What’s that Sound?

A few weeks ago I posted a story about an experience in which I attempted to weave a double-width throw using mohair bouclé as my warp. Challenging and time-consuming though it was, it did end up with a happy ending and a lovely throw. Apparently this struck a chord with some of you because I received a number of email responses from weavers sharing their own “learning experience” stories with me.

It occurred to me later that I had actually had another much more traumatic weaving experience that perhaps I had tried to block from my memory. I’m going to tell that story now and hope that another even more traumatic one doesn’t later rise from my subconcious…

I spent three years in the early 1990’s working towards a Master of Fine Arts in Weaving at the University of Oregon.  I was blessed to study for those years under Barbara Setsu Pickett, master weaver extraordinaire of handwoven velvet. Here is a detail of one of her weavings that combines voided velvet, uncut velvet and cut velvet in a beautiful geometric pattern –

Barbara had spent a number of months studying velvet weaving on jacquard looms at the Lisio Foundation outside of Florence, Italy in the 1980’s, and made many trips back over the years. Every couple of years she would take a small group of students over there to spend a few weeks weaving at the foundation. I dreamt of being able to go on one of those trips someday.

Barbara regaled us with colorful stories of studying at Lisio under her maestro, Vittorio. The jacquard looms there used hand-punched and sewn cards rather than computer software, and every warp pile thread was wound on its own sewing machine bobbin. Each bobbin had a weight and counterweight hanging from it so that each pile thread could be individually controlled. Hundreds of these bobbins were arranged in rows on a rack that was placed to the back of the loom.

A ground warp is woven in fine silk in a very solid structure, generally a satin weave. The pile warp is raised every so many weft picks, and a velvet rod is inserted under either all of the pile warp or under selected pile threads to make figured velvet. Several more picks of the ground fabric are woven, another pile shed is raised, another velvet rod is inserted, and so on. After enough cloth has been woven to hold the pile threads in place a small device holding a razor blade is drawn across one of the velvet rods to create cut velvet, or the rod can just be pulled out to leave the loops of uncut velvet.

If there isn’t enough of the ground fabric woven ahead of the pile being cut, all of the weights and counterweights that hang off of each of the pile bobbins will pull the pile ends out of the weaving and the weights will drop to the floor. Barbara told us that Vittorio had a saying that the saddest sound in the world was of the velvet weights falling to the floor. Il suono più triste del mondo…

In my last year of graduate school Barbara asked a group of us if we were interested in learning to weave velvet. We began with a thicker weight of perle cotton, in what Barbara called macrovelvet, and learned the basics of weaving the ground fabric, making the loops of uncut velvet and then cutting tufts of pile.

Once we had an understanding of the principles of velvet weaving it was time to tackle the real thing – 120/2 silk sett at 120 epi for the ground fabric and 90 epi for the pile warp. Three of us took on this project and we divided up the tasks involved in making the warps and setting them up on our 16-shaft AVL compudobby loom. One of my jobs was to wind the warp for the ground fabric. The silk was so fine that I often couldn’t feel it passing through my fingers and had to stop to make sure that I hadn’t dropped the strand.

We made a fairly narrow warp – about six inches wide – but at a total of 210 ends per inch that came to 1260 warp ends, 540 of which had to be wound individually onto sewing machine bobbins. I also took the job of sleying the reed – 7 ends per dent in a 30-dent reed. It was quite a challenge to even see the individual dents and I had to be very careful to be sure that I didn’t skip any dents or double up in any of them. As I recall, it took close to six months for the entire process to take place, and by the time everything was set up and ready to weave I was the last one still willing to work on it.

By this time I was in my last month of graduate school, and I was ready to weave off some of this warp and move on in my life. It had been an intense three years that included driving 50 miles each way on days that I had classes. The thought of having a summer in front of me with lots of time to spend working in my garden kept me going through those last weeks.

I finally sat down at the loom and began weaving a few inches of the 8-shaft satin for the ground fabric. I started raising the pile warp and selecting the sections that I wanted under the velvet rod for a design that I had planned. Insert rod, weave a three rows of ground fabric, insert rod, weave three rows of ground fabric. I continued this process until I had an inch or two of rods lined up and then took the plunge. I drew the razor blade across the first velvet rod in the weaving and watched the loops turn into rich tufts of silk. 

But then suddenly a few of the cut pile ends started to worm their way out of the fabric and travel towards the back of the loom. And then more of them joined in and more and more, until every one of the threads had pulled their way out of the cloth and the little weights and counterweights started dropping to the floor. It was a very gentle sound, like a light rain falling on the surface of a pond, but it was almost too mournful to bear. I sat there until the last weight was on the floor, and then sat there a while longer in a state of shock.

I walked over to Barbara’s office, stood in the the doorway, and finally said, “Barbara, I just heard the saddest sound in the world”. She could only reply, “Oh, no!”, and offer me her sympathy.

It was a long ride home that day as I resigned myself to the fact that the first few weeks of my summer break would be spent driving back to school, rewinding all those pile bobbins, and getting the loom ready to weave again. I wove a small piece with blocks of uncut velvet and even smaller blocks of cut velvet.

I think I had such of fear of cutting the pile threads at that point that I only pulled the velvet rods out to create uncut velvet for a second piece.

At that point it occurred to me that the pile warp could be used as a supplementary warp that could weave in and out of the ground fabric without having to use the velvet rods at all. Much faster and no danger of having that disaster happen again! I wove  a couple more pieces raising up the pile threads in blocks, adding in a gold metallic thread to the ground fabric. I was quite happy with the results and felt an enormous sense of relief that I didn’t have to worry about cutting the pile threads.

I haven’t woven velvet since, and I have a feeling it’s probably not something I am likely to take on again. But I gained an enormous appreciation and respect for those weavers who have mastered the craft and have the fortitude to take a razor blade to their warp threads. I finally had the opportunity to join Barbara on a trip to the Lisio Foundation in 2014, but that is another story, perhaps for my next post.