GoKawiilAfter a bit of time off from weaving after the PENELOPE project, it was great to visit Kristina Andersen, Pei-Ying Lin, Femke Vorselen and co in Wearable Senses lab in Eindhoven last year and explore hacking the TC/2 loom. This got me keen to get deeper into weaving, and I remembered Laura Devendorf enthusing about thinking in terms of shafts, and so we acquired a second hand 8-shaft table loom for the Alpaca project. Before I’d only really woven on looms where you control threads independently (in particular the TC/2, and my handmade live loom), which is often not how traditional weaving works. It might seem a bit strange to go from full control, to only lifting threads in eight groups of threads, but I suppose that’s how creativity works – finding constraints and playing with them.
The loom arrived, as a wooden construction with a few special-use tools and other textile and cardboard items. Luckily my cool expert weaver friend Seiko Kinoshita was happy to get me started, showing me how to make a ‘warp’ (set of vertical threads), transfer it to the loom and thread it up – this took over a day but it probably would have taken me a week or so to figure it all out myself, with chaotic results. You might see a ‘cross’ in the threads in the photo, where threads alternate going under or over the pegs either side. This cross keeps threads in order, and if at any point the cross were to get lost that’s really game over. You also have to take care to maintain even tension throughout the warp – warping is a kind of artform in its own right! You’ll also see we decided to have a striped warp, alternating through colours in groups with some symmetry.
For more info about setting up a table loom, you could check on Dave’s tutorial that he made during our last-but-one “weaving codes, coding weaves” project.
When choosing a loom, I assumed a “table loom” was one that you placed on a table, and a “floor loom” is a larger one that you placed on a floor. This isn’t the core difference though — a floor loom is one which is operated with foot pedals, known as “treddles”. This actually changes the logic of the loom, because treddles are often tied to more than one shaft — this allows you to drastically simplify the patterns of movement needed to weave a complex pattern. The pattern in which you tie treddles to shafts is known as the ‘tie-up’. I’m not completely sure why table looms can’t have more than one shaft tied to each hand-operated lever, but it might just be down to it being too heavy.. After all, weaving operations have to be ergonomically tuned to the body, because you have to perform them repeatedly, thousands of times over many hours in order to produce cloth. It’s interesting how these decisions around the binary logic of the loom is grounded in the body in this way.
Seiko and I initially threaded the loom with a direct warping – with the first warp thread attached to the first shaft, the second to the second shaft and so on, wrapping round so the ninth thread is attached to the first. This means that you have full control over the warp threads, but also that the pattern must repeat every eighth warp. So before I started to weave I decided to change it to a ‘point threading’. This starts off the same – threaded to shafts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, but then continues back 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. Accordingly, the pattern repeats every fourteen warp threads. What you gain in the width of the repeat, you loose in control – the first 7 threads are always the mirror image of the second 7 threads. If you like symmetry, then this is a win! But here you begin to understand why there is so much symmetry in weaving – not only does it look great, but it is also a consequence of the logic of the loom.
Above you can see the patterns I began with – first a pattern of chevrons, each 14 threads wide, which is basically a direct transfer of the threading to the cloth – I was simply raising one shaft in turn for each horizontal ‘weft’ thread. Then I tried a ‘waffle’, a simple yet fascinating pattern that creates this (at first) surprisingly very three dimensional structure from the otherwise two-dimensional pattern of shafts and lifts. This is often seen in tea towels.
I was particularly happy with the above pattern, which has a long weft repeat because the ‘lift plan’ advances slowly in a sort of zig-zag pattern across the shaft levers.
As I was just getting into all this, I had to say goodbye to the loom for a while, for a trip back to Eindhoven to visit Kristina, Pei and Femke again, along with a newer research student Helen Milne in the Wearable Senses lab. We wanted to explore ‘multi-user weaving’, but of course shaft looms also entered the agenda. They have a nice range of looms in their collection, including table looms but our focus was still the computer-controlled TC/2, because we wanted to continue exploring the potential for live interaction through digital weaving. What we ended up doing though is making a shaft loom simulation for the TC/2.
The interface is shown below, and will be familiar to any weaver — the threading is shown across the top, the ‘tie up’ in the top left, the ‘treadling’ in the left, and the resulting ‘draw down’ in the centre. The draw down could be seen as representing what the fabric will look like given a warp of one colour and a weft of another colour. This isn’t really true – it doesn’t account for the three dimensional behaviour of the resulting cloth, you might end up with a layered ‘double weave’ cloth, or a fabric that doesn’t hold together at all.
Because it has a ‘tie up’, this is a weaving draft for a floor loom with treadles. The same pattern would be possible on a table loom, but with a more fiddly ‘lift plan’ in the place of the treadling on the left – it would look similar but would have multiple lifts per weft to account for the lack of tie-up.
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