weave4fun

 Yo-Yo-Yo! 24-shaft weavin in the house yo! i think that's enough pretend hip-hop talk for now, eh? so yeah, here are three of the more successful results of my cotton warp on 24 shafts. i am really beginning to envy the 3rd and 4th years working on compu-dobby systems now. you spend 2 hours weaving and 2 hours making a peg plan, and it hurt my back putting little pegs into little holes. and of course all the little pegs and the little holes are almost imperceptibly different sizes, so not all pegs fit all holes, and sometimes you have to stuff wee bits of yarn in as well to get them to stay. and then sometimes they're not far in enough and they jam the dobby mechanism, and sometimes they're too far in and they jame the dobby mechanism. and sometimes a link breaks and the whole mechanism jams. and sometimes all the shafts lift at once and you can't figure out why. and sometimes shafts just bounce off their strings and you can't figure out why,

I am currently in the process of designing a triple layered fabric. One layer shall carry conductive warp threads (one out of every three), another layer shall carry conductive weft threads (again, one out of every three) and a third layer shall lay between them and act as an insulator, keeping them apart and preventing unwanted contact between the two conductive layers. Constructing a treble cloth is a compicated process. The way that a treble cloth is woven is that first the face cloth is woven, then the centre cloth is woven, then the back cloth is woven. This is a draft for a treble cloth. The crosses indicate weaving marks for the cloth currently being woven, the dashes are lifts and are used to indicate shafts that are being lifted in the case of layers that are above the layer currently being woven. Blue is back, Red is front, Green is centre (All three layers are plain weave btw) The cloth is constructed like so 1: Back cloth is woven. All red and green marks are lif

i've been having fun today, weaving away and making up new drafts.  This is a selection of the drafts i've been making up as I idly whittle my time away, avoiding doing what i'm supposed to be doing in my timetabled class time. Also what I've been doing at home when i should be studying for a test on colour chemistry, which isn't going to be easy. We're also going to get tested on weave structures and processes, but I know most of that and besides it tends to conform to logical rules. Colour chemistry and dyeing and all that though you just have to know. I guess there probably is some logical consistency to it, but probably only if you already happen to be shit-hot at molecular chemistry and physics and biology. Which I'm not  I've also been weaving away (as I say) and have just finished my first sample of a pattern repeat i took from the knotwork book i mentioned before. It's working out rather well, although you can blatantly see the reed lines i

and we're spending pretty much all of our time in the weave shed. pretty much everybody has ended up doing double weave, which means that pretty much everybody is behind. i'm doing an interchanging double weave with 2/2 twill on both shafts, meaning i'm using 16 shafts. my lecturer tried to talk me out of it, but i wasnae listening. i hadn't thought of this before i started, but it turns out that areas of the fabric where the two faces interhange often tighten up a lot quicker than those areas of the warp where the faces don't interchange. as you can see in the second one the interchanging is occuring every 8 picks, by the time i'd finished i had to cut the fabric off and retie onto the front stick 'cause the warp was slack on the sides and in the middle and it was becoming impossible to weave properly. that's why you're seeing these before i've finished the 3rd sample. we have 3 samples to do. it was supposed to be finished by the end of

i have to meet prince charlie. only for a minute or so, but still. i might end up with my picture in the paper. and i hate having my picture anyway. cos i set the loom up at castlehill heritage centre, and that's what that's for. i wasn't sure originally, but when i got an invitation letter in a fancy envelope i kinda knew. so that's that. i think the other people that'll be there are more important from a social point of view. Charlie ain't a decision maker, he ain't a politician or a businessman or a charity organiser. but there'll probably be a lot of them there. so it's probably worth me going. and i might as well shave, mightn't i? i mean, i don't think i'll be coming back to live in caithness permanently in the future, so in the long run it might just be a waste of time, but on the other hand there's always that chance that i might have to fall down the route of being an anachronistic backward-looking kind of a guy that's ju

It's finally done. I've made all the heddles i think i really need for the castletown loom, and i'm going to go in and warp it up on saturday. or maybe friday. friday might be better now i come to think of it. anyway, i got some yarn for to put on the loom. a navy blue plain yarn, probably something like 28 worsted count i guess, and also a brown and white sorta flecky nep yarn. i think that's the right term, i really should know these things by heart now. anyway, i'm going to warp it up at 20epi or so with blue predominating in a sort of tartan check. so, my rough calculations go like this: 500/20 = (5/2=2.5x10=25) 25" or just over 2 feet. allowing for draw-in it could end up being exactly 2 feet wide, which is quite a nice width for a scarf. so i guess i'll make a 5 metre warp with that and get 4 scarves out of it if all goes well anyway, that's that. making 500 heddles is no joke. -andrew

i got bored when i was in the country. this is what i did for the 3D sculpture part of visual studies the front piece is a warp of plastic fishing line, which is tough enough to handle a weft of bramble and gorse stalks. for those not familiar with gorse, it's prickly as hell and almost impossible to weave with. you really need a shed about 20 cm deep to expect to not be snagging warp threads while using it. the warp was a chaotic mess by the time i'd finished using the gorse, the brambles were very little trouble on the other hand and this is a flower, think i had a picture up of this in unpainted state a while back. as you can see it's made out of gardening wire and masking tape the tutors thought the straw hanging all over it was intentional, something to do with the interface between nature and artifice. the truth is i ripped the wire out of a tangle of weeds. the suit is sort of an idea i had for aggressive textiles. textiles that harm rather than heal, y'know. the

cos i'll be out of computer range and besides, my camera's broken first year's finished anyhow. don't know if i've passed CAD or Art History yet, but have everything else. away out west tomorrow to help build up a ruined house over the summer. took my copy of collingwood's tablet-weaving book to see if i can't get into some more complicated pattern. doubleface i could do with getting the knack of. i wish i hadn't misplaced that linen, i guess it's around in gala somewhere, but that's no use. need to buy a shitload more acrylic as well. always easy to get hold of. tablet weaving with wool pisses me off, it's too damn hairy, felts up awful as well. linen is lovely to TW with, i imagine silk is too, but i've never been able to afford any. anyone got any more suggestions for fibre for tablet weaving?

That's my favourite one (above), it's a plain satin. I like the one below as well, which is sateen stripe That's a double faced interchanging plain weave I went somewhat overboard on the fancy yarns there. slub, gimp, and hairy. don't like it that much That's a honeycomb. you probably can't see there, but the texture changes as it goes up cos i gradually changed it to a plain weave on the way up. the lecturers idea. That's weft figuring. not a big fan of weft figuring, it is kinda pretty, but i reckon the floats would catch on things. don't think it's too practical the pictures aren't too great. i don't have access to a scanner. i tried taking pictures of the draft sheets but they came out pretty incomprehensible, so i'll leave them for now. i'm wanting to make an interchanging double weave tartan next year, and am going to try getting the draft sorted out in scotweave (that's the weave drafting program we use, it's kinda cool

almost just finished my last final woven bit on the looms at college. that's 8 technical samples and 5 final samples (usin colours from pictures i pulled off the web, cos i use the web to do pretty much all my research and imagery scavenging) all the samples are based on natural stuff that happens in nature. in order - 1 dying star, 1 lake with hills in front, 1 bunch of trees in summer, 1 largest/coldest large-sun-sized-but-really-cold object as seen through hubble telescope (discovered the other month), 1 rocky/heathery hillside somewhere up north presumably with the purple heather and all that jazz and 1 big green nebula thing with all bits of orange and some pale blue in it i particularly like the hubble stuff. gas nebulas rock the fabrics should be getting cut off the looms tomorrow evening, and i'll have to do yarn wraps and weft plans. of course, not having written the weft plans down while i was weaving, i now have to painstakingly look at the fabrics to figure out exac

i love it when a plan comes together

hey! guess what! pretty much everything i've been doing so far as weaving goes is grossly inefficient! hooray! i kinda figured that would be the case so far i've learned better ways of making the warp, better ways of putting lease rods into the warp while it's on the board, better ways of stretching the warp, better ways of packaging the warp for transport, better ways of winding the warp, better ways of threading the heddles, better ways of sleying the reed at some point in the future i'll probably attempt to illustrate these methods in a comprehensible manner, though i find it difficult to imagine i could reasonably expect to show anyone how to use a warping rack consisting of two levels of yarn alternating 1,2 in an up, down manner in order to make a cross between thumb and forefinger for ease of quickly putting onto a warping frame. not without standing there and making sure. it looks like magic when an experienced weaver does it, until you figure out how it's d

this from Imogen Heaps Twitter Dress Tweets From The Grammys "Around Heap's neck: a kind of sculptural cuff with blinking light. And her purse was a small television. The necklace had a live Twitter feed with a wireless router. And a television with videos her fans were sending to her account. She brought her followers down the red carpet." Wow, that's kinda cool and was actually something i was thinking about recently, about incorporating IM, facebook, twitter and other such info-feeds into clothing via a visual display or an earpiece (with text-to-voice software necessary of course to translate all that "omigod! c wot wez doon 2moz d00dz!" txt/hack speak stuff which is so unnecessary these days when everyone under the age of 25 types at the speed of light anyway It's maybe not a viable application the now, but surely will be an inevitable and highly desirable one in the coming age of Ubiquitous Computing and Full Connectivity. It might not be feasible

i made a pile fabric out of ripped up strips of an old t-shirt and guess what, it's part of visual studies. not that sam said "make a pile fabric out of pieces of an old t-shirt" but she did say "take last weeks 3D sculpture stuff and express it in cloth in a 2D format with 3D elements coming off the surface" and i had this old t-shirt sitting there. so i cut it up into strips and made warp, weft and pile out of strips of warp-knitted fabric. i tied the warp around my A2 sketchbook it's all 1 colour and kinda ugly, and i couldn't keep the selvedges from pulling in progressively as it went on and i'm sure you can understand how crap that feels, cos once the selvedge is pulled in on there's no way of pushing it out if you're not using a reed which i obviously wasn't. it's a common problem i've found with tapestry and knotted pile on square-frame looms. not easily avoided unless you're going to go to the trouble of building littl

North Korean propoganda poster, presumably the bad guys are US soldiers Monument to the Third International, communist More North Korean propoganda anyway so here's the question. i have been asked to, at great length it seems to me, define Art. and the question occured to me, can totalitarian art be considered truly Art, or is it merely propoganda? in the same vein you could ask if adverts have artistic value. the other issue that popped up when i was discussing this with a friend earlier that there were several schools of art, with their own distinctive styles that grew up in the USSR, so yes it is. but then, this begs the question doesn't it, that are all products of a totalitarian society necessarily totalitarian in themselves. certainly, state controlled propoganda artists certainly produce totalitarian work, but does that discredit every artist in the school of Socialist Realism, for instance, a state sanctioned artistic ideaology though it was? we don't call all art t

hey there i know, i hardly ever put anything on this thing anymore. see, it's like this, it's actually hugely frustrating, i haven't done any weaving worth speaking of AT ALL since i started college. and yeah, i ken like that there's more to life than intersecting two sets of threads at right angles to each other, but i like it you know? and i'm supposed to be down here to be doing that. and the knitting is really quite interesting, and actually i guess a potentially productive money-spinner in terms of actually producing sale goods, and it's handy to know how to actually cut patterns and sew properly, with a machine, and print is fun and is so something i quite enjoy and want to do more of, but the thing is i feel like it's gonna take forever before i get to do any weaving and here's the other thing right, well one of them, there's a whole rake of things doin my brain in right now, but here's the other thing like i say. see, in first semester we