For my second warp sampling Grouped Weft weaves, I wound a warp of 10/2 natural cotton in three sections. I laid the sections side by side on my dyeing table and painted the warps with fiber-reactive dyes (Dharma Trading’s Moose!, Golden Brown and Raven). There was no plan, rhyme or reason to the patterns, I just painted on color where I thought color ought to be! You can see the variation in each section on this overview of one of the samples.
The warp was about 12” wide and was sett at 24epi.
I remembered to take pictures of this warp on the loom so that you can see the difference between before and after wet finishing.
Below left: before. Below right: after. It’s amazing how much the yarns move and settle after wet finishing.
This time I also created a draft with three blocks instead of two. This allowed me to weave combinations of all three blocks to get more variation in the sizes and shapes of the woven and float cells. Below is the right half of the draft showing the three different blocks as well as a plain weave border on the selvedge. The treadling is divided to show different combinations of the blocks woven together as plain weave or as float cells.
Below is a good picture showing the various treadlings.
I also played around with weaving isolated areas using various combinations of blocks with sections of plain weave in between. I like how this allowed the dyed warp to show more.
But one of the most exciting moments came when I started using some wire and monofilament! I soon realized that it didn’t really work to use wire in each treadling block, but worked best when alternate blocks were treadled with a softer more forgiving fiber.
So much inspiration!
And just look at how the light comes through!
Next time – Grouped Weft with a linen warp!
