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week 4 of 2nd year

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 the week, but as some people have only just started weaving we've got an extension.

the weave department is understaffed, the college administration have no understanding of it whatsoever

in other news, i've just ordered a 400X magnification USB microscope (for examining textile fibres) and an Arduino Microcontroller newbie's kit, for to play with electronic. for my next project i want to create a fabric with conductive warps and wefts that can act as a touchpad by connecting one warp with one weft via the conductivity of the finger and all that. but i need to get the electronic part sorted out.

i need at least two layers of fabric (one with weft and one with warp) so the two sets of conductors are seperated from each other. i also possibly need an insulating layer in between, but i'm not sure about that yet.

it would be kinda groovy to make triple layered interchanging fabric though, a proper challenge for the old brainbox and that. would make me feel dead clever that would

Comments

Meg said…
You've been back? Or course, it's your autumn, I guess.

I'm excited to see your high-tech cloth. I've been thinking of the same type of double weave - but in my case to create strange shapes - same colored warp but dif colored weft... Something like that.

Thanks for the push.
Andrew Kieran said…
hey meg, good to hear from you again.

i'd be interested to see what notation you use to describe a double cloth. there seems to be more than one way of describing it.

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