Sample blanket progress report

There are 50 treadle patterns in the sample blanket I'm weaving from Janet Phillip's Designing Woven Fabrics, (see also Janet's website) and so far today I have woven no. 38 which is a shadow twill and no. 39 which is weft Bedford cord. Plenty of "ohs" and "ahs" going on at my loom today!! Love that shadow twill. Photos will follow, another day.

I had this comment from Kas on my last post:

I bought Janet's book from her website. From the US, it's quite
expensive but definitely worth the cost. I've been looking for a clear
understanding of the design process and this book is clear,
understandable. I can't wait to get to the sampler! Now if only someone
could tell me whether 5/2 cotton will work just as well as 2/6!

It's not a cheap book if you just look at the cover price, but in terms of content you I'm sure you're getting every cent's worth and more. I think you're spot on in describing it as giving a clear understanding of the design process. Well, at least one approach to design, but a very useful and adaptable approach that could lead you to develop into your own approach to designing. I can see how what is in this book is not only very comprehensive in terms of the structures covered, but also teaches an approach that you can take into trying other types of weave and working with colour in other ways.

Now to the nitty-gritty (is this a UK expression? it means getting down to the nuts and bolts, dealing with the basic issues) ....... this question of will 5/2 cotton work just as well as 2/6.

I thought about the yarn choice too, because I have lots of yarn about my workshop but not 2/6. In the end, I ordered 2/6 (and 2/12) to make my life easy. It means that following the instructions has been straightforward. I made one difference, I ordered natural instead of white as it's slightly cheaper and I think makes no difference to the result.

But maybe you can get hold of 2/6 cotton? O.K., lets look at what difference it makes. I got out one of my "Best of Weavers..." books because at the back they have a quick reference page for yarns which gives an actual size yarn photo and details. Hmm. very useful, except - no 2/6 or 5/2!!

Think some more. Well, 5/2 is going to be a heavier weight yarn than 2/6. Less yards per pound. Need setting slightly wider, possibly, and the second warp yarn will need to be 2/10 instead of 2/12. If you sett wider, you will find it is wider on the loom. If you're loom is ample width, you could put the warp on, make sure you have a good bit extra length for sampling, and then try different setts. My favourite weaving techniques author Peggy Osterkamp's books would be useful to have to hand, if you need reference books to help you work out the sett you want, but maybe you are familiar with using this yarn anyway?

A couple of tips -

1) I'm using a temple because this peice of weaving incorporates many different structures with different numbers of thread interactions and the temple helps with keeping the cloth even.

2) I put on a 6 metre warp, the book said 4 metres woven length. Apart from loom waste, I like to have spare, just in case, and if there's extra at the end I can try my own ideas a bit.

Another thought: the sample blanket might be slightly easier to weave on a jack loom, or a (wide) table loom (width on loom is 25.7 inches).

On my 8 shaft 10 treadle countermarche, I'm using 8 treadles in a universal tie-up. I never used a universal tie up before, but Janet gives full instructions in the book. Every lift needs 2 treadles, so every lift plan has to be translated into a list of which 2 treadles I need for each lift. I write the treadle order for each section out on a small white board which I have at the side of my loom. I check, and check again, it when it's written, as errors at this stage lead to tedious un-weaving!!

Must get back to the loom now, I want to have this blanket woven and finished before Tuesday evening, as I'm going to stay a few days with an Aunt who is an artist. It's really useful to talk to other interested people, possibly especially non-weavers, about how they perceive cloth design.

Weaving again

Those yarns I ordered.... I have wound my warp, the warp is wound on the back beam and now I'm threading heddles. I'm taking photos and will have a report on this in the next week or so.

My project is to weave the sample blanket from Janet Phillip's book Designing Woven Fabrics. This has several different twill threadings across the width of the fabric, used with different treadling patterns down the length so you get lots of sample squares in the one piece, and you can learn about combining two or more twills in one piece of weaving, as well as seeing how the different patterns look and compare.

I have been learning lots and am very excited about this project, it's stretching me already, I have had to work out how to do things I have never done before. I am so excited to be making a sampler that is a tool for design will take me to the next stage in my weaving. I am developing an idea of what sort of weaving interests me and where I am going. I keep eyeing up different yarn and colour combinations from the stash around my workshop and thinking "this plus that... mmm". Now I am not worrying about having a growing yarn stash... I see it turning into a fabric stash soon!

Yarn calculations

Yesterday I wanted to plan a yarn order. There are two particular projects I have in mind. The first is to weave a twill sample blanket, following instructions in Janet Philip's new book, Designing Woven Fabrics.

This requires 6/2 and 12/2 cotton yarns. Most helpfully she gives weights of yarn required in her book. I am going to alter the colours slightly. The two main colours she uses are white and navy. I have done a lot of samples in white and navy recently, so I have chosen to work in primrose yellow and royal blue instead. This still gives good strong contrast to show the weave patterns.

Project two is a lace weave cloth in mercerised yellow cotton for my sister's dressing table. She has a beautiful Victorian chest, french polished, and is concerned that it might be scratched by the bits and pieces she keeps on top of it. Yellow is far and away her favourite colour, and will go well with the yellow-orange-red colour range of the patchwork quilt I made for her wedding.

For project two, I needed to do calculations to find out how much yarn I need. This is something new for me. I went to Janet Philip's first book, The Weaver's Book of Fabric Design, pub. Batsford in 1983. She gives equations for warp and weft calculations.

The amount of yarn needed for warp is the ends per centimetre x width in centimetres x length in metres x Tex number of the yarn, divided by 1000.

What is the Tex of my yarn? This information is not given by my supplier. I know it is 12/2, what exactly does 12/2 mean, does it help for working out Tex? I found a definition of Tex: the weight in grammes of 1 kilometre of yarn.

This looked like a very difficult task. It took me some time, and plenty of digging around my books and files for information. Along the way I found various bits of information I thought needed keeping together. I started a new folder for yarn information, including things like sett ranges for different yarns, reed sley charts (I found I had 4 different ones!), notes on yarn counts and project planning sheets. It's a bright red folder so hopefully easy to find when I need it.

I discovered that my 12/2 cotton yarn means that the yarn is 2 ply, and the 2 single yarns are both of cotton count 12. This seems to be an imperial measurement. I found in notes from another weaver that the cotton count is the number of hanks of yarn of 840 yards which weigh 1lb.

The yarn count didn't seem to help with Tex. However, then I found notes I made from the SI/Metric website. The purpose of this website is to assist with Standard Imperial to metric conversions. There isn't much on yarns, but I found in my notes I had put information on yards per pound / tex together with an article by Rosemary Brock from her website called "Amount of Twist". The yards per pound of 12/2 cotton - 5040 from SImetric gives a tex of 98 in Rosemary's chart (for which she gives credit to Peter and Jacquie Teal).

I decided to check this against my own yarn. I measured out 10 metres of yarn and weighed it on my scales (which are accurate to 0.01g). The weight was 1.1g. This would be 110g of yarn per kilometre - Tex 110. That's reasonably close to 98, my yarn must be slightly fine for it's count.

So, now I could make the calculations. I just had to convert ends and picks per inch to ends and picks per centimetre. The sample I wove that I want to base the cloth on was at 24 epi. I recalled that an inch is about 2.4cm, so decided to work with 10 ends per centimetre and picks per centimetre.

This was taking a fairly long time to work through, but next time I will know what I'm doing.

I multiplied: 10 ends per centimetre x 46 cm wide x 1.2 c.m. long x Tex 110, divide by 1000. I got 54g. Plus 54g for the weft calculation. Only 128g? I was surprised. Then I started to think about loom waste. I realised that my loom needs 1.5m for loom waste (that's slightly generous) and I want some extra for sample length in case I need to make changes or adjustments before weaving the piece. Say, 2m extra. Well, that about doubles the yarn needed. I got my boyfriend to check all my calculations for me. He did, and then pointed out that weaving on a loom like mine is a production method - it's for producing large amounts of cloth. I'd better think again and weave more than one small piece of cloth! After all, she might need at least two so she can wash one from time to time.

Now I can order some yarn.