[00:00:00.250] – Janet
This is our first live course Q&A for premium members. So the primary purpose of the course Q&A is to answer questions or provide clarification on any stuff related to the courses that we have released since the last course Q&A, of which there has not been any. So that means all of them so far. So we’re going to focus on those questions for the first while. It would be 30, 45 minutes or so.
[00:00:35.530] – Janet
However, of the questions that were sent in in advance, none of them have to do with courses. So what we’ll do is go ahead and ask all your questions. For the first 15, 20 minutes or until we run out of them, we’ll just do questions that are related to course content. But the other ones will just stay in the queue, and we’ll get to them after that initial period. So you don’t need to wait to ask them, but we’ll just skip over them for the time being.
[00:01:03.330] – Janet
So to ask your questions that are related to courses, or not, you can use the Q&A interface, which is a button, if you’re on a desktop, somewhere in the middle of the bottom of your screen, underneath our smiling faces. You’re supposed to smile when I say that, guys.
[00:01:21.520]
[laughter]
[00:01:22.970] – Janet
Thank you.
[00:01:23.920] – Tien
There you go.
[00:01:25.690] – Janet
How to tell when nobody’s listening to you. Okay.
[00:01:30.320] – Tien
I never listen to Janet, so what else is new?
[00:01:34.650] – Janet
Okay. If you’re on a device, like a phone or a tablet, you will have to find that Q&A button on your own. It will be in a menu somewhere, but we don’t know where because it varies from device to device and operating system [inaudible 00:01:47].
[00:01:49.410] – Janet
Okay. So normally, if we had slides related to course content, we would do the slideshow part first and then come back to the live questions related to course content and then slides not related to course content. But we’re going to skip the first part because we don’t have any. So Dawn [inaudible 00:02:07] at the moment, but may disappear into moderator space shortly. Are those Christmas tree ornament earrings?
[00:02:16.580] – Dawn
Yes, they are.
[00:02:18.170] – Dawn
Super cute.
[00:02:20.630]
[crosstalk 00:02:20]
[00:02:25.070] – Dawn
It’s a 35-year tradition.
[00:02:29.470] – Janet
So Dawn will be with us or in moderator space, and she will direct our attention to the appropriate questions. And Tien and I will go through them, addressing course questions first. And then when those run out, or if we hit the 30-minute mark, then we’ll just–it’ll be free-for-all, all the questions. But we’ll do the slide shows in between.
[00:02:51.540] – Tien
All the questions.
[00:02:52.950] – Janet
All the questions.
[00:02:54.660] – Dawn
We have three whole questions. Oh! We got a fourth.
[00:02:56.920] – Janet
Four. Woo-hoo.
[00:02:57.930] – Dawn
Okay. I guess we can call these related to the Value class. Joy Hogg has two questions. And she asks, can almost any color go with any color, if one is careful about value?
[00:03:15.440] – Tien
That is a very interesting question. And the question, as a friend of mine likes to say, I’m glad you asked that question. But she does that when she doesn’t have an answer, and I actually do have an answer. So let me share my screen.
[00:03:33.140] – Tien
It depends on what you mean by go together. So in general, colors that are on opposite ends of the color wheel, like here we have a blue and an orange, which are pretty close to opposites, those are the ones that could be said by some people to not go together. And the degree of value and hue contrast makes a difference. So some people are going to like this color combination, and some people will think it clashes.
[00:04:02.740] – Tien
Similarly in here–thank you. I don’t need my pop-up–you have two colors that are very different in value and that have very strong hue contrast as well, because they’re on opposite ends of the color wheel. And as a result, again, some people are going to like it, and some people aren’t.
[00:04:22.340] – Tien
If you think that this is overbearing, then some of the things you can do is just to reduce the amount of one color, usually the brighter and lighter color. So here you have a very strong sense of clashing, which is to say very high contrast. Here, by reducing the amount of lime green to the amount of purple, you have something that feels much less clashy. And then when you come down to the bottom swatch, you have eight threads of–I think it’s seven threads of purple for every thread of lime green. And you can see how the effect of it has diminished. And so instead of the two colors fighting with each other, you have sort of a nice accent color on the background of the other color.
[00:05:17.220] – Tien
So the way to think about it, if you think about color as a conversation, two colors that have–and this is coming up in the next class, so you’re getting a sneak preview. But two colors that are opposites on the color wheel have very different opinions. If they also have strong value contrast, then they have even more difference in opinion.
[00:05:41.520] – Tien
And if you put two people with very different opinions down next to each other at the dinner table, the conversation is going to be pretty spicy, and you might wind up with an argument, if they are both passionately partisan about something or another. With colors, it works the same way. So if you have two colors that are opposite on the color wheel and which have very different values, then you might get the sense that they don’t go with each other.
[00:06:13.880] – Tien
If one of them takes up most of the space, takes up most of the airtime, then that reduces the amount of perceived clash. Because it’s kind of like if you have two people sitting next to each other at the dinner table and one of them is pretty quiet and the other one dominates the conversation, then you wind up with a situation kind of like the bottom swatch, where one person basically shuts up and lets the other person do all the talking. And so there’s harmony at the dinner table again, although the person who shuts up may not be happy.
[00:06:47.280] – Tien
Whereas here, if you have equal amounts of airtime for both of them, then you have the opportunity for there to be a much stronger clash. And again, this all depends on your taste. Some people are going to like this combination, and some people will think it might be a little excessive. But in general, my feeling is that there are no two colors that you can’t use together. You just have to get the right proportions of each color.
[00:07:15.260] – Tien
And in some cases you might want to throw in a buffer color. So another option is to stick another–so if you have these two colors, you could stick a third color in between them, which is another option. Anyway, that’s a long answer to a short question.
[00:07:31.300] – Dawn
All right. Well, let’s do the second part of Joy’s question then. Does value contrast or lack of create mood?
[00:07:40.900] – Tien
Ah. So that is coming in about ten days. It’s part of the class Value in Design, which I’m just putting the finishing touches on. Mood is created by, let me see, a combination of drama, which is created through value and hue contrast and lighting. And so let me pull up my notes.
[00:08:12.940] – Tien
So mood is basically about drama, which is the amount of contrast between the two colors, mostly value contrast, and lighting. And it can also be affected by culture–lighting is the values that are being used. It’s also affected by culture and by vibrancy, which is basically how saturated the color is, plus how warm or cool it is. So I’m not going to go through the entire lesson because that would take an hour, but value contrast is definitely one of the factors. You’ll hear about that in the next live lecture.
[00:08:49.080] – Dawn
Fabulous. Mary Wood and Dayamitra are asking something about My Documents in My Academy. What do we do with that? What do we upload, or what do we save there?
[00:09:06.890] – Tien
Janet?
[00:09:07.840] – Janet
Yeah. You can upload just about any kind of document, in fact. So I was just madly uploading things in another window while Tien was talking so you could see. You can upload WIF files. You can upload PDFs. There are several different kinds of–well, you could upload just about anything. PNGs, those are photos. So if I open this, there’s a picture. And PDF, it only shows you the first page in the display, but you can download it. These are either text or other document formats. So you can upload anything you want.
[00:09:58.110] – Janet
And the same file formats work in a group. So if you are in your class discussion group and you want to share a WIF or your notes or whatever in–let’s see–here in the group, you can upload them there, too. And if they’re uploaded to the group, then anybody in your group can see them and look at them and download them. So here you can upload them.
[00:10:35.070] – Janet
You can also create folders and then organize your documents into folders. So you could have a folder for WIF files. You could have a folder for documents, like .doc or .odt, depending on what text editor you use or word processor you use. You could have a folder for My Holiday Project, and in that put your notes and photos and WIFs related to your project. So you can organize your file system however you want. So hopefully that answers your question.
[00:11:14.260]
[crosstalk 00:11:14]
[00:11:21.820] – Dawn
Mary says, so are the documents in My Academy available only to me?
[00:11:28.320] – Janet
Let’s see here. I believe–that’s a good question. I’m going to use Tien’s friends thing.
[00:11:40.900] – Tien
I’m so glad you asked me.
[00:11:44.660] – Janet
So glad you asked that. Okay. Going back here, sharing again. Sharing here. Do you see here, here it has the visibility of the documents. You can presumably change the visibility–edit privacy on each one so that you can decide whether everybody, all members, can see it, only your friends, or only yourself. So if you had a folder that was Super Secret Present for Dawn, you could hide it away so that only you could see it and Dawn couldn’t see it and spoil the surprise before she received her super secret present.
[00:12:30.090]
[laughter]
[00:12:33.300] – Dawn
I am snoopy. So that’s a good idea.
[00:12:38.500] – Janet
Making a super secret present for you is a good idea?
[00:12:41.090] – Dawn
Hiding anything you make for me.
[00:12:45.980] – Janet
[inaudible 00:12:45] surprise for you.
[00:12:46.990] – Dawn
Yes, well.
[00:12:48.690] – Tien
Joy says we now have two mottos. It depends. And that’s a good question.
[00:12:52.050]
[laughter]
[00:12:54.700] – Dawn
Absolutely. Hi, Ellen. Okay, let’s see. Dayamitra says in Documents it has a video section. Can we download any video, say from YouTube or the course?
[00:13:18.290] – Janet
Back here. Are you talking about this here? This is actually not part of Documents. It’s videos as opposed to Photos. So Photos in My Academy are your own photographs, which you can sort into albums. On the separate tab are your uploaded videos, which can, I believe, be sorted into the same albums as your photos. I don’t actually have any videos yet. Let’s see.
[00:13:51.510] – Janet
Site tour. That’s too big. So as with any other place where you can upload stuff, there’s a maximum file size, and there’s also a limit of ten files that you can upload at a time. So, yeah, my videos are probably all going to be too big to upload. But you can, in theory, upload them.
[00:14:16.590] – Janet
As far as downloading them, keep in mind the ownership. The same is true of photos. And consider whether the thing that has been shared was shared with the intent to let other people download it.
[00:14:37.110] – Tien
Janet’s short version of this is, don’t download it without permission from the owner.
[00:14:42.270] – Janet
Right. And that’s true of YouTube videos, certainly. It’s true of any media on any site.
[00:14:50.160] – Tien
Yep.
[00:14:52.570] – Dawn
Can she upload or download into those files a video from a course?
[00:15:00.810] – Janet
Well, they’re already in the course. I suspect that the videos from the courses are going to be too big for the limits, because the limits are, like, 10 megabytes per file.
[00:15:16.310] – Tien
That’s like about three minutes of video at most.
[00:15:19.090] – Janet
At the most.
[00:15:20.260] – Tien
Yeah.
[00:15:21.160] – Janet
Yeah.
[00:15:22.550] – Dawn
All right. Perfect.
[00:15:26.950] – Tien
All right. Looks like we’re into the pre-asked questions.
[00:15:32.390] – Janet
Okay.
[00:15:34.390] – Tien
All right.
[00:15:36.890] – Janet
Let’s do that. And I’m sharing the slideshow?
[00:15:39.770] – Tien
Yes. But I’m going to need to share my screen, so maybe I should share it just for this one.
[00:15:47.610] – Janet
Well, let’s show this slide first.
[00:15:50.540] – Tien
Okay, sounds good.
[00:15:51.900] – Janet
And then you can share your screen. So other people know what we’re talking about. And I think you can just share and kick me off when it’s time. So this is our first question. It was sent in by Sheila Roberts. And it’s a Color in Design, so take it away, Tien.
[00:16:11.900] – Tien
Okay. So Sheila is asking, why does this piece glow? And to answer that, I will share my screen and kick Janet off and then proceed to show the exact same screen, just despite Janet. Well, actually, in a moment, I’m going to.
[00:16:35.690] – Tien
Okay. So the short answer is that if you look at what causes something to look like it’s glowing–this happens to be the black hole at the center of the universe. I’m actually not kidding. This is a picture from NASA, and it’s of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
[00:16:53.320] – Tien
But more relevant to what we’re talking about, this is a thing that is basically all glow. There’s nothing else. And if you look at how it’s constructed, you have a light color here that gradually shades off into darker colors here and then drops off to black at the edges. And so the reason why it glows is because you’ve got this color gradation at the edges. When something glows, you have a bright light, and then the light gradually dissipates as you go further. So the more glow-y it is–the higher the value contrast between the inside and the outside, then the more glow-y it is.
[00:17:30.490] – Tien
So, for example, over here in this section, there is not a whole lot of value contrast. And so it glows, but not nearly as brightly as here, where you have a very big value contrast between the inside and the outside.
[00:17:44.210] – Tien
So how does this play out in weaving? If we look here, I’ve done a few examples. And if you look at the one on the left, that goes straight from essentially white to black, and there is no sense of glow. Now, if you go on the right side, you actually do have a feeling that the stripes are glowing. And in the center, I’ve done kind of an inverse glow. I’ve gone from a sharp edge on the center here to a darker section in the center and then back out again.
[00:18:24.910] – Tien
And you can get a feeling of value gradation. But again, because the lighter color is up against a darker color it doesn’t glow nearly as much as on the right, where you have that trailing off into darkness effect.
[00:18:41.570] – Tien
With the stripes on the right, it’s actually pretty interesting. Because if you look at which one sort of glows more intensely, I would say it’s this one on the right. You can make an argument for the one on the left, but it’s mostly the one on the right. And the reason why is because you have a small, intense shot of color and then you have a quick drop off at the edges.
[00:19:07.310] – Tien
So this one has–let’s zoom in and scroll around. Okay. So let’s move that up here and scroll back up. Okay. There we go.
[00:19:27.730] – Tien
So if you look at these three over on the right, this one over here has three strands of white, one strand of beige, and one strand of a slightly darker brown, and then one more strand of very dark brown. So the rate at which it drops off and the central white section are both–it’s a pretty small section. Over on the left, you have the exact same edge pattern, but you have more white in the center. And because the white isn’t as close to the value gradient, it doesn’t really feel like it glows as much in the center as the one on the right, where both edges of the white are very close to that value gradation.
[00:20:15.150] – Tien
And then the one in the center has a slower–I basically doubled all the stripes of different colors. So this is six in the center, and then it’s two of each. And you can see how the glow is much less powerful, again because the gradient is much more gradual. So that is the short answer.
[00:20:38.660] – Tien
Some interesting stuff happens if you–let’s zoom out again. If you look at what happens when you are going from–when you start crossing them, this is what happens. Let’s zoom in again, then copy and pasting. And let’s look at this section all the way up here.
[00:21:13.150] – Tien
So over here is what happens–in the top right corner is what happens when you cross the narrow stripe with a narrow stripe. And you get a pretty strong sense of glow. And then here is crossing the bigger stripe with a bigger stripe. And again, you get a glow, but it’s not quite–it’s more diffuse.
[00:21:33.350] – Tien
In some ways that might be better depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Because on the right you almost get a little bit of a harsh sense because the color areas that intersect drop off faster, and you have that pure white in the center. This feels a little harsher than this section here where it’s a little more gradual. And the fact that you’ve got the gradation in both colors means that it’s a little more–it feels a little more diffuse. It’s got a little more area to work with.
[00:22:14.310] – Tien
Down here on the left where you have the wider white stripe and you have a sharp gradation, again, because of the way the colors are blending, you have that sense that you’re mostly looking at a patch of white against a patch of brown, and so the glow isn’t quite as intense.
[00:22:34.830] – Tien
And then over here, down further, here we’re looking at the two inverted sections, and you can see that there’s not a strong glow for either of them. And then if you go all the way down to the bottom, where you just have light crossing dark, you can see that there’s no glow at all. So it’s really about creating that color gradient at the edge and playing around with the width of the center light section.
[00:22:59.970] – Dawn
So related to that question, can I throw in an extra one from Joy?
[00:23:04.430] – Tien
Sure.
[00:23:05.990] – Dawn
Joy says the glow is easy to see on the computer. Would it still have the glow effect in the cloth? Would it glow more if shiny yarns were used?
[00:23:18.840] – Tien
In my experience, it does still glow if you use shiny yarns for the lighter colors and particularly if you use a duller yarn for the dark colors. Bearing in mind that using two different types of yarn can result in weird stripe-y things happening because of differential shrinkage, then you can get a much more pronounced effect, I think. I have not tried doing this. Or I have not tried doing this in different types of cloth. So that’s sort of as much as I know.
[00:23:52.850] – Dawn
Okay, great.
[00:23:55.860] – Tien
However, if you do it, post a picture because I’d love to see it.
[00:24:00.070] – Dawn
Yes, please.
[00:24:06.120] – Janet
Okay, so the next slide?
[00:24:08.780]
[laughter]
[00:24:13.570] – Tien
Celia is saying, we just explained the glow of Rudolph’s nose. It’s actually secretly a black hole.
[00:24:21.980] – Dawn
Perfect.
[00:24:26.320] – Janet
So our next slide is a question from Carol Patton, who is wondering about 2/24 or 24/2 acrylic yarn, and can it be used for weaving? What projects or structures would be appropriate? Is it strong enough to use as warp? Should I keep it in my stash or donate it?
[00:24:46.660] – Janet
Well, that–let’s see. I’m going show you–no, I can’t get it to stop sharing–because I want to show you how to test to see whether something is strong enough to use for warp. You can certainly use fine acrylic for warp. No problems there, if it’s strong enough. And acrylic doesn’t degrade like some natural fibers do, but it’s still smart to test how strong it is.
[00:25:16.490] – Janet
So I’m using here–happens to be an acrylic. It’s quite thick so that you can see it on the screen. But imagine that this was your fine stuff. Now, chances are, if it’s a fine thread, even if it’s a strong fiber, if you just pull on a single strand of it, that will break. But keep in mind, you’re never pulling on a single strand in your warp. You’re pulling on all of the warp threads together.
[00:25:44.510] – Janet
So what I would do is to take several ends, really, of your fine acrylic, half a dozen maybe, and pull on them as a group. And give them a good hard tug, about as much tension as you think they might get on the loom, and see. If they snap really easily, you don’t want to use that for warp. That would be a recipe for sadness. If they snap but not super easily, then it might be just fine as long as you don’t put too much tension on the warp and you’ve got plenty of the threads working together. And if you can’t break them, then they’re fine for warp.
[00:26:29.400] – Janet
As for what would be a good thing to use them for, acrylic can be a very practical fiber because it’s so easy to wash and to launder, so it’s great for things that might get washed or laundered a lot. So tablecloths or baby items.
[00:26:56.560] – Janet
Oh, it was my office hours. Mom was recently showing off a scarf that she had woven out of acrylic in Bronson lace in both directions. It was actually quite a wide shawl. And also she had a scarf that she had done in a twill. And the warp was tencel, but the weft was Orlan, which is an acrylic, so you can combine it with other things as well.
[00:27:24.220] – Janet
As for whether to keep it or donate it, chances are if it’s a yarn you decide you don’t want to work with, I’m not sure that I would donate it to somebody else unsuspecting. Because if you don’t want to work with it, then they probably don’t want to work with it either. But they may not know to test it. So it’s one thing–like, if you’re donating it to somebody for craft projects and it doesn’t have to be used like a warp, then fine. But I’m not sure I’d put it on, like, the flea market table at a weavers guild yard sale without some warning. But having said that, lots of people buy sort of mystery yarns from secondhand places or all over the place. So, yeah, if you’re not going to use it, you might be able to find somebody else who’s interested.
[00:28:25.510] – Tien
Before we go–are you done?
[00:28:28.090] – Janet
I’m done with that one. Yep.
[00:28:29.390] – Tien
Before we go onto the next question, I pulled up an example of glow. So there’s actually two of them. This is a close-up of one of my pieces where I did a gradient by dyeing a bazillion colors. I think it’s 28 for this one.
[00:28:51.470] – Tien
But the relevant thing here is that if you look, this section in the center kind of glows. And the glow that is being generated basically by–I know this one photo and it was photographed flat with fairly even lighting. So what’s going on here is that you have that slightly lighter value going off into darker values.
[00:29:16.720] – Tien
And the difference is not hugely pronounced. If you look at it in black and white, this is what you get. So you have a little bit of darkening going off here, but you’re also going from a warm color to a cool color, which also contributes to glow. But you can see that this section on the right is definitely lighter and it progresses through until you have a pretty dark color over on the side. And so that is contributing a lot to the glow.
[00:29:45.150] – Tien
Let me undo what I just did, so you can see. And if you look at the other piece–this is the same shawl, but the whole thing–you can see that there’s definitely a glow in the turquoise section as it sort of fades off into the other section. So hopefully that is a good example. The colored parts are silk and the black part is cashmere that I found in the thrift store. So I’m still very pleased with myself. I got 5 pounds of cashmere for $6. Can’t beat that.
[00:30:23.450] – Dawn
Oh, wow.
[00:30:24.460] – Janet
Weaving yarn scores at the thrift store is not a bad thing.
[00:30:27.790] – Tien
Yep.
[00:30:29.790] – Dawn
Quick question.
[00:30:31.230] – Janet
Yeah.
[00:30:32.020] – Dawn
Ellen asked if that test would be good for knitting and crocheting, or maybe if that yarn would be good for knitting and crocheting.
[00:30:39.950] – Janet
I took it to mean, would the yarn be good even if it didn’t stand up to the tensile strength test. And yes and no. It depends on what the problem is with the yarn. If the problem is that the yarn has gotten gnawed on, say, and it’s breaking because the strands are actually damaged, well, then you probably don’t want to knit or crochet with it either.
[00:31:04.810] – Janet
But yeah, if it’s not strong enough to be warp, it could certainly be weft if the yarn is otherwise sound. And you could use it for other yarn crafts that do not put a lot of tension on it. If the yarn is fragile, then you might run into trouble making stitches, like pulling the loops through with the hook or with the needles or something. I would knit a test swatch or crochet a test swatch to see if it behaves nicely.
[00:31:40.950] – Janet
If it is much too fine to use as a knitting yarn, at least for your preferences, then–this is sort of off topic, but since I have this stuff here and I can demonstrate it, you can take a page from the spinners. If you are a spinner, you will have heard probably of something often called Navajo or N plying, sometimes also called chain plying.
[00:32:11.550] – Janet
And when you spin, you ply from a single strand. Why am I out of focus? This needs to be focused. You ply from a single bobbin, and you create a three-ply yarn by making a loop in your single and then pulling up a loop through it. And then you fold the loop along the length. So now you have three strands. One is the loop, and one is the strand connected to the bobbin. And you can just repeat that process over and over and over. And so that is how you do things when you’re spinning.
[00:32:57.080] – Janet
You could do exactly the same thing with a yarn and then knit with it. So if you do that with a fingering-weight yarn, you turn up with something that’s about a worsted or a little bit heavier. If you do it with a 2/24 acrylic, you might come up with something that is thick enough to see and knit with. Anyway, that was just an addendum, too.
[00:33:24.230] – Dawn
Let me pop in and say that Carol says 10 strands together seem very strong. Thank you for reaffirming her wish to use the acrylic for scarves, shawl, baby blankets, et cetera.
[00:33:35.280] – Janet
Yay. Good. I’m going to try–
[00:33:41.770] – Dawn
And while Janet’s fixing her camera, Tien, Kay Hutson asked, is that called iridescence, what you showed, maybe the glowing.
[00:33:49.150] – Tien
No, it’s not. Iridescence is when the color looks different depending on which way you look at it from.
[00:33:57.170] – Dawn
Oh, no, Janet.
[00:33:58.630] – Tien
What?
[00:34:01.140] – Dawn
She was just very wobbly.
[00:34:03.100] – Janet
I was just fiddling with my camera, trying to make it–maybe if there’s more light. I don’t know what the problem is. Fortunately, you don’t need to see me. You only need to hear me.
[00:34:13.590] – Dawn
There you go.
[00:34:13.590] – Janet
Yay. Here I am. Okay. Let’s see. I’m in soft focus, like romantic vision. I always think of it like “Moonlighting”. Was it “Moonlighting” with–
[00:34:27.290] – Dawn
Bruce Willis and–
[00:34:28.230] – Janet
Bruce Willis and Shepherd?
[00:34:31.160] – Dawn
Yes.
[00:34:31.680] – Janet
Cybill Shepherd.
[00:34:32.500] – Dawn
Yeah.
[00:34:32.690] – Janet
And they always would go to, like, soft, romantic view. Soft focus. That’s what I’m doing. Okay. Back to the slideshow.
[00:34:44.930] – Tien
Okay. What’s up next?
[00:34:48.840] – Janet
This one is for you, Tien. Mary Howe would like to know how to save her own drafts on Handweaving.net.
[00:34:56.310] – Tien
I’m so glad you asked that question.
[00:34:58.540]
[laughter]
[00:35:02.870] – Tien
Here we go. It’s not actually that hard. What you do is you go to Handweaving.net. And then up here in the top menu, it says Drafts. So you have to log in first. That’s important because otherwise you won’t see this button. But there’s this draft here that says–button here that says Contribute Drafts. And this uploads it to Handweaving.net for everyone to look at. So don’t do it unless you want to give it to everybody.
[00:35:29.740] – Tien
But if you want to choose–you just choose a WIF to upload. This is something I designed a long time ago to make a scarf. Well, that’s very interesting. Oh, I know why. It’s because the diversified plain weave is not rendering correctly. Anyway, so you upload your draft. And then you enter the title for your draft, and you save it. Since this is not rendering correctly, I’m not going to save it because I’m not sure that anybody wants to see it. But that’s how you do it. You just hit Contribute Draft, and then you upload your WIF file, and you save the draft. And then it appears immediately.
[00:36:11.530] – Janet
So that’s to share it with everybody. Is there a way to save it to your own collection that isn’t shared with everybody?
[00:36:17.010] – Tien
Not currently. It’s on Kris’s roadmap somewhere, but not really close up in the–okay. Next question?
[00:36:25.570] – Janet
Yep.
[00:36:28.190] – Dawn
Go ahead and scroll. You’re sharing.
[00:36:30.290] – Tien
Oh, okay. I was wondering if we want to do a live question.
[00:36:33.890] – Janet
We might as well do the ones that were sent in in advance.
[00:36:36.870] – Tien
Okay. Sounds good. Okay, so MaryAnn Drake is weaving a scarf to wear to, I think, her granddaughter’s wedding and has come up with these designs and wants feedback on them. Now, MaryAnn, you sent in some WIF files, but they look quite different. So this one looks different from the ones you were sending, and maybe those are just the ones you’re now thinking of. So I am going to go back to here and talk about these drafts, and please let me know whether you’re still contemplating the ones that you sent in earlier or if you’re doing a different set.
[00:37:17.570] – Tien
So in terms of feedback or suggestions, it honestly depends entirely on what you want to achieve with the piece. So maybe the thing to do is promote–can we have MaryAnn just come on and talk to us about it?
[00:37:32.900] – Janet
Yeah. Sure can. Allowed to talk. There we go.
[00:37:37.910] – Tien
Okay.
[00:37:39.670] – Janet
MaryAnn, you have the floor.
[00:37:41.510] – MaryAnn
Oh, good. Well, the WIF files I sent you may not be the right ones, because I couldn’t tell which ones were which [inaudible 00:37:48] I have fiddled, but this is definitely one of them.
[00:37:53.390] – Tien
Okay. Yes. It’s this one here.
[00:37:55.950] – MaryAnn
Yes. Okay. And so your question to me was?
[00:38:00.990] – Tien
Well, I guess the question is, what are you trying to achieve? Which I know sounds kind of–but what kind of look are you trying to achieve with this?
[00:38:10.360] – MaryAnn
Well, my daughter explained to me that my granddaughter’s wedding is considered cocktail attire, not formal attire. Of course, this is all way, way above my pay grade. I am wearing black slacks and a gray sweater. And all my granddaughter’s life, the only time I ever dress up with anything is with a scarf.
[00:38:35.590] – Tien
Okay.
[00:38:36.510] – MaryAnn
So I want something that is drapey and dressy, but I don’t want, like, bold or–I mean, I’m not a bold. I like grays and blacks and burgundy and brown.
[00:39:00.450] – Tien
You’re looking for something that will be interesting enough to sort of carry the day.
[00:39:06.370] – MaryAnn
Yes.
[00:39:06.770] – Tien
But which doesn’t necessarily involve wearing screaming pink.
[00:39:10.910] – MaryAnn
Correct.
[00:39:12.470] – Tien
Okay. So I have a couple of thoughts.
[00:39:16.460] – MaryAnn
Oh, good.
[00:39:17.030] – Tien
It depends on what you want to achieve. It looks to me like this one here–sorry if I’m making anyone seasick. This one here and this one here are basically the same stripe design, but with different wefts?
[00:39:32.910] – MaryAnn
Yeah. One of them had a darker burgundy weft, and one had a lighter burgundy weft.
[00:39:38.070] – Tien
Right. A more purple-y weft.
[00:39:42.110] – MaryAnn
Okay.
[00:39:45.810] – Tien
So this is the one with the darker burgundy weft.
[00:39:48.360] – Janet
I’m sorry to interrupt. Tien, if you just grab that with your mouse and pull it halfway, you can see half of each one of the things.
[00:39:55.590] – Tien
Awesome. Thank you, Janet. So the thing about the darker burgundy weft is that it will do two things. Oh, one thing you should do on whatever software you’re using is to remove the feature that shows the lines between squares. Because if you put black lines between every thread, it will really affect the way it looks. You can see that by looking at this versus this, which are the same draft, except in this case, I’ve turned off the lines. If you turn on the lines, you can see how it massively affects it.
[00:40:32.770] – MaryAnn
Oh. Okay. I’m using handweaving.net, so I can turn off the lines.
[00:40:36.650] – Tien
Yeah. And so that will make your color rendition a lot more accurate.
[00:40:43.410] – MaryAnn
Ah. Good to know.
[00:40:46.850] – Tien
Okay, so back to here. The darker weft is going to give you more definition between the stripes. In this case, you’ve got one dark weft that is fairly saturated and one dark weft that is not very saturated. And the effect is more of a mood thing. So if you were to–let’s see, do I have them up? I do. So looking at them side by side, you can see that with the darker weft on the left, the lines stand out much more sharply. Whereas with the lighter weft on the right, it’s gone from a super dark to a medium value weft. Your lines aren’t quite as dramatic, but the overall mood is a bit cheerier because you’re using a more saturated color.
[00:41:40.550] – MaryAnn
Okay. We want cheery.
[00:41:41.570] – Tien
And the other thing is that–hmm?
[00:41:44.390] – MaryAnn
We want cheery. We’re happy.
[00:41:47.350] – Tien
And the other thing about the one on the right is that it gives the impression–because the values are different, it gives you the impression of slightly different lighting. And so the value of contrast between these stripes is not quite as strong on the right-hand side. On the left-hand side, it might feel almost stark, depending on how you feel about it. It will make very dramatic stripes which are eye catching and which might be what you want to sort of carry the day. This will give you a softer effect and a little more romantic look to it.
[00:42:25.810] – Tien
It’s hard to tell what it’s going to look like without the lines, but I think I did a simulation of it here. And if you change this–let’s see. Hang on. Let me grab that purple you are using. If we use this purple instead of the more burgundy-ish color and replace the colors, you can see how it makes a difference to both the vibrancy of it, which affects how eye-catching it’s going to be, and it also makes a difference to how stark the look is. So, again, this is what the original looks like, and the lines are much better defined. But you also have something that feels a little softer when you reduce the value contrast.
[00:43:23.190] – MaryAnn
I like that better.
[00:43:26.550] – Tien
And it also has the advantage of standing out against a gray or black background better because of the saturation.
[00:43:36.410] – Tien
Now, if you look at this one–no, not that one. That one. Then this one is much more lively or has more of a sense of visual interest, visual intrigue, because unlike the other ones, this one has random lines. They look like they’re not quite random, but there’s a lot more variety in the different lines and the different types of things. So visually speaking, it doesn’t look quite as neatly organized, which might be what you’re after and might not be, depending on what effect you want to get.
[00:44:14.230] – Tien
If you look at it side by side with one of these, you can see that here on the left, you have a very regular feeling, and on the right, you have a much more dynamic, casual feeling to it. Neither of these is right or wrong. It really just depends on what effect you’re trying to achieve. Like I said-yeah?
[00:44:40.590] – MaryAnn
I’ll try the one with sort of not so random stripes–
[00:44:45.737] – Tien
This one.
[00:44:45.890] – MaryAnn
–without the lines. No, not that one. And see what that looks like.
[00:44:53.170] – Tien
Okay.
[00:44:54.150] – MaryAnn
I’m not particularly straight lined and organized, so the random stripes might be better.
[00:45:01.670] – Tien
Yeah, like I said, they have a more dynamic feel. I would try it looking at it with the lines off.
[00:45:07.830] – MaryAnn
Okay.
[00:45:08.740] – Tien
And just see if you like that result more.
[00:45:14.410] – MaryAnn
Okay, great. I really, really appreciate your feedback.
[00:45:18.410] – Tien
Okay. Any other questions about this?
[00:45:23.950] – MaryAnn
No, no. I will play with this one. I think you’ve helped me make a decision.
[00:45:28.890] – Tien
Sounds great.
[00:45:30.670] – MaryAnn
Thank you.
[00:45:32.350] – Tien
All right. That was it for the pre-asked questions. So we have two more.
[00:45:36.840] – Janet
No, there’s one more.
[00:45:38.150] – Tien
There’s one more? Oh, yes, I remember this one. So let me share my screen again.
[00:45:44.740] – Janet
You’re sharing. Okay.
[00:45:49.250] – Tien
This one is from Chris, and she says that her goal for the upcoming year is to learn how to design clothes. She wants to make a jacket. And so the question is, should I start with selecting the sewing pattern or start with the cloth design? And Janet and I both have opinions on this, but I have no idea what Janet’s opinion is. So I’ll let her talk first, and then I’ll talk about how I do my process.
[00:46:17.550] – Janet
Okay. So I would say when designing a project, that form often follows function. So you can get an idea. I mean, you could think about colors you want, or do you want big motifs or small motifs or whatever. But until you know what garment you’re actually making, you won’t know what the appropriate hand for the cloth is or how much drape it needs, how much body it needs, or how wide the pieces need to be.
[00:46:54.490] – Janet
So I would be inclined to pick a pattern first. Maybe have a general sense of the look that you’re going for, the colors or whatever. But don’t get too attached to a fabric until you’ve picked a pattern you’re going to use. Otherwise, I mean if you go to a fabric store and you’re just buying a commercial fabric and you find the fabric you love, and then you go to find a pattern, you have to find one that will work with this fabric that you’ve chosen. Same thing if you’ve hand woven the fabric. On the other hand, if you pick the pattern first, you can design the fabric to be the perfect thing for the pattern you have chosen.
[00:47:39.430] – Tien
Is that it for you, Janet?
[00:47:41.350] – Janet
Yeah.
[00:47:42.470] – Tien
So my answer is more or less the same, which is that–particularly if you aren’t designing your own garment, if you’re designing your own garment and doing all the drafting from scratch, then that is a totally different kettle of fish. But even then, I would start with the sewing pattern.
[00:47:59.230] – Tien
But basically I would rather start with a pattern because, as Janet says, trying to sort of back into what pattern will fit your cloth can be difficult. Because on a pattern, if you look–if for no other reason that if you go down to your local fabric store and you’re flipping through all the patterns, you get all these beautiful pictures of what you could make, and you have to read all the fine print to find out what fabric would actually be suitable for it. So unless you’re pretty good experienced with sewing, then taking a cloth that’s already been woven and trying to find an application for it is something that requires a bit more experience.
[00:48:45.630] – Tien
The other reason is that what motifs you make and what designs you do will also depend on the cut of the garment. And so let me see if I can find the right thing. I tend to make a lot of muslins for my garments. And I want to show you my Kodachrome. I made eleven muslins for one piece, which is admittedly a little over the top.
[00:49:18.950] – Janet
Our live captioning is not doing well with the word muslin.
[00:49:24.010] – Tien
What is is saying?
[00:49:24.010] – Janet
Muslim.
[00:49:25.120] – Tien
Oh, of course.
[00:49:26.270] – Dawn
I did three for my only sewn woven garment. Three muslins.
[00:49:30.580] – Tien
All right. So let me pull this over here because this is sort of all the photos of Kodachrome, and that way you can look at the pretty pictures before I–here we go–while I find the correct one. So let me see. Nope. Okay.
[00:49:51.090] – Tien
What I want to do is show you a picture of the muslin, and it looks like I might not have any. Okay. So let’s back up and go to a different project. Sorry about this. I’m doing this on the fly.
[00:50:08.470] – Tien
So the design of the fabric, you may want it to echo what’s appropriate for the design of the garment. So in the case of this one–let’s me see. I think it’s Coat Design. This one took me nine months to do. I do not suggest doing that as your first project. So I did a whole bunch of muslins for this one, and by the time I got down to the actual design of the piece, I had this muslin here. And the thing about this is that it depends on having one light side and one dark side. Otherwise that nice, dramatic swoosh doesn’t actually go anywhere. And so if I had started with the fabric, then I would have had to design the garment around the fabric, and that limits my design from a sewing perspective.
[00:51:03.590] – Tien
If you are a weaver already and you are just getting into sewing, the weaving part is not going to be the most complicated part. The sewing part is the thing that you’re going to have the least experience with. And so I lead off with the part that is–or given a choice, I will let somebody else do more of the hard design work for me first. And so if I am doing this, then I need to pick a cloth and a pattern. It’s just much easier for me to look at this pattern and say, okay, I need a light and a dark cloth, and I can design a light and a dark cloth.
[00:51:51.190] – Tien
If I had just one type of cloth, then I would have to go and say, well, what can I do with this particular type of cloth? If you’re Darryl Lancaster, you can do that just fine. Most of us are not Darryl Lancaster. By the way. If you’re curious what the finished thing looked like, it was–it’s around here somewhere. Here we go. So this is the finished piece. And I was able to design the cloth around the idea of that light and dark contrast.
[00:52:27.520] – Tien
But again, this is something where if I had started with the cloth, it would have been really hard to figure out what to do with it. So I find it’s easier to design the piece first–get your pattern first and then design your cloth around that. What else do we have?
[00:52:51.100] – Dawn
Well, we have some typed-in questions.
[00:52:54.710] – Janet
Joy Hogg’s question is directly related.
[00:52:57.490] – Dawn
Sure. Says Michelle Benson suggested we watch–
[00:53:00.950] – Janet
No. No, at the bottom.
[00:53:01.770] – Dawn
Sorry. Oh, what is a muslin? I knew that was going to happen.
[00:53:05.950] – Tien
A muslin is a mock-up of what you’re going to sew. And so you wouldn’t want to start by cutting into this cloth because it would take hours and hours and hours and hours to weave it. So what you do–think of it as being like a sample, only a sewn sample.
[00:53:23.150] – Tien
And so when I was designing this, I drafted this myself, and I didn’t really know what I was doing so I wound up doing a lot of different muslins. In fact, I did eleven of them. And you can kind of see the progression. This is where I started. And then, as you can see, it evolved. And if I had tried to do–just sew it straight off at the very beginning without doing a muslin, I wouldn’t know how well it fit. I wouldn’t know how much I liked the design, how much I liked the cut of the garment. I wouldn’t know–basically I’d be jumping in feet first. It’s like weaving a thing without sampling. Your sample becomes the actual garment. And so it’s increasing the amount of risk that you’ll wind up with something you didn’t like.
[00:54:18.870] – Tien
So it’s a good thing that I didn’t start out with this because, as it turned out, I didn’t like this cut and this design at all. And by sewing other muslins, I can, A, make sure that the piece was going to fit at the end, which is important, especially if you’re doing something fitting like a jacket. And it also means that you can experiment with different changes and different–you can experiment with changing the lines. You can experiment with making it fit better. You can do a lot of different things with a muslin. And it’s a lot less costly–here’s a late version of it–than trying to do it in your precious cloth.
[00:55:01.790] – Tien
Even if I’m using a pre-made pattern, I always do a muslin because I don’t know how well it’s going to fit. And then this was my final muslin. As you can see, I went through a lot of them, and here I was testing out the colors. So that is what a muslin is.
[00:55:18.530] – Dawn
You even dyed your muslin.
[00:55:21.590] – Tien
I was a little paranoid.
[00:55:23.610] – Dawn
Wow. Impressive.
[00:55:25.670] – Janet
Muslin is actually a lightweight cotton fabric, typically used for these kinds of samples because it’s inexpensive. So you can make your mock-ups without blowing the bank on your fashion fabric or your precious handwoven. So that’s where the object got its name, from the fabric that was traditionally used.
[00:55:49.330] – Tien
Right.
[00:55:51.790] – Dawn
And Sonia Kamel says in the Chat that a muslin saves you a lot of heartache if the fabric and pattern don’t match. It’d be very wasteful of fabric. Patterns don’t always fit you.
[00:56:03.000] – Tien
Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely.
[00:56:05.490] – Janet
And once you have a muslin that fits properly, you could even–and that represents the final version of your clothing or your garment, you could draw things onto it, then take it apart and lay it out and see where those motifs, for instance, need to land on the fabric on the loom. So you could use it as a cartoon on the loom to make sure if you had–like if Tien’s jacket had had a bold stripe that went diagonally across from left to right and she wanted them to meet at the overlap.
[00:56:42.120] – Tien
And, in fact, I actually did that on my Kodachrome coat, which is why I’m so unhappy that I can’t seem to find any photos of the muslins. Because what I did for my Kodachrome jacket, which let me show you a picture of it, actually, so you understand what I’m talking about. Share screen, screen two.
[00:57:01.030] – Tien
So this is the finished jacket here. And you can see how it’s got those stripes. And those stripes line up precisely with that little piped edge over here. And the stripes also go precisely up and down, and they also match precisely at the shoulders. That is the result of having taken a muslin–so I cut out the pattern in cotton muslin, and then I drew stripes on it with the–not in color, but I just drew lines on it that were the same spacing as the cloth. And I used that to figure out how I could true up this edge and still have it look good on this side and still have all the stripes match. And so that’s the advantage of a muslin. You can use it sort of as a testing ground, but also as a way of determining the appropriate sewing for the pattern on the cloth. All right. Next slide.
[00:58:11.630] – Dawn
Well, we’ll stick with Joy then. She says that Michelle Benson suggested we wash our woven towels not cut apart and around the hub of a machine to reduce wrinkling. I did that and find that now when I wash those towels, they dry without wrinkling, even though they’re cotton. Is this a truism? What’s our other favorite?
[00:58:35.370] – Tien
It depends.
[00:58:38.190] – Tien
That’s a Janet question.
[00:58:40.030] – Janet
Yeah. I would not assume that that is a truism. I would assume that they’re not wrinkling because of the construction of the yarn and the structure of the fabric and not so much because of that way of wet finishing them the first time around.
[00:59:02.180] – Janet
Now, by all means, in the future when you do more towels, leave them connected and put them around the hub in the washing machine and see if you get the same results. It still doesn’t prove that it is related. But if they do wrinkle, then it proves that it’s not, if you see what I mean. I haven’t heard that that is the case. And of course it’s going to vary by washing machine, and not every washing machine has the hub and set up. So I await your results in this experiment.
[00:59:41.060] – Tien
Systematic experimentation. So now you need to weave 100 warps full of towels and try them all in different [inaudible 00:59:47].
[00:59:49.170] – Janet
Some around the hub, some wadded up on one side. Some hot water, some cold water.
[00:59:54.130] – Tien
[inaudible 00:59:54] everything. See, this is how you wind up making 2,500 samples.
[01:00:00.950] – Dawn
I’m going to dig back to the muslin question because Celia put it in the Chat. Does muslin come in differing weights? If muslin was real different from woven cloth, wouldn’t it affect drape and fit somewhat?
[01:00:14.340] – Tien
Yes, it does. Absolutely. In an ideal world, you would use a muslin that–when you made your muslin, you would make it from a cloth of similar weight, et cetera. Having said that, for things like basic fit, cheap muslin will do a reasonably good job.
[01:00:34.350] – Janet
And if you’re going to wind up making eleven of them, you could make the first eight out of something inexpensive and then get something closer to your fabric weight.
[01:00:42.750] – Tien
Well, that’s what I did, actually, with the last one. The last two muslins were flannel, which is a heavier cloth. Having said that, you really, honest to God, don’t need to do eleven muslins unless you are an inexperienced pattern drafter trying to figure out what you’re doing while you’re doing it. Usually one muslin is enough.
[01:01:07.450] – Dawn
Oh, I don’t know about that. Let’s see. Dayamitra says, in the future, will we discuss mixing different yarns in a project? I realize some yarns have the same amount of shrinkage, but how do I know different shrinkages will work in a project or if it would be a disaster?
[01:01:30.160] – Janet
I’m sure that we will at some point discuss this again, but that was the topic of–well, it was one of the main topics of the Stash Weaving Success class that Tien and I–and the two weave-alongs that we did in 2020 and 2021. So it will probably be a little while before we revisit those topics.
[01:01:52.360] – Janet
Having said that, there are some bits and pieces from the Stash class and weave-along that may appear as weavers’ toolboxes or blog posts or something like that in the nearer future than an entire class on the topic.
[01:02:09.780] – Janet
So not to point you off at something else when you’ve already got–you’re already a member here, but we do have that–those weave-alongs are still available on the Warp and Weave site. Yeah. And in those weave-alongs, and eventually in the toolboxes on the website, are things like ways to test for the strength, that we just talked about earlier. Ways to test for how differently different yarns stretch and ways to test for how differently different yarns shrink or behave when wet finished so that you can choose a combination of yarns that will play nicely together. Or at least you are forewarned about how you need to be careful when wet finishing them so that they don’t do anything unpleasant.
[01:03:04.220] – Janet
And in the full-on class, we also talk about how you wind up adjusting for sett when your warp threads are different sizes or sley your warps at different setts–or, sorry, stripes at different setts to accommodate that kind of thing.
[01:03:26.340] – Tien
Okay.
[01:03:27.250] – Dawn
Thank you. Okay. How about Debbie West from Georgia says, this is mundane and boring, but could we discuss techniques to improve selvedges, please?
[01:03:39.160] – Janet
There are three things that are particularly important for getting good selvedges. One is–well, four, have an even tension on your warp. If your warp has got lots of different tensions, especially at the edges, then that makes it tricky.
[01:03:58.580] – Janet
But assuming that your warp is evenly tensioned, one of them is winding good bobbins. So winding them, in particular, tightly so that there’s no squish on the bobbin and so that you don’t wind up with bumps in the middle that the thread has to drag across. So we will have toolboxes about bobbin winding up as soon as–well, actually, no, we have a whole class planned for that, mini class, short, coming up on bobbin winding. In fact, these first little short bites are all really related to how to get good selvedges. So there’s bobbin winding.
[01:04:47.220] – Janet
The next thing is shuttle handling and weaving rhythm. And the most important thing as far as shuttle handling goes with respect to selvedges is to not fuss with them, not to fiddle around, or as I usually call it, don’t fret around with your selvedges. When you throw the shuttle, control the bend at the selvedge over here with your shuttle hand, not by fiddling with it over here.
[01:05:19.320] – Janet
So my advice is to put on a warp where you don’t care so much about the selvedges. Maybe it’s going to be yardage and so those selvedges will be in hems. You’ll never see them. Or maybe you just give yourself permission to have some messy selvedges on a scarf. Because, honestly, whoever sees the edge of a scarf when it’s all wrapped around your neck? Whatever. I wouldn’t do it, like, on a table runner that’s going to be spread out across the dining room table during your fancy dinners, because then everybody will be sitting there for 45 minutes looking at it, and they will see the edges. That’s not the place to experiment.
[01:05:54.620] – Janet
But wind your bobbin carefully, and then just throw the shuttle and beat and throw and beat, obviously treadle, too, without messing with them. And if you do that for 10, 15 minutes without messing with them, you will get to a sort of steady weaving rhythm. And that weaving rhythm will produce nice, tidy, even selvedges. It will. But it won’t do it immediately until you’re used to it, until you have a little more faith.
[01:06:25.120] – Janet
And the other thing you need to do is to advance the warp often. Because one of the things that affects your selvedges is the angle at the shed. So when the fell, which is the edge of the woven cloth, is far from the shafts and you open the shafts, the angle at the shed is not as steep.
[01:06:49.780] – Janet
But when the fell gets very close to the shafts and you open the shed, that angle becomes much steeper, and it pulls a different amount of slack out into that opening between the top and the bottom of the shed. And that will produce loops if everything else has stayed the same–the way you’re throwing the shuttle and the amount of tension you’ve put on things. If those things all stay constant but that angle gets steep, then your selvedges will behave differently.
[01:07:20.100] – Janet
So get into the habit of advancing your warp every couple of inches and keeping the fell in the sweet spot for your loom, wherever that may be. On some looms, it’s quite close to the front beams and other looms it’s about halfway between the front beam and the beater when it’s all the way back against the castle. So you want the spot at which the beater hits pretty much perpendicular. So a little bit ahead of that and a little bit behind that, that’s your sweet spot. And advance often to keep the fell in that range.
[01:07:52.760] – Tien
My other tip is that if you use an end-delivery or end-feed shuttle–they’re the same thing. They’re just different names. That can help a lot if you have wobbly selvedges, because it essentially gives you a perfectly even tension as you pull it off the–a perfectly consistent tension as you pull it off the shuttle. So it takes a little more skill to use a boat shuttle successfully without getting wonky selvedges. Having said that, the vast majority of people weave with boat shuttles and do just fine. But I happen to be fond of end-feed shuttles.
[01:08:35.240] – Dawn
Joy says, don’t forget to sit in the middle of your bench.
[01:08:39.320] – Janet
Yes, that’s true, too. If you are–thank you, Joy. If you’re weaving along and you notice that one of your selvedges is messy and the other one is not, then move your seat on your bench or chair, whatever–well, if it’s a bench, move your seat on the bench. If it’s a chair, move the whole chair–one inch towards the side that is messy, and that will make a surprising amount of difference.
[01:09:04.800] – Dawn
Very good. I have one more question. Miriam says, I started using a warping mill, and it’s much quicker than the warping board. Do you have any tips for keeping the warp chains the same size? And how big should a warp chain be before removing it?
[01:09:27.320] – Tien
You wind with a mill, Janet?
[01:09:30.590] – Janet
Yeah.
[01:09:32.323]
[crosstalk 01:09:32]
[01:09:32.440] – Tien
Then I’ll let you tackle it.
[01:09:38.520] – Janet
As far as making them the same size, I just kind of figure out, here’s my threading plan, and it’s this many threads, and therefore half of it is this wide, or maybe I want quarters or whatever. And I plan so that my warp chains are about equal numbers of ends, if I’ve decided that’s important.
[01:09:57.600] – Janet
I often do decide that that is important because then it is easier to put weight on the chains and put the same amount of weight. Well, if the chains are all the same size, then putting the same amount of weight on them will put the same amount of tension on them. If the chains are different sizes, but you add the same amount of force in the form of weight, then you’re putting more tension on the skinnier chains than you are on the wider chains.
[01:10:26.700] – Janet
You can adjust for skinny chains, putting less weight on them, or you can adjust for stretchy yarns or less stretchy yarns by adjusting the weights on them. So they don’t always need to be consistent. But a lot of the time, if your warp is all the same material and you’ve got whatever you’ve got to put weight on–I’ve got little exercise dumbbells and one pound and two pound and five pound–then if the chains are the same size, it just makes that whole decision-making process a lot easier.
[01:11:01.620] – Janet
So if I say, okay, this warp is 500 ends, and that’s going to be 20 inches wide, then I’ll make my chains half that, maybe. And then when I’m weighting them, divide each chain in half and put a weight on each chunk. When I am warping from back to front, I tend to just make a single chain unless it’s wider than, I don’t know, 15, 16 inches. When I was beaming, dressing my loom from front to back, I kept the chains narrower, like five inches, because of reasons, because that was easier for crank and yank and all of that. But I don’t bother with that stuff anymore. I warp from back to front, and so my warp chains could be wider.
[01:11:53.640] – Janet
Okay. How big should a warp chain be before removing it? So if you’re on a warping mill, then as you wind a chain, the path of the thread–say you’ve got a guide string on it, and originally your threads will just be close up to the guide string. But the more threads you get on there, the further down from the guide string those threads will be. So you want to keep pushing them up so that the path hasn’t changed too much.
[01:12:20.180] – Janet
But eventually there’s going to be a wide stretch there. If your warp is quite long, 20, 30 yards, then that’s not going to make that big a difference, really.
[01:12:31.850] – Janet
But if your warp is fairly short, and it’s got a difference in length–I wish I had pictures. I probably do somewhere. Because the thread has deviated from the guide string path by several inches down the sides or across, if you have a horizontal mill, then that’s probably a good time to take your chain off and start a new one. Because you’ll probably notice that the new parts of the chain, either the tension is different or they’re just getting too long, too much longer than the other part. I feel like that was not real clear there at the end, but I hope you got the–the takeaway is don’t let the chain get too wide away from the guide string.
[01:13:22.900] – Dawn
Great, Janet. That was fine. You did fine. Let’s see. Joy reminded us that you told us to be careful the yarns are coming off spools at the same angle so there’s the same amount of tension.
[01:13:36.140] – Janet
Yeah. Along a similar path. Or if some are coming off small spools and some are coming off big spools and some are coming off cones and some are coming off balls of yarn and so they’re not feeding at the same rate, then you might need to do something to slow the fast ones down so that they’re not going a whole lot faster than the other ones. That’s if you’re winding several ends at a time and you’re noticing that each individual end is not the same tension.
[01:14:14.200] – Tien
I was going to say something smart, and then I forgot. Oh, well. It just goes to show.
[01:14:20.200] – Dawn
It’ll come back around. Celia’s got more tension questions. Hers is never perfect. Usually I have one edge that’s a little loose, mundane again. But will there be somewhere we can see how you tie your warp on the front once it’s beamed onto the back? I’ve done it two different ways, but it’s not often fabulous.
[01:14:43.200] – Tien
Do you lash on or do you tie on, Janet?
[01:14:46.240] – Janet
I tie on usually, though I practice–I try to keep practicing lashing on so that that is a skill in my wheelhouse so I can help if people have questions. But I tie on.
[01:15:00.100] – Tien
I have never actually managed to get the tension reasonable when I tie on, and so I lace on. Let me show you what that looks like. So this looks pretty horrendous because the knots are way bigger than you would normally want. But on this particular loom, I was planning on cutting off and retying before this mess actually reached the beam, so I didn’t worry too much about it.
[01:15:30.240] – Tien
So basically, to see what it actually looks like, let me see if I can pull up this one. This is the basic idea behind lacing on. And this is on Peggy Osterkamp’s blog. She has actually a couple of books on how to do all this.
[01:15:47.140] – Tien
But the advantage of lacing on is that the knots are not tied directly to the apron or to the apron rod. And so it’s a lot easier to adjust. Basically, you’re taking the bout. You’re tying it in a knot. You’re running a thread or a slippery cord through the center of each bout, and then you’re lacing it on. So the advantage is that if something is not quite the right tension, you can pull on the threads on the cord and adjust the cord because it’s slippery enough that if it’s too loose here, you just pull up a little slack here and then you distribute it over here. And that makes it much easier to get good, even tension, at least for me. And so that’s how I approach it.
[01:16:39.620] – Tien
I happen to use slip knots, not overhand knots, at the ends because I find it easier if I have to adjust tension within a bout. You don’t have to try to unpick an overhand knot. You just take that slip knot, and you undo it, and then you correct it, and you put it back. And that sends the tension wonky. But again, because I’m laced on, I can just adjust the length of the cord in each place.
[01:17:07.760] – Janet
Whereas I prefer the other. Because then if you adjust the tension in one spot, it doesn’t affect tension that’s already right everywhere else. And it’s equally easy to adjust tension when they are tied directly to the front apron rod. And if I discover a threading mistake and I have to take threads out of the reed and heddles, I haven’t lost tension on everything.
[01:17:37.750]
[crosstalk 01:17:37]
[01:17:40.290] – Tien
Well, that makes sense. However, what I’ve generally found is that when I adjust the tension–the reason why I lace on is partly because when I tie on I find that the tension on one side winds up being wonky than the other side. And then I have to adjust every single knot. With this, I don’t have to adjust every single knot. I just pull on the thread and then sort of pat it in different places to see where it’s–
[01:18:10.100] – Janet
It’s the same with the other, though, once you’re used to it. So it’s just either way, whichever one you choose, you become more experienced or more practice, and it becomes easier and more automatic to do. And they both work well.
[01:18:22.840] – Tien
Right. The one place in which I would definitely advise lashing on is if you are working with a very slippery thread, but that’s sort of a specialty thing.
[01:18:33.740] – Janet
Another place where it’s a great idea is if you’re working with incredibly dense warps, like a very–
[01:18:41.660] – Tien
Like this one, actually. [inaudible 01:18:42] ends per inch in 10/2 cotton.
[01:18:45.820] – Janet
So like a rep weave, if you’re doing warp rep, then the knots can just be too big to fit in the space that the threads are allowed. So lashing on works in that situation, too.
[01:19:00.640] – Tien
That’s interesting. This is a triple weave warp, and I bet I would have had the same problem if I tried tying on.
[01:19:05.860] – Janet
Yeah.
[01:19:06.690] – Tien
Yeah.
[01:19:08.340] – Dawn
Sue’s got further questions. She’s tried lacing on, but sometimes it isn’t perfect either. Is it helpful to attach a round rod to make this work better, like in Peggy’s picture, rather than around the non-round apron rod?
[01:19:24.260] – Tien
A round rod works a lot better in my experience because it’s easier. You get more even tension. The reason I’m using that steel bar that was in the photo is because that’s Jacquard loom, and that’s what it’s designed to use.
[01:19:38.000] – Dawn
On the other hand, Carly Jayne says that she finds lacing on is better if your apron rod isn’t round, so your mileage may vary.
[01:19:47.450] – Janet
Exactly. And you’ll have a different experience with a flat bar, like in Tien’s picture, versus, say, a square or rectangular wood rod that you’d get on a Schacht Baby Wolf or something.
[01:20:01.300] – Tien
Now, one thing to keep in mind is that this one may actually work a little better because it’s a relatively thin rod, which is to say it’s about an 1/8 of an inch or more. So it’s a really heavy steel rod. It’s not going to bend. But if you look at where the friction spots are, if you have a big rod with more surface area at the bottom, then the amount of friction on the lacing yarn is going to be higher, I think, than if you have a relatively smooth, narrow bar. So that’s something to think about, too.
[01:20:42.020] – Janet
Yeah. And as Tien mentioned, you want to have a slippery cord that you’re using so that it reduces the friction and it can slide around whatever bar you’ve got, whether it’s round or square or flat.
[01:20:55.560] – Tien
Right.
[01:20:57.960] – Janet
Carly points out–sorry, go ahead, Dawn. Less loom waste with lacing too. And I know people who effectively lace or do something similar related to lacing at the back as well as at the front.
[01:21:11.900] – Dawn
Interesting.
[01:21:12.750] – Janet
And that’s what a dummy warp is, too, kind of.
[01:21:16.460] – Tien
Yeah.
[01:21:18.620] – Dawn
So besides that, Celia Quinn is happy to hear that you guys have to fiddle around a bunch, too, with your warps. She wonders how you would attach the round rod to the rectangular apron rod. Velcro bands?
[01:21:31.620] – Tien
I haven’t tried Velcro bands. There are two things that I use. I either use Texsolv cord, which has the advantage of being easy to make loops in, or I’ll just lace the bar on in exactly the same way that this is laced on, just because I always have lacing cord available, and it works pretty well for me.
[01:21:56.990] – Dawn
What kind of cord is that, Tien?
[01:22:00.060] – Tien
I think this is called mason cord. I don’t know. It’s a two- or three-strand twisted cord. You find it at hardware stores. Yeah, it’s the shiny one.
[01:22:12.270] – Dawn
It’s cord, cord. It’s not yarn.
[01:22:15.200] – Tien
Not yarn. Yarn, in general, isn’t really strong enough or slippery enough.
[01:22:20.800] – Dawn
Excellent.
[01:22:21.750] – Tien
And I reuse this a couple of times before it starts getting ratty. You can use it actually quite a bit longer than that, I think.
[01:22:29.780] – Dawn
Cool. Okay.
[01:22:31.650] – Janet
Going back to Celia’s question, yes, I do use Velcro. Or I’ve even been known, like, in a workshop situation where I want to cut off and reattach really quickly, I’ve been known to use zip ties to reconnect them because that’s fast. But I don’t do it normally because it’s also wasteful, plastic. And I don’t use Texsolv usually because Texsolv stretches over time, especially when you’re putting high tension on it. So there’s that.
[01:23:14.840] – Tien
Blank. Okay. My brain fried.
[01:23:16.430] – Dawn
All right. Celia wonders if a thinner cord is slippery-er, if that’s a word, for the lacing through. Slippery-er.
[01:23:28.620] – Tien
It depends. A thinner cord can bite into the center of a bout. If you’re talking about, like, half an inch versus a quarter inch–well, that’s kind of excessive–then the thinner cord will slide through better. But as you start going down further and further in size, you reach a point where the thread is so thin that it sort of buries itself into the bout and doesn’t want to move as well, in my experience, as a slightly thicker cord. What do you think, Janet?
[01:24:03.560] – Janet
Well, I use the same mason cord that you were talking about. Or I think sometimes we have, like, parachute cord or something at the studio where I was teaching last–no, where I was studenting last fall, and that worked well. The slippery-ness comes from the fiber content and the construction of the yarn–not yarn, the cord. So you want something that you would just feel is slippery.
[01:24:41.570] – Tien
Right.
[01:24:44.760] – Janet
I agree with Tien. I would avoid something too fine. But again, it’s more like the ratio of the thickness of your lacing cord to the thickness of your warp threads and the size of your knots. If your warp threads are very fine and your knots are small, then the lacing cord can be finer. But if you’re working with big, chunky wool and bigger knots, then you can use a bigger cord.
[01:25:14.560] – Tien
I know what I wanted to ask you, Janet. How do you do that Velcro thing? Now that I’ve heard about it, I’m curious.
[01:25:23.960] – Janet
Well, there’s Velcro cable ties.
[01:25:30.120] – Tien
Okay. Yeah. Now, I know.
[01:25:34.540] – Janet
I will put a video and pictures up in the Toolbox at some point. And if you go to my Weaving with Janet Dawson Facebook group, at this point I know there’s videos there showing me using the Velcro cable ties. And I’m pretty sure there’s videos of me tying onto the front apron rod as well and adjusting tension. And I know that there are videos out there on YouTube of me doing the same thing, too. So eventually, before long, we will have videos on the Academy site, too. The list is long.
[01:26:03.560] – Tien
We have one last question.
[01:26:05.540] – Dawn
All righty. Dayamitra wonders, I’ve had problems with threads separating when they go over the front beam. I’m using 16/2 cotton sett at 15 ends per inch. Why is it separating, and what can I do to fix it?
[01:26:19.830] – Janet
It is separating because 15 ends per inch is very open, very loose sett for 16/2. Let’s go look at Ashenhurst. Dayamitra, can you tell me what structure you are using while I zoom over to Ashenhurst? I closed my window. Oh, I didn’t.
[01:26:45.230] – Tien
Twill. Like a four-shaft twill? Like a 3/1 twill or 2/2 twill?
[01:26:52.100] – Janet
So if we go to the Toolbox. Toolbox and down to calculators, Ashenhurst. Oh, delightful. Oh, I think I changed the path. Hang on. That’s my bad. Yes, look. It should be Ashenhurst Imperial. I better fix that.
[01:27:25.420] – Tien
But you all can admire my cat in the interim.
[01:27:28.880] – Janet
Yes. Look at Tigress hunting for the Ashenhurst calculator on the shelf of yarn. All right. What? Okay.
[01:27:45.920] – Tien
Go to Courses. Pull it out of courses. Oh, everything is returning–
[01:27:51.280] – Janet
Everything. I wonder–the developers are trying to solve our lost page problem.
[01:27:58.876]
[crosstalk 01:27:58]
[01:27:58.890] – Janet
They said do not do anything until after 10:00 p.m. because of this reason. Let’s see. I’m going to stop sharing for a moment and go flush the permalinks, which sounds very strange, but that is the thing that needs to happen. But I have to wait. It’s even slow to load the–
[01:28:34.160] – Tien
He’s probably doing something.
[01:28:35.890] – Janet
I think he must be. Okay. Dayamitra–so let’s see. The yards per pound of 16/2 cotton is 3,360 times 2, that is 3,360 times 2–6,720. When Ashenhurst, the whole website comes back, try putting that number in. Actually, I could just do Ashenhurst on my calculator.
[01:29:10.020] – Tien
Or I can just tell you that when I’m weaving 30/2 silk, which is 7,500 yards per pound, I generally set it at 36-ish, which means that 15 is going to be really, really wide. So I think if you double your sett, that will help.
[01:29:34.420] – Janet
The yards per pound is 6,720. And take the square root of that and multiply it by 0.9 and then take 2/3 of that–divided by 3 times 2. That’s kind of–well, that’s a bit close, I think. But the point is that a twill sett for 16/2 is, for me at least, 36, like Tien said.
[01:30:13.840] – Tien
36 would be a little dense, but for twill, I would go 32, 30 to 36.
[01:30:22.420] – Janet
And what happens when your fabric is sleazy, which is a term we use when the sett is far too open, is that any time it passes over an edge, that the warp–or the weft, rather, can get pushed forward and back, especially if you are adjusting the tension forward and back a little bit to get the tension back to where you had it before you advanced. And so any edges–and if it’s really loose, the same thing can happen when the fabric wraps around itself or wraps on top of itself on the cloth beam. The weft from one layer can embed in the weft of the other layer and pull it around there, too. So, yeah, that’s classic my-sett-is-too-lose evidence.
[01:31:12.840] – Janet
So the solution is to re-sley at fewer ends per inch–sorry, more ends per inch, quite a few more ends per inch. Or if you’re committed to your warp being the width that it is, then use a heavier weft. So increase the weft by–at 15, you might need to go with a weft that’s almost four times as heavy, so like an 8/4 cotton, to get a balanced fabric that doesn’t slide around.
[01:31:40.140] – Tien
Are we done? I think we’re done. We’re a little over time.
[01:31:44.540] – Dawn
I think that’s everything.
[01:31:45.520] – Tien
I think it’s time for the black cat to appear.
[01:31:49.980] – Janet
Well, I am flushing permalinks.
[01:31:52.620] – Dawn
I am copied.
[01:31:54.260] – Tien
All right. The other cat is volunteering to eat the cat treats. All right. Are we done, Janet?
[01:32:08.420] – Janet
Yes.
[01:32:09.400] – Tien
All right. Goodnight, everyone.
[01:32:11.620] – Janet
Goodnight.
[01:32:12.760] – Dawn
Thanks, everybody.