Old Draft Comes to Life
Today I finished warping my 24 harness AVL loom. It seemed to take me forever to get this warp on the loom. I kept putting off working on it since I was a bit nervous about what I was doing. The draft came from a weaving book published in 1740 in Germany. The book is “Nutzliches Weber-Bild-Buch (Weaver’s Tie-up Book)” and was written by Johann Michael Frickinger. I have a translation of the book and have found some very nice weaving drafts in it and other old resources.
The fabric is a plain weave background with a supplemental weft pattern. Not too fancy or complicated, just different than what I have done before. After the loom was set up, I started weaving. No real hitches, just a few adjustments needed to be made to the loom to accommodate the current project. I found the tabby weft was a little too thick to get the threads to beat close enough together. This would leave spaces between the pattern threads and would make the cloth look a bit thin and worn. I found a thinner thread to try for the tabby and the results improved.
The cloth looked pretty good on the loom. I was tempted to just start weaving the project I have in mind. However, I know better. You can not judge fabric until it has been taken off the loom and washed. The water transforms the straight stiff threads into the final product. Natural fiber threads will bend around each other and fill in the spaces between themselves. A stiff cloth just off the loom can be turned into a supple fabric after it has been washed. You never know exactly what the results will be untill the fabric has been washed.
Another thing washing does is amplify any imperfections in the weave structure. Once the cloth is woven, there is nothing that can be done to fix major problems. Minor ones can be corrected by weaving a correctly placed thread into the cloth with a needle. This is time consuming, but well worth the effort.
With that in mind, I cut what I had woven off the loom and gave it a quick hand washing in the sink. I am so glad I took the time to do this. Once the water allowed the threads to move into their natural place in the fabric I found it didn’t look quite right. The design has a flower motif and it was lopsided in the center.
Back to the drawing board (or I should say computer). I use a computer program to work out new weave structures and designs. A few minutes of working with the pattern and it was balanced. This is something I should have done at the beginning, but didn’t think about when I did my first draft on the computer.
Tomorrow I will start weaving again. I hope to make a shawl to wear at ‘Museum Comes to Life’ and I will use some of the fabric for a sample eschange for a study group I belong to. Right now I am debating whether or not I will cut another piece off and wash it before weaving the final project. After today, I bet I will…
