having lots of fun with grid paper

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 in the warp, it's a pain. With any luck it'll even itself out in finishing.

These pictures were taken with my new USB microscope. I got it for my birthday from my parents along with a beginner's Arduino kit, for which to be playing with textile electronics. i want to make an array of switches. It's difficult to explain. But now i have a microcontroller. Here is a picture close-up of a fucked-up bit of my bag where the fabric has been stretched and distorted due to rakes of stuff being stuffed into a small bag:

Is a little bit fuzzy, i forgot to take the lenscap off. Is good for examining fine fabrics close up and that. You can see how the fabric there's been damaged, is pretty good eh?

Anyhow, I've got a 24 shaft warp of 2/19's cotton to play with and more ideas than i know what to do with. considering that it takes me about an hour and a half to hammer in a 24 lag peg plan, it's probably worth taking care in what exactly i'm going to be weaving, as I can't spend all year making this one warp. I also have my special project to be working on, as well as a christmas present for my mum, which is a linen table runner and matching placemats. It's a surprise, but it's ok because she's allergic to the internet so she'll never know as long as noone tells her.

Having looked at some of these drafts a bit more closely it occurs they're occassionally flawed and wouldn't work actually. The above weave is a classic example of what happens when my love of symettry isn't working with commonsense and such.

-andrew

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Tablet Weaving Lesson #1: Backstrap weaving a simple diamond motif

This is the first in a series of video and photo tutorials showing basic to advanced tablet-weaving concepts. These lessons shall each build on the last and hopefully take the viewer from simple diamond patterns up to more complicated double face pattern weaving with finer yarns and eventually onto the heady heights of brocading and other fancy techniques (just as soon as I learn how to do them myself). In this first lesson we'll learn the basic weaving steps involved in weaving a diamond pattern in the backstrap style. This lesson is meant for someone who has purchased a ready-made warp from me. The next lesson shall detail how to design and make this warp oneself. And we begin This is the basic pattern we are making. The woven band is tied to my waist with another strap. I am holding a small stick shuttle in my right hand which contains the weft. In front of me are the cards, each card has 4 warp threads going through it. The gap that you can see is called the ...

24 shaft patterns - all the fun

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, ...

Building a jack loom Part 1: Vague plans and messy diagrams

I've been thinking about it for a while to be fair. What I'm thinking about is an 8 shaft folding jack loom. The interesting part comes when I point out that I'm going to build an electric dobby controller into the bottom of it so it operates from one pedal and a computer program. So far I've been thinking and thinking and I'm basically roughly copying the kind of frame you'd find in a Siever's school or Baby wolf loom. Basically it's like an X that folds up on itself with the castle in the middle. Should be able to reduce it's depth from 3 feet to about 1 for storage. I don't think it's really that difficult to design the loom frame, aside from building the beams and making the ratchets and so on, which I may just jigsaw out of thick MDF. I have most of the wood I need asides from some panelling and I need to buy some aluminium sheet to make the shaft dividers with and also to hold the shaft bodies together with. The rising levers w...

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