Weaverly
Alice Schlein
Category: Handweaving
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As promised in the previous post, here is some 9×9 basketweave combined with plain weave blocks. Warp 8/2 cotton, natural, and weft 8/2 cotton, pale gray, sett 16 epi and ppi. I’m weaving this on an 8 shaft loom. Ideally I could use another 2 shafts for a band of plain weave at the selvedges,…
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First, let me tell you about my Christmas cactus, which for the first few years never bloomed at all. I think maybe I was overwatering it. Then, for the past two years it has been blooming madly in March and April. I don’t know what’s going on. I just enjoy it. This might be a…
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Once upon a time I wove this black & white shawl in cotton and rayon, blocks of alternated basket weave and plain weave. Although the basic plan requires only 8 shafts, I wove it on a 16 shaft loom, so that I had the luxury of extra shafts for plain weave bands at the selvedges.…
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The current warp: a two-block pattern in jin weave (aka turned taqueté, aka warp-faced compound tabby). I always enjoy weaving this structure, for many reasons. Warping is quick and easy. Two contrasting yarns are alternated in the warp (contrasting colors, or matte vs. shiny, or smooth vs. textured, or thick/vs. thin, or?? And perhaps the…
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The blanket is finally, finally finished and wants to take one more bow. Six strips total, of different widths, and (mostly) all the same length. About 95% handspun wool and other fibers. 8 epi on rigid heddle looms. This project was such a joy to work on. I loved the process of sosrting all the…
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Sometimes it’s the small things that get us through some tough spots. A sudden change in the weather, an unexpected sunbreak, a drive through the neighborhood, and a burst of luscious bright green moss in the otherwise brown woods. This one was a stunner. If I had seen it at another time of day, another…
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The blanket you saw here is being added to, gradually. It needed to be wider, so I’m adding two more strips, one on each side. Although the first four strips were all handspun warp and weft, for these additional strips I’m using Harrisville Shetland wool from my stash as warp, and handspun wool as weft.…
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Everything looks like rectangles today. The screen of my TempoTreadle, the the number stickers on my Louet Jane, the windows with their weather drama. The little fluffy ends of the heddles add a contrasting illusion of grass on the bottom of the picture, as if this were a prairie scene. The sleet is blowing horizontally…
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It’s not as cold as in other parts of the country, just enough to get my attention. I’m in between warps, but to keep my circulation going, I played around with some 8-shaft drafts on the computer this morning. This one I entitled freezing.wif. It actually looks like icicles to me. There are a lot…
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The first thing I did this morning, after thanking the weather spirits for preserving our electric power, was to take a few ice pictures. Full disclosure: I Photoshopped this first image severely. Couldn’t resist. Back indoors I went to work on the two small warps I wound yesterday for the rigid heddle loom. These will…
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The last few days have been devoted to sewing the final section of blanket to its companion strips. The blanket looks pretty good on the bed, but it’s not quite wide enough yet. I think two more strips, one along each side, will be just about right. The pillow on the right is doublewoven jacquard…
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I’ve been accumulating a collection of 3-yard strips woven on a rigid heddle loom. The yarns are all handspun wool and wool blends, plied, from a stash that goes back over 50 years. Spinners will recognize that wool yarns have widely differing takeup and shrinkage properties depending on breed of the sheep, amount of twist,…
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There are many versions of the children’s folk song “Here we go loopty loop”–you may have learned “looby loo” or other variations — but I especially like the last line of the refrain, which goes “all on a Saturday night.” On a recent Saturday Night I loopty looped this 8″ wide warp as a stashbusting…
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It’s been 20 years since the publication of The Woven Pixel: Designing for Jacquard And Dobby Looms Using Photoshop® (see sidebar). Bhakti Ziek and I, at opposite sides of the country, thought it was important to document our individual explorations in digital weaving and make our joint efforts available to the weaving community. We worked…
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On my walk yesterday morning I passed a construction site and saw this very amusing dumpster. I did not mess with the image at all, except to crop it a little. It kept me laughing for the rest of the day. Back in the studio I worked at my current RH project and was thinking…
Weaverly 