Weaverly

Alice Schlein

recent posts

Category: Handweaving

  • Doodling on 8 Shafts

    Yes, truly, that’s what I have entitled this draft. I doodle on the computer when the yarn refuses to behave. Or when the weaving pixies run amok, as they have this week. It’s an amalgamation on a simple point twill, no networking here, and I designed it with the help of TempoWeave on my Mac.…

  • Conversations

    Sometimes it’s simple, like what to have for dinner. Other times, it’s more serious. But mostly, we just enjoy hanging out together. Occasionally I have conversations with my yarn. I find wool yarn is the most forgiving, Too tight? Too loose? Wool doesn’t care. Skipped a dent? No biggie. Here I am working on a…

  • Making Do

    What do you do when your hands aren’t working the way they used to, and you have to give them a rest from throwing shuttles? Hereabouts the solution is to make a deep dive into the stash of handspun wool and warp up a rigid heddle loom. The longish skeins of habdspun are used for…

  • Up Close

    The following image is a scan of a fabric I wove on a rigid heddle loom a few weeks ago. It’s a balanced plain weave of 12 epi and ppi, hand washed and hung to dry. The yarn is a handspun wool/linen blend from my stash (I spun and plied the yarn from a custom…

  • On Pins & Needles

    I collected as many pincushions as I could find for an impromptu group portrait. The felt ones were purchased on Etsy, the handwoven ones are scraps of my own fabrics, and the one nestled permanently in its own ply-split basket (my one foray into ply-splitting) is my own creation. Why so many pincushions? Well, I…

  • Eight and Sixteen

    Further explorations of network drafting with initials greater tnan straight 4-end. In this first example, for 8 shafts, I have used a point twill as the initial: 1-2-3-4-3-2.The resulting threading is tromped as writ, and the tieup has no floats longer than 2. Maximum float length in the resulting draft is 5. The same process…

  • Playing With Point Twill

    I spend hours playing with point twill threadings, mostly because I find them easy to thread on an 8 shaft loom. In the following illustration I show three stages in one of my experiments. Read these diagrams from right to left. First is a point twill threading with a treadling developed on a point twill…

  • More Shafts Than Necessary, & Other Matters

    In this halvdrall draft, you will see that this design can be woven on 4 shafts. But because of the imbalance between numbers of heddles on shafts 1 and 2 compared to shafts 3 and 4, I would have had to move heddles around on the loom, a task I really hate and try to…

  • Four Leaf Clovers

    I’ll bet you didn’t know that four leaf clovers can be blue. Insert smiley face. This draft for eight shafts was created using the principles of network drafting and amalgamation. To learn more about these topics, check out the online class I’ve created in partnership with LoftyFiber. The class is self-paced and contains many hours…