OK, so when I bought the rigid heddle loom I told myself I had to learn to really use it, and not just for knotted pile. It's fairly expensive, a couple hundred dollars, and that's more than is reasonable for a single-use tool that is not a deep fryer.
(Deep fryers are totally worth it. TOTALLY.)
So I signed up to take a class with Syne Mitchell this weekend at CNCH (Conference of Northern California Handweavers; we shared the convention center with some kids doing some kind of ninja thing and a coin/stamp collector group).
The class was pretty intense.
In the first part of the class, we did lace techniques. This sample is a couple sizes of leno weaving (more on that in a second) on the bottom, then a row of Brooke's Bouquet (looks like sheaves of wheat in boxes), then a couple rows of a modified Brooke's Bouquet which ends up being more like filet.
Leno was really interesting to me because it crossed over into the sort of manipulation of fabric that you can get in knitting.
Basically, you cross two sets of warp strands like this over a pickup stick, use that stick to open a shed, and drop a weft strand in there to hold it in place. The next plainweave row reverses the twist so you get that sort of cool cable look. The more strands you twist, the thicker the twists.
Brooke's Bouquet is funkier and involves wrapping the weft around the warp to make little bundles (as small or as large as you want, again).
The modified Brooke's Bouquet was wrapping the warp in a neutral shed rather than an open shed, and by offsetting the next row I made a filet pattern.
Above that filet is a section of "scribbling" with yarn. Mine looks awful: the technique and I did not get along, and I managed to choose the worst yarn for it. Here are some photos of my classmates' scribbles, done with ribbon yarn, that look great:
And:
Above the scribbles are these Danish pattern things that involve lifting a thread of a supplemental warp, as technogeeky as that sounds, and I'm still undecided on how much I like it. I think that subtley done, it might add a nice texture to a fabric.
After lunch we did a bunch of pickup patterns. That's when you use a stick to pick up a bunch of warp threads like this:
(OK, I used my spare shuttle because I didn't have an appropriate pickup stick.)
So you can make ridges and floated threads like this:
That's a 5/1 windowpane pattern.
You can then combine the supplemental warp concept to get a pattern like this:
Notice how I learned from the previous scribble exercise and just used a flat yarn. The ribbon yarn was still a pain in the butt to deal with, but it looked nicer.
Our last pattern of the day was this honeycomb pattern. This was tons and tons of fun to weave. I loved it. OK, in better yarns, with less weird colours, but I liked the results and weaving it was just challenging enough to be interesting and easy enough to be fun.
After class, Heather and I went down to the market floor and checked out the display area. This was very intriguing: both the blue and red were woven at the same time; they just lift apart. I'm sure someday I'll be able to wrap my mine around how that was done.
And now I think it's time to take a little break from taking classes and actually make some stuff.
