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 that you need for a doubleweave warp. One is that it be strong enough to withstand the firm tension you want for clean sheds. The other is that it be fairly smooth because the high density of a doubleweave warp can cause sticking with a very textured yarn.

Do I always follow my own advice? Well…maybe not always. Sometime back in the 1990’s I was seduced at a booth at one of the weaving conferences by an incredibly gorgeous set of skeins of space-dyed mohair bouclé. It was dyed in a luscious gradation of rich teals, red-violets, and russet golds that are favorites of mine and would go beautifully on my russet gold couch. It would make a wonderful throw to snuggle under on chilly winter evenings.

The thing is, it really needed to be the warp yarn, because I wanted to be able to keep the colors grouped together, and using it as the weft would cause them to get randomly jumbled up. Also, I didn’t have a loom at the time that was wide enough to weave a throw in a single width, so I would have to weave it double-width.

I was well aware of the challenges I would be taking on by using mohair bouclé as a warp set at twice the normal density for a single layer. But I had lots of practice in doubleweave and I knew of a number of little tricks for dealing with a sticky warp, so I proceeded with reasonably confident aplomb. I carefully wound the mohair warp, adjusting the length of each end so that colors stayed grouped together in the sequencing that they had been dyed in the skeins.

Since I was going to be weaving a plain weave structure in two layers I only needed four shafts, but since I was setting up the warp on an 8-shaft loom I could spread it out and only thread on every other shaft, giving each warp end more breathing room. I cut several hundred drinking straws into 3 inch lengths and threaded each warp end through one of these in between the front of the shafts and the back of the reed to keep them from sticking together. And I got a can of spray starch and sprayed the sections of warp from the front of the loom to the back beam to give them further help in staying separate.

I had a cone of worsted weight silk/wool blend from Crystal Palace Yarns in Berkeley - anybody remember them? It was in a beautiful color that they called Wisteria that went perfectly with the plummy colors in the warp. I decided to use that for the weft. I still have a pound or so of that yarn that will become something else someday.

Once the warp was all set up on the loom I sat down to put in my header and start to weave. I stepped on the treadle to create my first top layer shed and nothing happened. No warp threads rose up. I strummed the warp with the back of my hand and stepped more authoritatively on the the treadle, and still nothing happened. My warp threads were utterly stuck together and had no intention of separating from each other.

So instead of weaving this piece off in a few days, I hand-picked each and every warp end apart for each and every weft pick over the course of the next several weeks. Between every few weft picks I raised up the whole top layer to make sure that it separated from the bottom layer and I wasn’t inadvertently tying the layers together. I also looked carefully at each of my top layer sheds to make sure that every other warp end was being raised, giving me a correct plain weave shed. It was a long and slogging process, but I finally got to the end of it and was ready to cut the weaving off the loom and be pleased with the end result.

The top layer looked fine and the two layers separated neatly from each other with no problem at all. But when I opened it out and looked at the layer that had been on the bottom on the loom I saw floats scattered all over that layer. Even though I was regularly checking that the layers were separating correctly I couldn’t tell whether my bottom layer sheds were giving me the right plain weave alternations. And they weren’t. So my shuttle was passing over warp ends that should have been lifted or passing under warp ends that should have stayed down. Looking at the opened weaving I saw one perfectly woven plain weave half and one half with skips all over the place.

I sat down and threaded my weft yarn through a tapestry needle and patiently mended in each and every float in the weaving. But then I had all those short ends of yarn overlapping with the floats I had cut out, and it just felt completely unacceptable to me.

At this point I felt pretty resigned to the fact that I had just spent a lot of money, a lot of time, and a lot of beautiful yarn making a textile that was a complete failure. I figured I had nothing to lose, and threw it into the washing machine and dryer, prepared to find a felted doll blanket when I pulled it out.

But a miracle occurred. Instead of shrinking and felting, the mohair just lightly fulled and fluffed up, covering over the structure of the weaving with soft and feathery down, leaving a luxuriously warm and fluffy cloud of a throw.

Even the fringe, which I had just tied in quick bundles with overhand knots, had each dreadlocked beautifully in its own bundle without tangling with any of the neighboring bundles.

I felt pretty humbled by this experience, but also like I had pulled a rabbit out of my hat and been rewarded for my dogged patience. That throw has been living on my couch for 25-some years now and I have spent many evenings enveloped in its comforting warmth.

So what is the moral of this story? Listen to words of advice, even when they are your own. Keep going, even when it looks like it’s a hopeless cause. And every now and then, even when you may not deserve it, the weaving gods just might reward you with an unexpected blessing at the last minute.