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During my research project Weaving Glitches, I came up with my own weaving technique. I call it a weaving technique because it is a different way of designing than usual. It is quite simple in the basics, and yet I see very few fabrics designed this way. There are certainly advanced weavers who also like to play with the tie-up digram (or simply tie-up). in the weaving draft, but the only weaving technique I found that also involves designing in the tie-up is the Crepe weaving technique. But in that technique, the aim is to weave single-color fabrics, the main concern there is to obtain strong, supple fabrics. By the way, also a very nice technique, which inspired me to look beyond purely adjusting the wefts when designing my fabrics.
The tie-up is meant to show which shafts are lifted when the specific treadle is used, on a loom equipped with treadles. In the weave design below, you can see the tie-up in the upper right. The vertical lines are the treadles, in this case sixteen. Each black dot indicates which of the sixteen shafts at the left of the tie-up should be connected to that treadle.
While designing my Weaving Glitches fabrics, I began to play more and more with the tie-up. Because what you change there affects the whole fabric. And that makes designing on the computer so much more intuitive for me! Also when selecting a piece of tie-up and then rotating, shifting or mirroring it, all sorts of amazing things happen.
And when I’m satisfied with the effect, I convert the tie-up to the liftplan so I can weave it on my table loom. In other words, a loom that uses levers instead of pedals. Table looms are smaller, and it weaves slower than a large loom, but you can do just as much with it! And where on a large loom with treadles you’re stuck with the set bindings, or it takes a lot of time to tie the pedals differently, on a table loom you can design continuously by adjusting the tie-up, convert that to an liftplan, and then weave it.
These months, some loom makers are releasing smaller and affordable looms with eight shafts. I predict that this will make more complex weaving increasingly common.The Shuffle weaving technique is perfectly usable from eight shafts up, so also including these new looms. The technique is actually also usable on dobby looms, looms controlled by computer or mechanically, on which you can weave with even 32 and sometimes 40 shafts.
Shuffles
I decided to put my idea for the Shuffle weaving technique to the test in my fourth Weaving Glitches fabric. The basis of the weave are the two wide bands set up in the Twill weaving technique. This because, if I use the Twill technique for the wefts as well, it shows exactly the tie-up pattern. And with that I could test how well my idea held up, how many shuffles I could make to end up in a kind of total chaos. And the rest of the warp, which I designed with different techniques or variations of them, changed with it.
In the first shuffle, I selected a six-by-six pixel square in the bottom right corner of the tie-up, which I then moved up one step. In the second shuffle, I selected a block of six by six pixels in the upper left corner, which I moved up three steps. Then I weaved the result. The dotted line in the picture indicates the reference to the tie-up, the result of the two shuffles.
What I mostly encountered while designing, and sometimes while weaving, is that you get larger flotations than desired. So weft threads that pass over many warp threads before passing back under a warp thread to make a new joint. You can make those smaller by some further puzzling in the tie-up, if that is your desire. Personally, I usually keep a maximum flotation of five threads. In this fabric I paid attention to that only in the twill strips, leaving the rest to fate.
Below are three more shuffles from this weave. It doesn’t always work as an even flow, experimenting before setting up a weave I can recommend. Although it is also interesting to let yourself be surprised. I am getting better at recognizing what design steps in the weaving software will do in the actual fabric. Below the examples a zip file with all shuffles as wif-files.
The intro to the fourth Weaving Glitches fabric is a quick weaving sketch of several shuffles. So that I could get an idea of what I might achieve in the rest of the fabric. To the right of the photo is part of the wefts of this first piece of the weave.
Full weave
The shuffles of cloth four in a zip file. Where lift is after the document name, it is (usually) the above file converted into an liftplan. You can find the examples from above, they are numbers 08, 10, 13, 21 and 29.
26-weaving-glitches-4-shuffle-weave.zip
My research Weaving Glitches was financially supported by the Creative industries fund, with the Experiment scheme (now Kick-start Grant)
