Double, double, toil and trouble
When I am teaching doubleweave I generally use perle cotton as the standard yarn. It has lots of great qualities for doubleweave - it’s strong and smooth, is widely available and reasonably affordable, and it comes in a wide range of beautiful colors. Students often ask whether other types of fibers can be used for doubleweave. My answer is yes, of course. Any type of fiber can be used, but there are two important qualities…
I Love Hue Too! II
A couple months ago I wrote a blog post about working with various color apps to develop a finer-tuned sense of color nuances - https://doubleweaver.com/i-love-hue-too/. One of these apps, I Love Hue, has become a particular favorite of mine. As you work your way through solving the color grids you advance in levels of difficulty. At the time that I wrote the previous post I was working with fairly complex rectangular grids, and it’s fun…
Doubleweave Hem
If you are thinking about weaving a project in doubleweave and don’t want to have any kind of fringe on the ends of your piece, there is a great way to have hemmed edges that look perfect from both sides of the cloth that is unique to doubleweave. It’s always best to think about how you are going to finish the ends of your cloth before you start to weave, and this is no exception.…
Teaching an Old Teacher New Tricks
At this time last year my teaching was off to a great start. I had just finished a series of workshops in Hawaii and was about to head off to another in Florida. I had a very full year ahead of me with another twenty workshops yet to come. In early March I attended a board meeting in DC and afterwards went on a quick trip to Virginia to teach another workshop. The day I…
Many Moons
Can you believe that it has been twenty years since we were finishing up the first year of this millennium? At that time I was marking the end of my first year of living in my house in Santa Fe and a whole new life here. And I was also finishing up a special weaving that was about to lead into yet another one that led me down a path that I couldn’t have predicted…
Going Totally Tubular
What is it that compels me to start a new weaving project? Sometimes it is because there is something specific that I want to make for a specific reason. Sometimes I want to weave samples to illustrate a concept that I will be teaching about in a workshop. Sometimes just looking at all the colors of yarn in my studio makes me want to do something fun with them. And sometimes an idea enters my…
Weaving with Lunatics
I have a thing about complete sets of materials, especially when they involve color. I have sets of colored pencils and pastels that I’ve never even used because I want them to be perfect in their entirety. Back in the 80’s I worked at a weaving shop in Portland, Oregon. I would spend hours arranging new yarns that came in according to color on the shelves, and then I wouldn’t want anyone to buy them…
Weaving a Good Fold
As a teacher of doubleweave, what I get asked about more than anything else is how to weave a good fold. There are countless techniques in doubleweave and many reasons for using them, but easily the most common and functional reason is to be able to weave fabrics that are wider than the loom available. It takes two shafts to weave a layer of plain weave, so it takes four shafts to weave a doublewidth…
105 Tones of Grey
In my last blog post, 90 Shades of Grey, I talked about a warp that I put on my loom in a rotation of six neutral values from white through grays to black. Since I still had a couple yards of warp left on my loom after completing a sampler using all of the neutrals in the weft, I thought about what else might be interesting to try out on the remainder of the warp.…
90 Shades of Grey
Most of the weaving that I’ve done over the past several years has focused on exploring color rotations in doubleweave in a system that I call Double Rainbow. I've worked with color wheel hues in saturated colors, tints, tones and shades. I’ve expanded the traditional color wheel to work with up to twenty colors in one piece and I’ve created designs with up to eight blocks of doubleweave. I’ve experimented with different weights of yarns…