Designing Woven Fabrics

I'm borrowing my title today from Janet Phillips' new book, just published by Natural Time Out Publications. My copy, a new from the press, signed, first edition arrived yesterday morning.

Janet has been a professional handweaver for 30 years. She started out with a 1st class honours degree in Woven Textile Design from the Scottish College of Textiles, worked in industry as a designer, and was working as a freelance textile designer when her first book "The Weaver's Book of Fabric Design" was published by Batsford in 1983.

Janet's first book is very good, regarded as a standard reference by handweavers in the U.K. even 25 years on.

Her second book is exactly what I had hoped when I placed my pre-publication order. This is the book which is going to by by my side as I move from exploring weave structures to designing fabric. It's based not just on Janet's knowledge of weaving, but also her knowledge from many years of teaching handweaving. She explains things in her own way and is very thorough and careful in her writing. She doesn't talk down to the reader, nor does she assume any more than a basic ability to warp up and weave and four shafts to play with. The back cover says she "has a deep commitment to teaching others" - that really comes across in the style of writing and presentation.

Part 1 is all about weaving a multiple section sample blanket that demonstrates how different twill threadings work with different treadlings. She writes about all the sections first, in some detail. She takes you right through to how to finish the blanket when you take it off the loom.

Part 2 Design Criteria and Part 3 Designs, build on what is learnt from the sample blanket. It teaches you to look at the samples, think about them, plan and weave a project based on the samples using different yarns and colours (her examples are stunning). One thing that really impressed me was a section about dyeing and over-dyeing. She takes a yarn that is already dyed and then over-dyes to get related shades or complex effects. I realise I have hardly started to explore the possiblities of yarn dyeing. Also, I have hardly started to think about fabric design.

So when shall I place my order for the yarn for the sample blanket? I'm keen to get on with this project. Looking around I have about 18" of a twill sample warp to use up on the loom. I have a box of assorted colours of 2/12 mercerised cotton, and was thinking of winding a warp to explore doubleweave. I was planning a project weaving some simple mats in predominantly yellow mercerised cotton for one for my sisters. I have a little problem to sort with my loom aprons and tension.

I'm not sure what the order for doing things is going to be, I like having choices and possibilities lined up, I guess you'll just have to watch this space to see where I go!

Designing Woven Fabrics, Janet Phillips, pub. Natural Time Out Publications 2008,ISBN 978-0-9957620-0-0
(Follow this link for more details of Janet and her work or to purchase the book.)


The introduction to this book ends "I look forward to seeing cloths designed by weavers based on my ideas that are original, individual and which bring out their own personalities through the very essence of a woven fabric". Me too, hopefully from my own loom!!!"

Handweaving in England - 1939

An odd title, you might well think, but I am reading a book written in 1939 by Ethel Mairet, an English handweaver, who "set up her hand loom in defiance of the march of time" and went on to teach many other weavers, in several different countries.

The book is "Hand-weaving To-day, Traditions and Changes", Ethel Mairet, first published Faber & Faber 1939, my copy is the 4th edition, from 1959.

It is beautifully written, I was surprised by the use of colloquial language in a book of this time, but this makes the story flow as she tells a brief history of weaving worldwide and then in specific countries. She looks at the development of industrial weaving in England from a philosophical "post war" point of view. Writing of the influence of William Morris, she says:
"Although the Arts and Crafts movement had the disastrous effect of isolating the individual craftsman and separating him from the trend of industrial development, it did save him from extinction."

As I read this aloud at breakfast time my boyfriend commented "ah, she is of the Modernist era, then". Yes, indeed, she says:
"...we are now at the start of a post-War consciousness, a post-War art and life, entirely different from that at the beginning of the century. The idea of controlling the machine and making out of it something beautiful, is gradually developing. We are at least beginning to feel that our own age has something to express."

Curiously, this book is about hand-weaving, and yet what she seeks to do seems to be to marry the hand-craft and the industrial. This I had not expected from the title. This little book reads as an essay appealing for the standard of industrial work to be improved by going back to learning from the skills of hand-spinning - "the foundation of weaving" - and hand-weaving.

In a chapter on "Handweaving and Education" she says:
"there is much need in England for well-trained weavers. They are needed as designers for industry and for the individual small workshops doing work of fine quality".
She says the training of weavers should take 5 - 8 years:
"It is the gathering of experience that is important as well as the mastery of best technique. There should be an historical background - a knowledge of what has been done, but it must be used only as a help to creation."

In some ways, this book is charming as a picture of its times, rather dated. But it also has lovely descriptions of "contemporary hand-weaving " in Scandinavia, The British Isles, and France, and a fascinating account of the Welsh Mill form 18th century to the present day. To my surprise I read:
"there are still over a hundred small mills scattered about Wales, mostly in remote valleys, wherever there is a suitable stream to run the water-wheels...".

1939 is a long time ago, I wonder how many of these mills were still manned after the 2nd world war?

At the end of the book are short related essays by other authors. One is on sorting fleece, another I am looking forward to reading is about "Weaving at the Bauhaus" by one of the weavers who worked there.

For a weaver interested in philosophy, history, and the development of different weaving traditions, this is a very interesting book indeed, and as we are having very wet weather this weekend, I'm happy to be a bookworm :)

Balancing a plied yarn

Last week I had spun and plied a fine grey Shetland yarn, when I had wound a skein and removed it from the small niddy-noddy, it twisted over on itself, as shown.


My heart sank at this. I'd spent a couple of evenings preparing this yarn, spinning one singles one evening, the other and plying on the next. I hoped the problem might be solved by washing the yarn and then drying it with a weight to pull it straight. This was not to be - oh no - no such happy resolution. Nothing like. I dropped the yarn in a bowl of hand-warm water and it straight away seemed alive. It squirmed.

I leant over the bowl of water and stared at the skein anxiously, it didn't look right at all. It had kind of curled up in the bowl, like my cat in his basket. Skeins don't normally do this. They normally kind-of stretch out and float, like when you return a strip of seaweed to the sea. I pulled out the unhappy little skein, I hung it over a rack and dried it with a weight, but even with the weight hanging from the wet skein, it wouldn't straighten out.

Do you see its fancy twirls and squiggles? Not the sort of yarn I wanted. Not as good as my previous attempts at a balanced, fine yarn. One of the oddest yarns I've produced.

It reminded me of another skein, tucked away in a drawer for a couple of years.

No, this is not knitted! Yes, it does look like moss! I was trying out an idea, plying a yellow yarn with a green, thinking of knitting a sample square to try out a jumper yarn. When I took it off the niddy-noddy, my beautiful yarn turned into the strange coil you see above. It's very elastic, makes a nice warm neck collar, but will never be knitted!

How was this achieved? I had plied the yarn the same way it was spun. Normally, to ply a yarn the spinning wheel direction is reversed. The twist in a singles yarn gives it kinetic (stored) energy. The straight fibres fight against the spinning. A singles yarn can be set, just like curling your hair with old fashioned curlers: wash and dry under tension. In a plied yarn, two singles spun the same way are plied with opposite twist. The plying "balances" the energy in the singles with a twist that pulls the other way.

I remembered that Mabel Ross's Handspinner's Workbook had a section "Balance in Yarn Spinning". Very much aware that I really don't understand properly how plying works, I went back to this book. She describes how a balanced yarn needs to be plied, and being a mathematician, she gives an equation.

To summarise, plying a yarn the opposite way to the twist in the singles, removes of half the twist from each of the singles yarns.

To achieve balance,
the twist per inch in the plied yarn
must be equal to
the sum of the remaining twist in the singles.

9 tpi in each of two singles, plied 6 tpi the opposite direction, leaves two singles each with 3 tpi. 2 x 3 tpi = 6, the same tpi as the plying, and so a balanced yarn.

O.K. this is not the simplest concept in spinning. But Mabel Ross has done what no-one else seems to. She looked at what happens, analysed it, and made a description that if you can follow it enables you to ply a balanced yarn every time.

Big sigh. I had to stop, think, calculate, but it was worth while. I got some black Shetland, just a little (I didn't want another whole skein going wrong!), and prepared a couple of short lengths of singles yarn, then plied, putting in 2/3rds the twist of the singles. It worked.

What is more, it's a good fine yarn. I didn't spin enough to see how many times it would wrap around one inch of my ruler, but there were 20 wpi in the half inch.