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Halvdräll

Experiments in classical weave structures continue with Overshot!

This fabric has a base plainweave (tabby / over-under across each row), with a design pattern overlaid on it, created by rows with long floats. The design pattern appears to float on the surface.

This one is adapted from the Swedish Halvdräll style, in honor of which I chose flax and willow Harrisville loops. The result is textured, cushy, with tabby sections drawn up into pillow layers by the alternating longer floats on their surface.

To highlight the structure for my (and your, since I remembered to take photos!) understanding, I wove starting with the base tabby layer, using all the column pegs, and every other (even) row peg.

Having established that plainweave fabric, I then took my dozen willow loops, and wove them into the base fabric according to the pattern. You may observe that adding the new loops forced floats where there had previously been simple over/unders in the columns. Those smaller floats help pinch the longer floats in the rows into patterns on the surface, and pull the fabric along their length.

For the last 2 rows (top and bottom), instead of the design pattern as charted, I decided to plainweave (tabby / over-under across the row) both rows, to flatten the edge for a more attractive bindoff and function a bit like a selvage. (Chart update pending.)

I am curious if I could shift the plainweave rows now at the top & bottom of the entire chart (1 and 27) to be in between color row changes (new rows 9 and 19, respectively), so the surface floats could be pinched towards each other in 2×2 bundles (like the center section), instead of the 1x2x1 pinch we are getting in the top and bottom sections right now…

Gauze

I mentioned to a weaving friend that I was working on overshot today… and they suggested *gauze*. And we laughed heartily… And then I did it. Lol. Who’s laughing now?

I am (as ever!) surprised by how it came off the loom. It is suitable as a light-duty potholder, and would make a great coaster. You could even sew it onto something (around 3 edges) as a patch pocket! It gently bulges. Another amazing fabric, courtesy our ancestors in string technology.

Ok, so what is gauze, you ask? Wikipedia is pretty solid here:

In technical terms “gauze” is a weave structure in which the weft yarns are arranged in pairs and are crossed before and after each warp yarn keeping the weft firmly in place. This weave structure is used to add stability to fabric, which is important when using fine yarns loosely spaced. However, this weave structure can be used with any weight of yarn, and can be seen in some rustic textiles made from coarse hand-spun plant fiber yarns.

— Excerpt from Wikipedia: “Gauze” (CC-By-SA)

Because of the crossings, I knew my warp threads would tighten up significantly, and also required more space between them, so I decided to use half as many weft loops, on alternating pegs. The last skipped row looked like it would bind off too loosely, to my eye, so I added another weft row on the last row. The result would vary depending how many weft loops were used.

Hopefully the photos give you an idea of how to work the twists. Because we are using potholder looms, with closed loops, we could experiment with putting all the twists in the same direction, introducing a skew in the final fabric that might be interesting. (Also, having done these twists makes me want to try sprang as a technique, lol.)

Postscript, February 2024: I added these notes for someone who was confused about how to weave this structure. — Matthew

The whole piece is worked split-loop, treating the two arms of each warp loop as a pair.

On your starting row, weave over/under across, going over one arm of each warp loop and under the other.

On the next row, for each warp loop, twist it so the arm that was “under” the last time comes up and over its mate, and then back down again so that it can be “under” again but on the other side when the next weft goes through.

The result is that each warp loop is twisted back and forth on alternating rows, with the same arm always being “under” but hopping over its mate to switch from being under on the left to being under on the right and back again.

The result is a light, breathable fabric — the loops are tensioned into place, so they don’t gap or flop around, but there are lots of little spaces built into it.

Early Modern Pattern Books

Piglet and I ventured out today to see the “Threads of Power” exhibit at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery, exploring the development and social significance of lace, including examples of needle and bobbin lace from the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, courtesy of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen.

Although the fabric examples were impressive, the thing that particularly caught my attention were a few fifteenth- and sixteenth-century examples of “pattern books” — printed collections of designs to be used as source material by people working with fiber and fabric.

Those early pattern books are notable not because they’re entirely original creative works — indeed, they’re just collecting and organizing motifs that have mostly been developed by others — instead, their value lies in the crucial role they play in propagating those ideas to a wider audience beyond the narrow limits of guilds or court society, making it easy for a wide range of people to learn existing patterns, practice their skills, create items that others will appreciate, and eventually branch out to create new unique designs while drawing on this shared heritage.

These early works provide a historical reference point for the work I do in my own life to make heraldic art and small-scale weaving patterns available to facilitate the work of today’s artisans.

It was inspiring to see examples of this type of resource dating from four hundred and five hundred years ago, and I’m very pleased that I am, in my own very small way, helping to continue this tradition.

Alienor examines two sixteenth-century pattern books
Left: Schönsperger’s Ein new Modelbuch (1524). Right: Froschauer’s Nüw Modelbüch(1561).

Schönsperger’s Ein new Modelbuch (1524). [Scans at archive.org]

Froschauer’s Nüw Modelbüch (1561). [Scans at archive.org]

Parasole’s Gemma pretiosa della virtuose donne (1625). [Scans at archive.org]

Danieli’s Vari disegni di merletti (1639). [Scans at archive.org]

Tumbling Boxes

Oh!! This one is delightful! Such fun to touch. And also easy to weave, with the same pattern shifting across each row. The texture on this one pulls to the inside of the fabric, leaving a remarkably flat surface, good for trivets and coasters. The back side is deeply waffled, or honeycombed. The front is a flat tiled surface. The potholder as a whole is small and thick.

Three-Three Offset Bands

Last week we posted about “Three-Three Offset Twill,” a weaving pattern that produced a thick and textured fabric with prominent diagonal grooves. Here’s a variation with that same texture, but reversing the direction of the grooves part way across the fabric: “Three-Three Offset Bands.”

The photos below don’t really do the three-dimensionality of it full justice. The potholder is noticably thicker than a plain-weave potholder would be, and because the horizontal weft loops puff out over the surface of the vertical warp loops, both faces of the potholder winds up showing much more of that color, with more of the warp loops hidden inside the thickness of the fabric.

Waffle Weaves

New fabric *boggle*. Waffle weave!!! It is RIDICULOUS. IT WAFFLES.

The “Belgian” version is crazy thick. The “Breakfast” version is modified for flatness. The “Liége” version has smaller pockets.

These would make an excellent trivet. The pockets insulate and separate the base of the hot dish from the table finish, so you don’t end up steaming your trivet onto the surface.

Shown below in traditional size, these patterns are available in both 27-peg and 19-peg charts.

Belgian Waffle
Breakfast Waffle
Liége Waffle

Three-Layer Warping Demonstration

Silent demonstration video showing the three-layer warping technique from end to end, including warping, weaving, and binding off.

The weaving here is done by hand, from the center out, but the same general approach is equally applicable if you use a hook or start your weaving on any side.

This video is uncut and takes just over half an hour; if you’re already familiar with loop weaving, you can use YouTube’s “playback speed” setting to watch it at 2x speed to see the key points of the technique in action.

If you want to jump ahead, here are the key moments in the video:
00:15 First warp
01:13 Second warp
02:15 Third warp
03:40 Weaving
24:05 Binding off
32:51 Finger-blocking

“Piggybacking on Others’ Hard Work”

Earlier today, Deborah Jean Cohen (author of In the Loop) took to Facebook to complain that two of our earliest charts, dating from late 2020, had been created by looking at photographs of potholders that she and Bill West had posted to Facebook.

In each of those two cases, we had credited them by name as our inspiration, and neither of them had objected during the intervening years, but apparently she’s been carrying a grudge all this time, declaring in her post that we had “piggybacked on others’ hard work… Sure, it’s legal, but is it ethical? You’re on notice now.”

I’m not sure what that last sentence means, and it seems I won’t ever get to ask her, because she’s now blocked me and banned me from the Facebook group she administers.

The two charts in question are not particularly complicated, and the designs they show are indubitably in the public domain — they don’t belong to anyone.

For thousands of years, weavers developed their repertoires by practicing techniques other people had developed, and then evolving their own variations on them. By the dawn of the nineteenth century these designs were being collected in pattern books, and later publishers aggregated those references into larger and larger collections, each with hundreds or thousand of charts. Hundreds of those books have been digitized, and tens of thousands of patterns from them have been posted online.

Uncountable millions of hours have gone into producing this body of techniques and patterns — the shared legacy of humanity’s ongoing love affair with string, stretching back a thousand generations — so literally everyone involved in fiber crafts today is “piggybacking on others’ hard work.”

All modern weavers have access to this incredible legacy of public domain material, allowing us to select elements that catch our eye, modifying and recombining and elaborating on them in innumerable ways, and then putting the results of our efforts back out into the world.

The idea that when Deborah looked at other people’s weaving and made her own variation of it, that effort had been meaningful creative work — but when we later looked at her weaving and made our own variation of it, this was now unethical, a form of cheating, and a shocking breach of norms — well, I don’t think it holds water.

That said, I figured I might as well rectify the perceived slight, so I have deleted the charts that we created in 2020 for “Square Spiral” and “Diamond Spiral,” and re-drawn them anew, referring to century-old sources that have been archived at handweaving.net (a genuinely amazing community resource): a square spiral found in Orimono Soshiki Hen by Kiju Yoshida (1903) now adapted for 27-peg and 18-peg looms, and a twill spiral found in Die färbige Gewebemusterung by 
Franz Donat (1907) likewise adapted for 27-peg and 18-peg looms.

I hope that Deborah will be able to rest easier now that our charts are no longer piggybacking on her proprietary hard work.

Three-Three Offset Twill

Here’s another intersting weave that produces a highly-textured extra-thick fabric: “Three-Three Offset Twill.” (It’s so hard to come up with good names!)

Each row is woven over three/under three, but instead of each row shifting over by one pick as you would for regular three-three twill, here you alternate between shifting over two and then over three.

When taken off the loom, the fabric tightens in and puffs up as with three-three twill, but the alternating shift sequence creates extra-wide wales with distinct grooves between them.

The back side features the same design, with the grooves reversed to line up under the ridges of the front. The weft floats spread out on each face, leaving the warp mostly hidden.

I’m not sure the photos below fully capture the texture, but in person it’s quite dramatic, and the feeling in your hand is very different than a plain weave.

Piglet has woven some fun color variations of this fabric, but to start with here’s a simple two-color example, with a white warp and colored weft.

Pulsating Saltire

Here’s another linear shadow-weave design just added to our charts: “Pulsating Saltire.”

It’s mostly tabby weave, so the resulting fabric is smooth and flat flexible. Parallel twill-like wales run diagonally towards each corner to produce the X-shaped design. The back side has a different but equally-striking pattern, with a small eye in the middle that disappears when you take it off the loom.

Woven here in Harrisville purple and white, this would work equally well in any contrasting pair of colors — or replace one or both with a range of related colors, like black against a rainbow, or blues against yellows.