live. This particular draft has blue and orange of the exact same value. And blue and orange are pretty close to opposites on the color wheel. They’re not quite opposite, but close enough. And so you can see that there is kind of a little bit of that pulsing feel to it.
[00:06:58.990] – Tien
If I were to change the orange to a purple of the same value as the blue, you can see how you not only don’t get that pulsing effect, but you don’t get any pattern at all or you get a very hard-to-see pattern. And that’s because the colors are very similar in hue and they’re also very similar in value. And when that happens, the pattern kind of disappears. And again, if you go back to your orange, now you have a much more clear pattern, but it’s still not as clear as if you were to use, say, a lighter value, like this light blue here. Let’s switch this one out.
[00:07:46.160] – Tien
So here, again, you’re not getting that pulsing effect because you have colors of different value. And let me try changing this one now. So here you have orange with–this is actually even a better example because these two colors are the same value. Of course, the orange and blue were slightly different. But you can see how this is kind of vibrating in your face. And that’s because, once again, you have two colors that are near color wheel opposites but very similar values.
[00:08:22.390] – Tien
If I were to go darker on the blue–let’s say I were to go down here to navy blue–you would almost completely lose that vibration. So it’s important that the two colors be opposite on the color wheel and that they have about the same value. So that is my spiel. Janet.
[00:08:53.730] – Janet
Okey-dokey. Let’s see. The first question I had that was sent in in advance comes from Christine Shepard, who said, I downloaded a draft for a Christmas pattern with no weaving instructions. In the draft are repeated threading numbers 2 2, 3, 3, 4, 4, etc. The treadling is simple, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Should I use overshot on this or is that not necessary?
[00:09:23.280] – Janet
Let’s see. I will show you the draft in question. There it is. Just going to check in the other window to make sure that that is clear to see. Oh, it hasn’t shared yet. Or the YouTube is a little bit behind. Can you–let me know if you can’t see the tie-up or you can’t see some important part of the draft because my picture or our pictures are on top of it.
[00:09:52.830] – Dawn
Can’t see anything. I can just see your pictures. There you go.
[00:09:58.960] – Janet
So I’m not sharing?
[00:10:00.690] – Dawn
That’s it. Okay, good. There you are.
[00:10:02.370] – Janet
It’s sharing now?
[00:10:03.560] – Dawn
Okay.
[00:10:04.280] – Janet
Excellent. Okay. So Christine is talking about this area up here. There’s a square. Here we go. Up here, where you can see that the shafts are repeated. So two threads on shaft three, then two threads on shaft four, and two threads on shaft five.
[00:10:29.820] – Janet
So, Christine, what this is is it’s called an undulating twill. And you do thread it exactly like it looks. One thread on shaft one, then one thread on two, and then two threads go through separate heddle on shaft three, and then two threads go through separate heddles on shaft four, etc.
[00:10:51.990] – Janet
No, you do not weave this like overshot. You weave it just like it is as a twill. And that is what gives you those sort of bendy twill lines that have a different angle than the green twill lines, which will be more of the usual 45 degrees. And also the angle undulates. That’s why it’s called an undulating twill. So it’s sharper at the edge of the red stripe and then it gets kind of flat and then it gets sharper again.
[00:11:27.310] – Janet
So undulating twills do typically have just this sort of threading where you have repeated shafts. And then it’s not uncommon at all for them to also have twill areas where shafts are missing. So if you look at the green stripes–or, actually, the colors don’t necessarily coincide with the threading, but that first section that goes 8, 6, 4, 2, that’s actually skipping all the odd shafts, and that makes the twill line even steeper.
[00:12:02.910] – Janet
So short version of the answer is thread it exactly the way that it shows and then treadle it just the way that it is. You should not need an additional tabby, if that’s what you mean by treadling like overshot. You don’t need any of that. But you may need a closer sett than you would normally use with twill because it has longer floats and not very much closer because the floats aren’t very much longer. They’re four ends instead of two ends, but they’re only doing that in the undulating areas, whereas in the other areas they have some one-end floats to kind of balance things out. So consider a slightly closer sett, but follow the draft exactly as it’s written. No tabby, no overshot-tiness. That’s that.
[00:12:57.600] – Tien
Okay. One for both of us, or do we go for a live one?
[00:13:01.680] – Janet
Let’s do a live one.
[00:13:02.972] – Tien
Alright.
[00:13:03.080] – Dawn
Alright. I’m ready. I’m unmuted. Ellen says–her question is this. I have an eight-shaft floor loom which I have never used. Can you recommend a beginning project for me? My biggest difficulty is knowing how to tie on the loom. It’s a countermarch upper/lower lams.
[00:13:24.380] – Janet
Okay. My go-to sort of training wheels, eight-shaft thing would be some kind of an eight-shaft twill, because they don’t really behave differently from a four -shaft twill. They’re just fancier or prettier. Well, prettier, fancier, more complicated. So it won’t feel like you’re doing something radically new and difficult. It’ll just be–all that’s going to–the only complexity it’s going to add is more choices when threading, because you have more shafts to choose between, and a little more complexity when you’re tying up. And, again, with the treadling, you’ve got more treadles to choose from. So there are lots of eight shafts–I would probably make a tea towel or something or a scarf or something like that.
[00:14:21.000] – Janet
As for tying up your loom, on a countermarch your tie-up will have–if it’s written for a countermarch, your tie-up will have both X’s and O’s. The O’s are the rising shed, so they get tied to the bottom lams. And the X’s are your sinking shafts, so they get tied to your top lams. So I will add that to a Weaver’s Toolbox. It is not currently there, but I do want to show you what is currently there that may be helpful to you and will be amended shortly.
[00:15:04.930] – Janet
So this is–pardon me–in the Weaver’s Toolbox, which is part of the website. You can get to it here from the left side of your screen. I’ll hang on for a little bit until I’m sure that this is being shared. Over here on the left navigation panel, there’s Weaver’s Toolbox.
[00:15:26.440] – Janet
And one of the sections of the Weaver’s Toolbox is Drafts and Drafting, where there are already some toolboxes related to rising, sinking tie-ups, that kind of thing. And in this article or toolbox entry, “How do I convert from rising to sinking?”, if you come down to the bottom, you’ll see a section for converting to a countermarch tie-up. So if you don’t have a countermarch tie-up yet, this will tell you how to do it. And I will add to this that the top lams are tied to the sinking shafts and the bottom lams are tied to the rising shafts. And I will also add a whole toolbox for “How do I tie up my countermarch loom?” So there you go.
[00:16:22.540] – Tien
Okay. Let me see. So we did a live question, so I’m doing a–no, we’re doing a Tien-and-Janet question. We got one of those. So Sophie said, can you give us a peek at future class offerings? What other types of classes do you plan to offer and when?
[00:16:45.940] – Tien
Well, as it happens, we do actually have this information available right in the Academy. As soon as I figure out where my share of screen button is–here we go. All right. So if you go to Courses, there’s a tab called the Project Arc Roadmap, and that gives you the roadmap for upcoming classes, particularly in this Project Arc. So these are the courses that have been released so far. And then there’s an explanation of what the Project Arc is.
[00:17:23.130] – Tien
But then there’s the Course Flow Roadmap and the Course Release Plan. So the Course Flow Roadmap tells you what order to take the classes in. And that’s kind of cool. You don’t have to take them in that order. You can take them more or less in whatever order you like. And so that tells you what’s coming up.
[00:17:41.020] – Tien
But this is the Course Release Plan, and it tells you what’s coming up in the next couple of months. So coming in–and you can also change the ordering, if you want to. And then it tells you also what sequence in the Arc it belongs to.
[00:18:00.260] – Tien
So this is all the stuff that’s being released in December. You’ve got the Understanding Value and Color Recipes already. And then the Lowdown on Cotton will be coming in another week or two. One of the things we want feedback on is actually whether you’d prefer to get everything at the beginning of the month or whether you like having space in between classes.
[00:18:25.460] – Tien
And so if you look here, you can see that in January we’re releasing a number of other classes. We’re releasing a class on plain weave. We’re doing Value in Design, which is another color class. And then we’re doing a class on reading one of our drafts and two technique classes, short ones.
[00:18:47.590] – Tien
And then in February, we’re doing Designing with Muted and Neutral Colors, which goes–Value in Design, up here, coming in January, is a class about how to design with–the effects of value on design. And so it takes Understanding Value and extends it and teaches you the principles of design.
[00:19:11.940] – Tien
And then Designing with Muted and Neutral Colors actually gives you the entire sequence of the design process. So you start with a palette, and you go–you start by selecting your palette or–getting ideas, select your palette, do your draft, weave your samples. And so that’s much more about the design process. Now that you know all these principles, how do you take them and go to an actual project? How would you design an actual project?
[00:19:46.840] – Tien
Ready, Sett, Go is all about sett. And then Crunching the Numbers is about weaving math, right, Janet? Okay. And then Shuttle Handling, again, helps you in terms of just how to throw a shuttle and catch it efficiently and accurately.
[00:20:05.890] – Tien
And then in March, we’re getting Project One, which is a scarf in muted and neutral colors. And that just kind of takes everything and wraps it all together.
[00:20:13.920] – Tien
So the two big topics in this are obviously how to design with color. But also we’re going to have–because you’ve gotten the Sett class and the Crunching the Numbers class, if you want to change the yarns from what we’re specifying, which will be 8/2 cotton, Maurice Brassard, if you have it, those are the colors that are being used throughout all the exercises because that’s what we will wind up using in the scarf. And so that way you’re able to take everything you’ve learned and all the designs that you’ve created and apply them in the scarf.
[00:20:48.040] – Tien
But also, because you’ve learned about sett and weaving math, if you want to change out the yarns that you’re using for something thicker or thinner, then you can do that as well. It’s up to you, and it depends on which classes you’ve taken. Did that all make sense, Janet?
[00:21:10.460] – Janet
Yes. I think so.
[00:21:12.210] – Tien
Okay.
[00:21:12.630] – Janet
The parts I was listening to.
[00:21:13.710] – Tien
Oh, fine, Janet.
[00:21:16.750]
[laughter]
[00:21:18.230] – Janet
[inaudible 00:21:18] questions getting ready and updating the countermarch tie-up thing so it’s already in a document in the Toolbox.
[00:21:24.790] – Tien
You know, Janet is just telling you that. She never listens to me anyway.
[00:21:29.140] – Janet
I listened to 90% of that, and I understood all of it.
[00:21:33.640] – Tien
Very good, Janet. There will be a pop quiz next time.
[00:21:39.710] – Janet
Oh.
[00:21:40.138]
[laughter]
[00:21:39.710] – Tien
Alright. That’s that for this one. So I believe, Janet, you are up next.
[00:21:47.140] – Janet
Why don’t we do one of the live ones because there’s lots of those and [crosstalk 00:21:50].
[00:21:50.440] – Tien
Okay. Sounds great.
[00:21:52.610] – Dawn
Okay, here I come. Let’s see. Well, I’m just going to go through these in order. Christie [inaudible 00:22:00] says, re: our profiles. Can we change our surname, or do you want that left to be official versus long? And she would like to have it show in forums in a shortened format.
[00:22:11.740] – Janet
Your surname you can do what you want with, as long as it doesn’t break our profanity guidelines or something like that. You can change it to whatever you like, though. And you can choose to hide it entirely. The only parts of your profile name that you can’t change and that are required to show are your first name and your–actually, you can change your first name, but it’s required to show. And your username you cannot edit, and it will show.
[00:22:41.650] – Janet
But you can do what you want with your surname. So you can make it an abbreviation. You can change it to something else. Or you can hide it from other people entirely.
[00:22:49.120] – Janet
So I’ll show you quickly where to do that. Let’s see. If you go to My Academy or you can go to My Profile from here in your Profile or Avatar menu. It’s the same thing. Let’s see here. I’m going to shrink all these things on my window. And edit here in Your Info, this Your Info box. If you edit that–what are you laughing about?
[00:23:22.590] – Tien
Your pronouns. Hereafter I will call you “none of your business.”
[00:23:27.580] – Janet
Oh, okay. I was making videos to show people how to do this. I am looking at it myself, so I can see that my pronouns are set to “none of your business”, but, see, it’s set to Only Me. So anybody else looking at my page will not see it. And you can set that for anything other than your first name and your username. Your first name and your username will always be visible, and you can’t edit the username. Well, you could edit it, but it won’t save. But the rest of them you can change. So the short answer to your question is yes, change it. Make it an initial. Do whatever you like.
[00:24:11.290] – Tien
Having said that, if you have a strong reason not to have your username contain your first and last name, for example, if you are being stalked or something like that, get in touch with us, and we will set it.
[00:24:25.500] – Janet
Absolutely. You can’t change it, but we can make sure that it’s something different. So your safety and privacy is important to us.
[00:24:40.840] – Tien
Okay. I think I’m up now. Yeah, let’s do it. So my next question is from Dayamitra, who says, can you explain more about the free online photo editor Lunapic and the function that can be utilized? So yes, let me share my screen. Okay.
[00:25:05.960] – Tien
So this is Lunapic. And this is Lunapic.com. It forwards to this. Actually, let me start from the beginning. So if you go to Lunapic.com, you can see that you have all sorts of editing tools available down here in this section. And if you choose black and white under Effects and Filters, then it–oh, I was on it to begin with. Let’s try this again. Sorry. All right. It’s pre-loaded in the image. Let me see if I can just close this.
[00:25:47.740] – Janet
Maybe an incognito tab?
[00:25:49.750] – Tien
Oh, yeah, good idea. Okay. So we go to Lunapic.com. We go under Effects and Filters to black and white. And then you upload your photo, so pick a file. And I’m going to pick this one that we looked at earlier, the orange and cyan that was almost flat gray. And that’s all you do. You upload the image, and there you go.
[00:26:25.530] – Tien
And then you can also adjust, if you want, how much of the saturation is removed. So this is the fully desaturated version. This is sort of in between. And that’s really all there is to it.
[00:26:43.530] – Tien
If you want, you can also upload a new image. So if you go back to that page, then you get the chance to choose another image. And so if we want to look at this one, you can see that there’s much more value difference, which means that it’s much less likely to open the zombie hellgate. Sorry, hellmouth. So that’s that. Dare I ask, Janet?
[00:27:14.900] – Janet
I’m just laughing at the zombie hellmouth. Have you been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer lately or something?
[00:27:20.540] – Tien
No, but I watched it as a young tyke.
[00:27:26.010] – Janet
Let’s see. I’m going to go to my other–well, it’s a question that I claimed from the submitted in advance because it’s a website one. And Courtney Mitchell asks, she says, I find I must go to an email in order to find a link to log in. Is there a way to link to login without finding an email? I tried my.handweavingacademy.com and got nowhere.
[00:27:50.460] – Janet
I’m puzzled by that because it should work. So I’m going to–what am I going to do? I’m going to come back to this one and make it–come on. There. So now you can see the top there and–wrong button. There we go.
[00:28:17.330] – Janet
If I just enter my.handweavingacademy.com–oh, you know what? I’m going to open an incognito window. That’s the thing that Chrome browsers can do. It’s not a thing you need to know how to do. But when you open one, it’s like for–it treats you like you haven’t logged in anywhere yet. So it will look more like–well, I haven’t logged in, so it’s what you will experience if you have not yet logged in either. So if I type my.handweavingacademy.com–not dashboard, just that–it should take you to the login page.
[00:28:55.070] – Dawn
We are not quite seeing you log in. I’m still seeing that draft.
[00:29:02.540] – Janet
Are you watching on YouTube, or are you–
[00:29:05.690] – Dawn
No, I’m on–
[00:29:05.690] – Janet
Because YouTube is a few seconds behind. Oh, you’re just on the main screen? Okay, then I am going to open a new incognito window. How about that? Do you see my Chrome yet?
[00:29:17.680] – Dawn
No. I still see the–anybody else weigh in on this? I still see your red and green draft.
[00:29:26.540] – Janet
Anybody else out there?
[00:29:30.890] – Tien
I see your red green draft.
[00:29:33.510] – Dawn
Oh, good. Thank you.
[00:29:33.510] – Janet
Seeing draft on YouTube. Okay, so I clearly just shared wrong. Sorry. One moment, please. Oh, I opened a new tab. Sorry, that was my bad.
[00:29:43.730] – Dawn
Thanks, Ellen. Thanks, Cam.
[00:29:46.940] – Janet
Thank you all for straightening me out. Okay, now if I do this, do you see my incognito window?
[00:29:59.540] – Dawn
Yes. Yes, we do.
[00:30:01.730] – Janet
Good. I did it right this time. So I should be able to say handweavingacademy.com, and then if I hit enter, it will take me to the login page. Once you are logged in to the website, like over here, you should be able to go to any page and bookmark it too, if you want to. So, for instance, I bookmarked the dashboard here. And how you bookmark things is going to depend on what browser you use. And that takes me straight to the dashboard.
[00:30:47.440] – Janet
Choosing weft colors takes me straight to a lesson. Those are bookmarks that I created in my browser. But keep in mind that your bookmarks are only going to work if you’re already logged in.
[00:30:58.940] – Janet
We also have a glitch going on right now that if you click on a link in an email, that takes you to the website, but you’re not already logged into the website in one of your browser tabs, it says, oh, you are not a logged in user, so you are not allowed to see anything in the Academy website. So I’m going to take you to the Members Only page. But first it makes you log in to get there.
[00:31:28.340] – Janet
So you log in, and then it sends you to the Members Only page. And you’re thinking, what the heck, I am a member and I just logged in. Why are you telling me I’m not a member? And it’s because of this weird glitch.
[00:31:38.090] – Janet
You are actually logged in. And from that Members Only page, which looks like this–sorry, [inaudible 00:31:53] restricted. It’ll look something like this. You can still navigate to any of the links in your menus. We know this is not ideal. We are working to get it fixed, but it is the way that it currently is. Alas. All right. Oops. No. Wrong thing. There. Done.
[00:32:21.140] – Dawn
Okay. Is it my turn?
[00:32:23.990] – Janet
Sure.
[00:32:25.490] – Dawn
I’m going to ask questions on the current classes real quick. Dayamitra–and I’m glad to know that I was saying it right in my head at least–asks, in our Understanding Value worksheet, you ask about patterning being bold in between subtle or mixed. You also ask on value contrast being high, medium, low, or mixed. Can you show some examples?
[00:32:52.560] – Tien
Sure. Let me show you my–when you’re only dealing with value, the two are more or less synonymous. Or things that have high value contrast are generally also bolder patterns. But when I start talking about patterning, I talk about these things called sturdy patterns, which are the ones on the left. Let me just click through it here. And these are patterns that are bold patterns. Generally speaking, there are large chunks of warp-dominant areas next to large chunks of weft-dominant areas.
[00:33:31.490] – Tien
And as a result, these patterns are intrinsically bolder than, for example–let me open the other one–so what I call delicate patterns. These are patterns that are not nearly as bold. Let me pull this out, so you can see the difference. So you can see that there is not as much value contrast intrinsically in this pattern. Or that this pattern has a lot of areas of blended color compared to, for example, this pattern here, the green and white, or this pattern here, which is a 3/1 broken twill versus 1/3 broken twill.
[00:34:14.760] – Tien
And if you look at these, they mix the colors together a lot more. And so these are more delicate patterns. So these are not bold patterns. And this has to do–and then if you look at value contrast–let’s take one of these here. If you increase the amount of value contrast, let’s say you turn it to black and white–Editor and Turn Off Lines. And let’s say you were to go to black here. And we hit Replace Colors. Now that has high value contrast. And so that’s going to have a lot more visible pattern than, say, this one, which has much less value contrast. So that is the short answer.
[00:35:22.490] – Tien
If you were to go to one of these, let’s say let’s go to this one, and go to the Color Editor, and if you were to change this, you can see how this, at a similar scale, has a much harder to see pattern. And if I were to drop this quite down to just kind of about the same red, like this, and Replace Colors. And there we go.
[00:36:07.410] – Tien
So the boldness of pattern is determined by two things. One, value contrast and a little bit of hue contrast, which is what we’ve been talking about, but also about how thick the lines are in the pattern.
[00:36:21.670] – Tien
So this one on the left here is a bolder pattern because it has big chunks of warp next to big chunks of weft. And so that separates the warp and weft colors. This one here is mixing the warp and weft colors together a lot more. And it doesn’t have big chunks of warp-dominant or big chunks of weft-dominant areas. That’s a factor as well. But like I said, also, whether or not it’s high value contrast or low value contrast twill also greatly increase the boldness of the pattern. Okay. Dawn.
[00:37:07.820] – Janet
Actually, I’d like to–sorry to interrupt.
[00:37:09.782] – Tien
Go ahead, Janet.
[00:37:09.890] – Janet
I want to follow up on a question from earlier because Kathy Minor said she was able to edit her username, and she’s corrected me. Yes, you can edit your username, but I’m going to show you a thing and the reason why it’s important.
[00:37:28.940] – Janet
So I assume, Kathy, that you were Kathleen originally, because here I see that you were Kathleen Minor down there and now your username is Kathy Minor. So that’s fine. Obviously you can edit it.
[00:37:42.490] – Janet
But what has not changed is your name up in the URL. So the reason this is important is if the reason you’re changing your username is for safety or security, because you have some–you do not want to be findable online, then whatever name you entered when you create your account, when you purchase your subscription will stay up here in this URL, even if you change your username later. So if it’s important to you that this not be visible, then speak to us, and we will help you. What we’ll do is create an account manually for you and give you access to it, and then you can purchase a subscription.
[00:38:28.490] – Janet
But we have to configure all of that manually. So it’s not a thing that we do unless there’s a safety requirement for it, but we certainly can do it if that is your situation.
[00:38:41.100]
[crosstalk 00:38:41]
[00:38:42.740] – Dawn
Can I pop in and ask a question? If Kathy changes her username, it doesn’t change if people mention her or message her.
[00:38:52.860] – Janet
It might make it more difficult for people to find her because they’ll see that this is her name. And if they’re in a forum and they’re trying to mention her, which you can do–it’s like if you’re familiar with Ravelry, you can [inaudible 00:39:10] people or on Facebook, you can tag people.
[00:39:13.110] – Janet
So if I want to go here to, say, this one and mention Kathy, let’s just see what happens. We’re still, honestly, learning some of this stuff ourselves. So if I type “Kathy”, there is Kathy, but see, her username still says Kathleen.
[00:39:33.290] – Dawn
Yeah.
[00:39:35.540] – Janet
So whether–Kathy, you’ll have to let us know if you get this. Hey, Kathy, do you see this? Do you get a notification? And you can let us know. And then we’ll delete this because this shouldn’t really be living in the Weaving Help in poor Carolyn Metzler’s question about tying on. But still, this is how we learn how this stuff works and why you guys are here to help us polish the site.
[00:40:03.670] – Tien
To be clear, Janet actually knows a ton about the website. But the particular WordPress plugin that we’re using dumps a whole lot of options on you. And so imagine trying to understand how all of Facebook works and you’ll get an idea of kind of what it’s been like trying to comprehend the entire website. And so while we certainly know what the big things are, there are some small, minor bits that we’re still learning along.
[00:40:37.640] – Janet
Yeah.
[00:40:37.640] – Tien
I didn’t want to give anyone the impression that Janet does not know the website backwards and forwards because she’s built about half of it. Just saying. And with that, let’s move on to the next question.
[00:40:53.690] – Dawn
Alright, who wants this one? Who’s doing a question?
[00:40:58.340] – Tien
I was actually going to answer the question about, in tabby weaving, don’t wide value contrasting stripes make a bold pattern? Yes, they do. In this particular–in the case that I was showing earlier–share screen–these are all solid warp and solid weft. So all the patterning is in the draft. If you’re working with plain weave or something like that, or if you’re just working with stripes, if you put the stripes–and I should have done this because–oops–I should have mentioned this earlier, because, after all, we’re working with plain weave stripes here. I was just thinking off the cuff about bold pattern drafts.
[00:41:39.590] – Tien
So if you put wide stripes, you will get a bold pattern. Imagine that this is plain weave. I don’t think I can edit in this mode. But if you were to use thin stripes, like so, for example, if I were to do this, single-thread stripes, and you can see how this is a much less bold pattern, and it’s really blending the colors together. So I hope that answers that question. So this one here would be a delicate pattern with the white and black stripes of single threads. And then this over here would be a much bolder pattern with the wider stripes.
[00:42:33.470] – Janet
I have a question about that, while you’re still there. So in that example, you had high contrast warp stripes and the weft color was all one color.
[00:42:44.240] – Tien
Right.
[00:42:44.750] – Janet
Does it matter if the weft color is more similar in value to one or the other of those warp colors?
[00:42:53.570] – Tien
It does.
[00:42:53.570] – Janet
Or is it somewhere in the middle?
[00:42:56.160] – Tien
Sure. So let me show you. So what happens if your–basically, your pattern is going to show wherever you happen to have high value contrast between warp and weft, because that is what makes a pattern show is value contrast. So in this section here, you’re pairing a white with a dark color. And so here you can see the pattern pretty clearly. This is actually a middle-value color. So you can also see the pattern, but not quite as starkly in the red and black thing.
[00:43:26.930] – Tien
Now, if you were to introduce stripes into that weft–and let’s just do a stripe that is a lighter color over here–you start getting chaos, actually. It’s really hard to do stripes and a complex draft pattern effectively unless the patterns align. And here I’m drawing them at random so they don’t. But you can see how now you can see very little pattern or not very clear pattern over here, dark pattern over here, or a bolder pattern over here. But you can also see, superimposed on that, the pattern of the colored stripes. If you were working in plain weave, you wouldn’t have to worry about the visibility of your draft pattern because there isn’t one in plain weave. It’s entirely featureless.
[00:44:21.440] – Tien
So Janet, why don’t you take the next question. And I will do up an example in plain weave.
[00:44:27.280] – Janet
Okey-doke. I don’t have any more sent in, so we’re all live questions now.
[00:44:37.040] – Dawn
Okey-dokey.
[00:44:37.040] – Janet
So are there any that are directly related to the classes that are out that I can talk about? I don’t think, for me, I mean, there are for Tien. So I’m going to take this opportunity to make sure that you folks are aware that Understanding Value and Color Recipes are not the only two classes that are already released. They’re the ones that show up on the Project Arc tab because they are part of the Project Arc.
[00:45:06.550] – Janet
But we also have two classes that Dawn put together related to the Color Editor. So those are available for your delectation at this point. And if you have questions about those classes, you can ask them tonight, too. And we have Dawn here to answer them, so be sure to keep that in mind. So then having said that, Dawn, what should I answer from this list?
[00:45:32.290] – Dawn
Well, you could talk about weaving things, like Joy Hogue wonders, if you’ll remind us how to avoid smiles on each side of the selvedge, or frowns for that matter, what causes that?
[00:45:44.240] – Janet
Okay. Those two things are generally caused by a difference in the sett at the selvedge compared to the center of your warp. So the more common is a smile. And what happens there is because you have draw-in, which is the warp getting narrower, which is not a bad thing. It’s not something you need to try to avoid completely. You want to try to keep it to a minimum. And if it’s significant, if the edges of your fabric draw in a lot, then that can put a lot of stress on your selvedge threads and cause them to break. But even if that’s not happening, you still will get some draw-in. And it’s a natural consequence of the way that the weft threads bend over and under the warp threads.
[00:46:47.240] – Janet
But if in addition to that natural consequence, you are getting draw-in because you’re pulling the weft such that there isn’t enough weft in the shed to allow for that bending, that makes more draw-in happen. And that tends to happen more at the selvedges than anywhere else.
[00:47:07.720] – Janet
And so then the consequence is that the sett of the threads close to the selvedge is more dense than the warp threads in the middle of your cloth. And if you can imagine, if you were weaving a cloth that was 10 EPI, for instance, with your weft and you were beating a certain way, it would beat in a certain way. If you change the sett of your fabric to 20 EPI and you use the same weft and you beat the same way, you wouldn’t get as many weft picks per inch or centimeter.
[00:47:43.640] – Janet
Same thing is happening even when that extra-dense part is just over at the selvedges. The amount of force from the beater can’t pack the weft into the selvedge areas at the same rate that it can in the center because the selvedge threads are closer together. And that means that the fell, which is the edge of the woven cloth, tends to creep forward. And it creeps forward towards the beater, and it makes that smile, which is a lovely, cheerful label to put on a weaving problem. Let’s just call it a problem. It’s a thing you want to try to avoid if you can.
[00:48:23.310] – Janet
The reverse is happening with the frown. That’s happening when you’re not pulling the weft up to the selvedge of the cloth sufficiently. So you’re giving too much thread there. And there’s slack over at the edge, so your warp threads are able to spread out and move into that loose area, because threads will always move to areas of least interlacement and areas of least resistance. So if they’ve got a big open area over there, they’re going to head that way.
[00:49:00.360] – Janet
And as a consequence of that, the selvedge threads at the edges are further apart and the weft can beat in more. And so those edges compress towards the front beam rather than stretch towards the beater, and you get the frown.
[00:49:19.340] – Janet
So in both cases, the solution is to be very careful about how much weft you are putting into the shed when you are weaving. If you’re getting the frown, don’t give as much weft. That might mean switching to closing on a–beating on a closed shed, or it might mean reducing the angle of your weft, or it might mean something else. It depends on your situation. And if you’re getting the smile, it means allowing more weft into the shed, which might mean beating on an open shed, increasing the angle of your weft, or taking some other steps.
[00:50:03.110] – Dawn
Excellent.
[00:50:04.330] – Tien
Okay. I’m just about done constructing my example here, so why don’t I go back to this? Although how are we doing on time?
[00:50:12.540] – Janet
We have 30 minutes left.
[00:50:14.810] – Tien
Okay, then I’ll just go through this. Janet was asking about the weft color and how it affects things. Basically, if your weft color matches in value or actually in–if it matches perfectly, then you get areas like this white patch over here or this dark patch over here. And that really reinforces the power of that particular color. And so that particular section will draw the eye because it’s different from the others.
[00:50:52.010] – Tien
If you are dealing with an alternating thread gradient and you have the contrast turned all the way up to white versus black, then anything in between will tend to blur the pattern relative to choosing something that either matches or is dark–either matches the black or the white.
[00:51:20.360] – Tien
If you’re doing something that’s like a gradient, then basically the same principle that I was talking about applies. In general, unless you have a case of a matching color, the darker your weft, the more pronounced the differences between the stripes in your warp.
[00:51:41.510] – Tien
I have some theories for why this happens. They’re not scientific, but basically your eye likes to look at light colors and thinks that light colors are on top. And so what happens as you add more and more white or more and more light color is that the brain pays more attention to it, and so it kind of bleaches out the differences between the lines. Whereas with black, what you’re looking at, and what looks like it’s on top, is the other color because black is so dull and uninteresting to the eye. All right.
[00:52:14.440] – Dawn
Well, you know, keep that picture up, Tien.
[00:52:17.050] – Tien
Sure.
[00:52:18.640] – Dawn
We have two questions that are similar. What’s considered a muted color? Is it middle or dark value?
[00:52:25.780] – Tien
I should maybe make that clearer. A muted color is a dull color. It’s just that various people have taken–who like colors that are nearly neutrals have taken exception to my characterization of them as dull colors because they are not dull. So I’ll also refer to them as muted colors.
[00:52:45.260] – Tien
Having said that, in colorist terminology, which is not the one that I’m using, a muted color is anything that is not absolutely brilliant. So in a colorist’s world–and I’m telling you this because you may run into somebody who is using the technical terminology–this patch of red here is a pure hue, super saturated. This over here is not quite a pure hue, and so it’s a little less saturated than that. So this would be considered a muted color.
[00:53:19.540] – Tien
And then if you were to go all the way to the point where it’s almost gray, these are called chromatic neutrals, which is a fancy way of saying that it’s gray with a little bit of hue added. And then if you go all the way over here, you got to neutrals. And neutrals are colors that have no hue. They’re as desaturated as they can be. And so that basically boils down to black, white, and gray. So you have the neutrals, the chromatic neutrals, the muted colors, and then you have the pure hues. That was probably way more than anybody ever wanted to know.
[00:54:03.848] – Dawn
Nah.
[00:54:04.910] – Janet
They wouldn’t be here if it was more than they wanted to know. I just want to confirm. Those terms are in the glossary, correct?
[00:54:14.290] – Tien
Muted color is not, and I want it there.
[00:54:16.840] – Janet
Okay. So it will be because it’s in an upcoming class, but we can add it early.
[00:54:21.520] – Tien
Right.
[00:54:22.290] – Janet
So if you have not yet discovered the Weaving Glossary, I’m just going to show that–mini site tour here. If you come to the Weaver’s Toolbox, the first thing in the Weaver’s Toolbox is the Weaving Glossary. And if you click on What Does this Word Mean?, you get a list of all of the terms that have been defined so far, and we will be adding to this constantly. And in this list, then, you can find various things.
[00:54:55.390] – Janet
Muted color isn’t there yet, but value contrast is there, for instance. Wherever you see these words that are pink until you point your mouse at them, and then they become orange, and they have this very faint little underline, if you just point your mouse at them, it tells you a short–a very brief definition of the term. But if you click on the word, it gives you, in some cases, a lot more detail.
[00:55:23.210] – Janet
And there’s also this related article. At this point, the Glossary is figuring out what’s related automatically, and it’s kind of funny to see what it thinks is related. Eventually, we’ll go through and–that’s a new feature, Dawn, that came with the Glossary upgrade recently.
[00:55:41.200] – Dawn
There’s the definition expanded right there.
[00:55:45.190] – Janet
Of the pattern clarity. No, of the–
[00:55:50.044]
[crosstalk 00:55:50]
[00:55:50.050] – Dawn
No, that’s not even the right definition.
[00:55:53.740] – Tien
What you’re seeing is definition of value.
[00:55:54.940] – Janet
Yeah. It stops–
[00:55:57.807]
[crosstalk 00:55:57]
[00:55:57.940] – Janet
There we go. That’s a Glossary glitch that they say they have fixed. So we still have to update. Sorry. Anyway, the takeaway here is that the Weaver’s Glossary tells you definitions of terms. And most importantly, it tells you the definition that Tien and I or the other folks writing stuff on the website mean when we’re using them. So in the case of something like muted colors, when Tien writes muted colors, this is what she means. It’s not the only definition. Like she said, colors may have another definition. But this way, you know what we mean, and you can understand the course content.
[00:56:46.690] – Tien
Okay. Alright, Dawn, next.
[00:56:49.090] – Dawn
Okay. Well, here’s one directly related and work for me. Canyon Woman says, the link to the Two Primary Rule and choosing weft colors isn’t working. What is the Two Primary Rule?
[00:57:02.360] – Tien
Well, I’m glad you asked that question. The Two Primary Rule is basically a rule of thumb for determining whether your colors will blend into equally bright colors or whether they will blend into more muted colors, more unsaturated colors. Less saturated colors? Yeah, there we go.
[00:57:29.960] – Tien
But if you want to find the Two Primary Rule explanation–let me bring up my screen–you can find it in the Toolbox. So let’s move this off. If you go to Weaver’s Toolbox–and we’ll fix the link. Okay, there it goes. And here’s the entry for the Two Primary Rule.
[00:58:01.600] – Tien
Basically, what the Two Primary Rule says–once this loads–is that if you look at the color wheel and you look at the sections between two primary color–and we’ll cover all this later in the year, or later next year when we get into color mixing–that if something is between two primaries, then it will blend equally well with another color that is between the two primaries without dulling anything down. So between yellow and magenta, the oranges, the reds, the sort of purple-reds, and yellow, will all blend into equally bright colors. And if you go from magenta to cyan, the blues, the cyan, the purples, and the blues, and the magenta, will all blend into equally bright colors.
[00:58:53.180] – Tien
But if you go across the color wheel or blend two colors that are in different segments, like blue and red, for example, you get a dull purple instead of a bright color. So that’s what the Two Primary Rule says, and that’s where to find it. Dawn, can you make a note that we need to fix that link?
[00:59:12.210] – Janet
I already did.
[00:59:13.300] – Tien
Oh, okay.
[00:59:14.880] – Janet
I mean I already fixed it.
[00:59:16.540] – Dawn
Oh, I was trying to fix it. You’re so damn fast.
[00:59:19.300] – Janet
That explains why it wouldn’t save because we’re both–
[00:59:23.110]
[laughter]
[00:59:24.930] – Dawn
I’ll get out of it right now.
[00:59:29.050] – Janet
It’s my fault that those links broke. I changed something in the docs thing, and now, yeah. It’s also affecting some of the links in some of the emails. So if you click on a link that supposedly goes to one of the help docs and it doesn’t work, just think, oh, Janet.
[00:59:52.840]
[crosstalk 00:59:52]
[00:59:53.130] – Tien
We said there would be unfinished fringe. Remember, it’s all Janet’s fault.
[00:59:58.600] – Janet
Yeah.
[00:59:59.800] – Tien
Oh, man. Having said that, the entire website is also all Janet’s–
[01:00:04.170] – Dawn
If you had any idea–
[01:00:05.700] – Tien
That’s Janet’s credit.
[01:00:11.050] – Janet
Okay, I think that balances out.
[01:00:15.130] – Tien
See, I threw you under the bus, then I got you out from under the bus.
[01:00:19.080] – Janet
Yeah, thanks. That just means I’ve been driven back and forth across [inaudible 01:00:25]. That’s okay.
[01:00:29.730] – Dawn
Shall we take a question?
[01:00:31.410] – Janet
Sure. Yes.
[01:00:33.700] – Dawn
I mean, laughing is good. Christie [inaudible 01:00:38] says, and I relate, I always manage to get my warp tangled when dressing the loom. What are the top tips for preparing a warp to avoid tangles? I use a warping board, plenty of ties, and chain up the warp with small chain loops. Am I introducing twist with the chaining up?
[01:00:58.000] – Janet
Okay. So that last question makes me think. Introducing twist, is the entire warp twisting because that is a corkscrewing, kind of. If so, then that is a result of the chaining up. Because what happens is–if you are a crochet or if you know somebody who crochets, and you’ve ever seen, like, a crochet chain without more cloth coming out of it, just a crochet chain, you’ll know that it corkscrews.
[01:01:29.880] – Janet
And when we are chaining the warp, we are basically crocheting the warp. So if you make a loop and you always reach through with your right hand to grab the rest of the warp and pull it through and make a loop, and then you reach through with your right hand to grab the rest of the warp and you pull it through to make a loop, and then you reach through with your right hand to grab the rest of the warp, etc., etc., you are always twisting the warp in the same direction. And just like a crochet chain, that will make the chain, the warp chain, corkscrew.
[01:02:00.180] – Janet
To avoid that, reach through with your right hand, make a loop, and then reach through with your left hand and make a loop, and then reach through with your right and reach through with your left. And it will twist slightly, and then untwist, and then twist slightly, and then untwist, and twist slightly and untwist. And you’ll avoid the corkscrew in the warp, the entire warp corkscrewing.
[01:02:21.100] – Janet
That corkscrew is annoying, but it doesn’t always, or often necessarily, it doesn’t necessarily lead to tangles as you’re beaming the warp. So that may not be your problem at all. If it is, great. There’s your solution.
[01:02:39.180] – Janet
If your warp is getting tangled when dressing the loom, there’s a whole bunch more questions that I would ask to try to diagnose exactly what’s causing it. But I can give you some top tips to avoid tangles.
[01:02:56.800] – Janet
First of all, don’t make your warp chains too narrow. We might think, oh, if they’re narrower then there’s less opportunity for things to get tangled. But really, the more you can let the threads act as a group, the less trouble they tend to have. At least that’s my experience.
[01:03:19.680] – Janet
Some fibers, some colors of fibers tend to twist more than others. So that could be at play, as well.
[01:03:30.700] – Janet
You don’t mention here whether you warp your loom front to back or back to front. If you warp your loom from front to back, meaning that you sley the reed first and then you thread the heddles, then it’s important to keep your warp threads aligned when you’re winding the warp and not have them crisscrossing too much.
[01:03:57.100] – Janet
The degree to which you have to babysit that depends on how cooperative your threads are and how comfortable you are in that situation. Some people don’t worry about it too much. Other people find they need to really pay attention carefully to make sure that things don’t cross to avoid tangles.
[01:04:16.400] – Janet
If you’re warping from back to front, you don’t need to worry about that nearly as much. But if you’ve wound your warp multiple threads at a time, then you want to make sure that those threads stay together throughout the warping process. So when you rough sley, keep them together. When you beam the warp, keep them together. Don’t separate them until you have to when you’re threading. And then they won’t tangle as much. I’m going to stop there for top tips because really the cure to the problem depends on the diagnosis of the problem. But I would say–what?
[01:05:02.410] – Tien
[inaudible 01:05:02] just said, keeping cats off the warp chains helps too.
[01:05:05.460] – Dawn
Let me tell you, that was one of my biggest problems.
[01:05:10.530] – Janet
There’s the voice of experience speaking right there.
[01:05:13.570] – Dawn
Bad. Bad.
[01:05:14.280] – Janet
Also dogs chewing on them. It’s all not ideal. I just want to put in a plug here, too, before we wind up. For weaving questions like that, they’re certainly fair game for the last half hour of these live lecture Q and A’s. That’s great that you’re asking them.
[01:05:38.370] – Janet
Other opportunities for getting answers to that kind of thing, though, come from the peer sessions weaving help, which happens once a month, or from the office hours with Janet. And as premium members–if you guys are at this webinar, that means you’re premium members, which means you have office hours with Janet, which will be coming up on Sunday. So, Christie, if you could submit your question again for office hours with Janet and tell me stuff like how do you dress your loom and what kind of threads are getting tangled on you and how wide are your warp chains and what part of the process the tangles happen at, then we can maybe diagnose this further. Because I like diagnosing stuff.
[01:06:21.690] – Tien
She’s looking forward to it. You can tell. She’s got that evil look.
[01:06:29.650] – Dawn
All right, Tien, here’s a good one for you.
[01:06:32.080] – Tien
Okay.
[01:06:33.250] – Dawn
Canyon Woman says, I have some cones of variegated yarns with a variety of values. What are some guidelines for designing with variegated yarns?
[01:06:43.380] – Tien
Start with a good, stiff drink. So the challenge with working with variegated yarns is that, of course, your pattern is only as clear as the contrast between warp and weft. And if you happen to be using a variegated yarn in the warp, like it is here, it works best if you have strong value contrast between warp and weft, as far as seeing your pattern goes, I should say, as far as seeing the twill line goes.
[01:07:17.370] – Tien
If you have strong value contrast between warp–between let’s just assume that you’re using the variegated yarn in the warp. If you have very strong value contrast between the weft and all of the colors in your variegated warp, then you’ll still be able to see the pattern. If you don’t, then you’ll get what you see here, which is that in some places the pattern can be seen, and in other places, like where this darker blue line is running down, you have a much less clear pattern.
[01:07:54.960] – Tien
If you roll down to here, where there’s much more value contrast between all the colors in the variegated warp and the weft color, you can see that you can see the pattern quite consistently.
[01:08:06.850] – Tien
Now having said that, if you are talking about variegated yarns, very frequently people are talking about handpainted yarns. Handpainted yarns are almost all made for knitters, and knitting is very different from weaving. So I did these swatches to illustrate the difference.
[01:08:28.330] – Tien
Knit stitches are square, and they’re pretty big. Whereas if you weave something, your stripes are only the length and width of the yarn. And so if you’re talking about color mixing, it can be really challenging. Because if you take this one, which looks really pretty in the skein and which also has a nice range of values, then when you actually try to weave with it what happens is the colors all mix together. And if you knit it, it’s okay because the patches are pretty big. You can see how those knit stitches are nice, big, distinct areas of color. As soon as you start weaving with it, though, the colors start to blend together. This is a black warp, and the variegated yarn is weft.
[01:09:20.200] – Tien
And you may like that effect and you may not. But it can be terribly disappointing if you looked at these really nice, bright colors here, and you thought you were going to get nice, bright colors once you wove it up and you wound up with this.
[01:09:36.030] – Tien
So one thing to keep in mind is that you want to select your colors carefully. You want to follow that Two Primary Rule when you’re mixing colors, when you’re choosing something with color, different colors. This one over here has colors from all over the color wheel, which pretty much guarantees that when you blend them together in weaving, you’re going to wind up with sort of a much muddier effect. This is influenced by the black weft, but fundamentally, the problem is that all the colors are mixing together into sort of a much duller color, almost a variegated brown.
[01:10:15.400] – Tien
So this is the discussion. This is a blog post, by the way, “Weaving with Handpainted Yarns” on my Warp and Weave website. I’ll probably wind up moving it into the Academy. Sorry, Janet. She’s shaking her head at me.
[01:10:29.530] – Janet
No. I’m just saying that’s a good idea. If we can get it in an upcoming blog post on the Academy, then it will be available in-house as well, and people won’t have to [inaudible 01:10:39].
[01:10:41.080] – Tien
Yes. This is something that follows the Two Primary Rule and also which doesn’t have a ton of value contrast between the colors. It has a fair amount, but it’s not like black and white. And as a result, you see a piece that is much more unified.
[01:10:54.260] – Tien
However, if you were to have a more complex pattern, like if you were trying to do something fancy, not so much like this one, but like–yeah, yeah, yeah, continue. If I were to go back to my boards–by the way, you’re welcome to come look at my draft boards if you want. I’m not quite sure how you get to them.
[01:11:20.890] – Tien
But anyway, if I were to try doing one of these delicate patterns in a handpainted yarn, you would just never see it. And that’s because if you take this color pattern here and imagine superimposing it onto a pattern like this one here, it would obliterate the pattern. The variegation and value in the warp would make it harder to see the pattern because now you’ve got a pattern of variegated value in the warp, which means that in some areas the weft is going to show off the pattern. In some areas, the weft is not going to show off the pattern because there’s not much value contrast.
[01:12:11.950] – Tien
Let me see what else. So if you look here, again this blends together more nicely. But if you have problems with that, then the things you can do are either to space them out. Here I’ve got a black warp, one shot of black in between each shot of the variegated yarn. And so you can see this over here, on the bottom, is what happens if you don’t separate the colors. And this is what happens when you start separating them with black.
[01:12:46.000] – Tien
In any event, what I would recommend is that you not try to use a draft that has lots of pretty patterning. Because unless your colors are really close together in value and hue, you’re just not going to see the pattern. So I would stick with something simple like plain weave or twill and, again, think about how closely you’re blending the colors. If the colors are turning into mud, then if you separate them so that they are spaced a little further apart, then you’ll get much better results.
[01:13:23.050] – Dawn
Alrighty then. We are down to one final question. And I think, Janet, you get to talk.
[01:13:30.880] – Janet
Okay, great. What timing. It’s like we planned this perfectly.
[01:13:34.620] – Dawn
I know. Do you have any dependable way to weight supplementary warp threads along with a regular warp?
[01:13:44.650] – Janet
Okay. So I’m assuming that supplementary warp threads are threads that are intentionally supplementary and not broken threads that have been weighted off the back or, say, floating selvedges that are weighted off the back, but ones that you planned as the supplementary thing.
[01:14:03.780] – Janet
And for that, I’d say if there are a lot of them, then your best choice is–I mean, obviously, if you have a second back beam and you can beam them onto a separate beam, great. But most of us don’t have that.
[01:14:27.630] – Janet
Let’s see. I would consider two options. One is still to beam them along with the rest of the warp, but that means you need to tension them a little differently.
[01:14:39.030] – Janet
So what you can do when those supplementary threads get a little bit looser than other threads is to lift all the supplementary threads and put a dowel or something under them. And then that makes–your regular warp threads will be traveling one path, and your supplementary warp threads will be traveling a slightly longer path. And that will take up a little bit of the difference in tension. And the more difference there is in the remaining length between the warp beam and the fell, you can swap in bigger and bigger dowels.
[01:15:23.800] – Janet
If it goes in reverse and the supplementary threads are taking up faster, then you put the dowel under the non-supplementary threads. So you put the dowel under whatever is looser to equalize the tension.
[01:15:36.480] – Janet
You can also–like, I would take that dowel and not have it be sitting on top of the back beam. I would push it over the back beam and right down to the warp beam. And you might then want to add some weights or something so that it stays down by the warp beam even when you advance. Otherwise, when you advance, it will just climb right up, and then it may fall out of the warp, but it certainly won’t be as effective.
[01:16:04.830] – Janet
Or you have to go around to the back and push it back down to the warp beam. It’s not the end of the world if you’re not weaving quickly and aren’t advancing every few minutes. But if you are doing that, then you can add some weights, and that will hold that dowel down to the cloth beam some.
[01:16:22.900] – Janet
I can say from personal experience, it’s a little sketchy to have so much extra length in the warp threads, whichever ones are looser, that the dowel can’t sit up against the cloth beam and you wind up weighting it. I have pictures where I’ve done that. And then the weights shift, like, one of the weights plonks down to the floor, and the other one is up in the air, and my supplemental threads are no longer evenly tensioned at all. And then there’s swearing.
[01:17:03.550] – Janet
If it’s only a few threads–I’m talking about–all that other blather was if there’s a whole lot of threads and they’re all behaving the same way.
[01:17:11.740] – Janet
If there’s only a handful because they’re little accent threads here and there, then I would weight them the same way that you would weight a broken warp thread or a floating selvedge thread, which is to say, put weights on either individual threads or small groups of threads. And then either have the source of the yarn that is feeding up into the warp be sitting on the ground separate from the weight. Or take a shoelace or some kind of long thread thing and attach it to the weight and then let that hit the floor, and that will keep it from rotating so that it doesn’t un-ply itself or tangle so much with its neighbors. That works for floating selvedges or broken warp threads, too.
[01:18:06.850] – Dawn
So there were a couple of other–let’s see. Somebody said–oh, the original questioner, CSMI, I don’t know your first name, but she is, yes, weighted, no separate beam. So I think you answered that. Dayamitra uses a dowel, and Holly Haines uses hand weights.
[01:18:26.800] – Janet
Yeah. I’ve also heard–and so went and bought but have not yet played with–that people use, oh, one of those things, uh-h-h. No, I use S hooks. I like S hooks. I like shower curtain rings or binder rings, that kind of thing. But no, they use, it’s not forceps. It’s not–
[01:18:49.960] – Tien
Hemostats.
[01:18:51.160] – Janet
Hemostats.
[01:18:52.493]
[crosstalk 01:18:52]
[01:18:52.530] – Tien
One of my favorite tools.
[01:18:54.180] – Janet
Yeah.
[01:18:56.950] – Dawn
All right. Well, that’s it.
[01:18:57.987] – Janet
Anything [inaudible 01:18:59].
[01:18:59.130] – Dawn
That’s it. Perfect. Last question, kids.
[01:19:02.200] – Tien
And Fritz has made his cameo.
[01:19:04.450] – Dawn
Fritz is like the Academy Awards music. It’s time to go now.
[01:19:08.040]
[laughter]
[01:19:12.400] – Janet
Okay. So the drill now is that we will sit here madly and copy all the things that need to get recorded so we don’t lose the questions that you asked and the answers that were given in text so that they can be included. And then we sign off. And then in five or ten minutes, we hope, maybe 15 more realistically, the instant replay will be available in the Transcripts Knowledge Base document file with however good this live transcription is and no editing.
[01:19:49.600] – Janet
And then we will take the high res. We’ll have to compress it. We have to edit it. It has to go to the transcription service and do this and do that. So that will all take a few days before the high res, transcribed properly by people who know how to weave terms–proper terms–gets uploaded. But you’ll be able to watch this before you go to bed tonight. Before I go to bed tonight.
[01:20:20.950] – Dawn
Whatever.
[01:20:22.680] – Tien
Anyway.
[01:20:23.550] – Janet
Okay, so that’s it.
[01:20:24.960] – Tien
Alright.
[01:20:27.330] – Janet
Our next live event is Friday. It’s on the Events page. It’s an all-members event. And it’s a meet-and-greet the whole Academy team and kind of a website tour. And then Saturday is Peer Sessions Weaving Help [inaudible 01:20:46].
[01:20:47.161] – Tien
Weaving Help.
[01:20:47.736] – Janet
Weaving Help. Sunday is the office hours with Janet at a special day and time because of beta or early access. Okay.
[01:20:59.440] – Tien
Okay. Off we go.
[01:21:01.080] – Janet
Bye, everybody.
[01:21:01.800] – Dawn
Goodnight.
[01:21:03.880] – Janet
Goodnight.