In defense of overshot

I have been meaning for some time to clarify my statements regarding overshot. I said that I don't like it; what I should have said is that I don't love it. Mostly I don't love weaving it (owing to the whole two shuttle thing) but, truth be told, it's not my fave even when someone else does the leg work. Even so, I've seen things done in overshot that absolutely take my breath away and I've woven a thing or two myself that I enjoyed making and enjoyed giving away even more.

My complaints about overshot are thus:

1) Two shuttles are slow! I'm one of those weird people who prefer planning a project and dressing a loom to actually weaving. Once I've gotten the first couple of inches done, I'm anxious to get the warp woven off and start on a new one. Two shuttles make that take longer.

2) Two shuttles are fiddly! If I've got to grit my teeth and weave off a long warp, I want to spend as much of that time zoning out in weaving zen as possible. Two shuttles require concentration and interrupt my zen.

3) Overshot is ... well, kinda boring. I dunno, maybe I'm just being obstinate, but around here overshot and tartan are the staples of the weaving diet and I'm not crazy about either one. My favourite overshot fabrics have something unusual about them, usually something to do with colour or fibre.

In light of these, I like weaving overshot best when:

1) I'm doing something unusual with colour or fibre. I like to weave it using chenille for the pattern weft. I like to put the colour in the tabby and use a white pattern thread. Better yet, I like to put a lot of colour in the warp and tabby weft.

2) I'm weaving it as a present for someone. If I have to focus on the project at hand rather than zen out, I don't mind as much when I can think about the person I'm weaving for, what the reaction will be when it's received... makes all the extra effort and attention to detail worth it.

3) I'm weaving with with someone. My guild has a 90" loom that requires two weavers to operate. We warp it with blankets or tablecloths and then take turn helping one another weave. If you've got to stay present while weaving, it's a lot more fun when there's someone else there to gab with while you work.


Here are a couple of things that fall into these categories that I'm really pleased with:


This is a coverlet that I wove a few years ago for my mother in law's 75th birthday. My MIL is allergic to wool, so I wanted the coverlet to be 100% cotton. You can't tell from the pic, but that's a cotton chenille pattern weft. It's sooooo soft!

It was woven in one piece on the aforementioned 90" loom. My dear ol' mum (over there on the right- hi, Ma!) helped me weave the first part while she was visiting and another woman in the guild helped me finish it. It's Double Chariot Wheel, taken straight from Weaving a Traditional Coverlet by Helen N. Jarvis. We threaded the full 90" at 20 epi and I had a hand in threading every one of the 1800 threads in the warp - did I mention I like dressing looms? Mmm, threading! Pretty sure we put on enough warp for 10 or 11 coverlets that time around.



This is the twin of a blanket that I wove for my dad and his wife. It's a name draft that spells out "Dave and Elizabeth". I'm pretty sure the little blue blocks are Dave and the big red blocks are Elizabeth, which I suppose makes the green stripes between them And. I used Fiberwork's name draft feature to work the initial design and then fiddled with the incidentals between blocks and the border pattern until I liked 'em. That's is a rather pretty border on it, isn't it?

The warp and tabby are 2 ply wool from Briggs & Little; the pattern weft is a heavy 4 ply wool that I got from South Landing. Man, I wish I could get more of that stuff - I used it in some really lovely huck blankets I did, too. Num!



It may just be possible to tell from this close up that I used different shades of blue and red in the warp and weft in this one just to create a greater depth of colour in the background. I love the interplay of colour and the way the white pattern floats on top. I'm really glad I put enough warp on for two of these and made one for myself, too! It lives on my couch and matches absolutely nothing else in the room. I couldn't care less because it makes me happy. :)

So there you are! See? I'm not anti-overshot!

And now I am off to enjoy the incredibly delicious chicken penne alfredo that Ron makes me every Valentine's Day because he knows it is my absolute favourite thing. Omg, it is TO DIE FOR. Yum!

Colour matching in Fiberworks PCW

I've got an order for a wool blanket in as similar a colour combo as I can get to my cotton/acrylic 'Beach' palette, or rather the modified version of Beach that I used in a blanket for the same customer recently. This was woven on that warp, but her blanket used a teal 8/8 cotton weft rather than the yellow 4/8 boucle:



The wools I use don't come in the same shades as the cottons and acrylics, of course, so I went through my sample cards and found the best matches I could. These will be the predominant colours:


As I've talked about elsewhere, it's taken me a while to get used to planning warps for my wool blankets since putting the sectional rakes on Mabes. The planning is the sticky bit, as I much prefer to let stripes happen spontaneously - I wind chains of one or more colours until they seem "about right" (very subjective!) and then switch to a new chain. Some chains are skinny, some are wide. Some are solid, some are striped. Once I've got enough threads for the warp, I flop them over the front beam of the loom and move them around until I find the arrangement pleasing. This does not work with sectional warping!

Since the advent of the rakes, I've tried planning my stripes by moving around balls of yarn or doodling on paper or by working them out in Fiberworks PCW, but nothing's been very satisfying. Fiberworks has been the best approach but I've always been frustrated by trying to get the colours to really match the yarns I'm using. I've tried their colour editor but just haven't been very successful matching the ball in my hand to the colour on the screen.

Today, though, I finally tried something I've been thinking about for ages and it was, as they say, The Business. Here's what I did:

1) I took the picture above of the colours I plan to use, without flash to get as close to the actual colours as possible.

2) I opened the picture in Photoshop and made some minor adjustments to make the colours even more accurate. In this case, that meant Image -> Adjustments -> Variations... -> more green. For some reason, when there isn't enough natural light, my camera tends to skimp on the green, like it did here.

3) I zoomed way in on each ball and used the eyedropper tool to "pick up" the colour of that ball. This required clicking on the ball several times until I got something close, as every pixel is its own colour and some are highlights, some are shadows - you'd be amazed at the variety in a chunk of seemingly solid colour.

4) This put me in the right colour neighbourhood but still didn't give me exactly what I wanted so I opened the colour editor and used the mouse to move the little circle around until the colour selection seemed perfect. The colour editor displays the colour in various ways, including its RGB value. Here's what it looks like:



See the colour indicator in the small toolbar way over on the left? That's the one you left click to open the editor. See the little white circle in the bottom right part of the colour gradient window? That's the guy you drag around to change the colour selection. See the highlighted blue text in the colour editor? That's the R(ed) value, which is above the B(lue) value, which is above the G(reen) value.^,1 This RGB value is also one of the ways you can enter colours into the editor in Fiberworks, so make a note of it. In my example, my colour's value is 20, 72, 69.

5) I opened Fiberworks and started editing the top five colours in the palette on the very right side of the screen. FYI: you'll want to avoid editing the very top value, that white one which is labeled -, 'cause doing so seems to mess up the works. Looks like that colour gets used for more than just applying colours to your warp, so leave it alone and start with the one below it, labeled 1, or whichever other one you find easiest to use.

To edit a colour in Fiberworks, right click on the little coloured box in the palette. This opens up its colour editor which, sadly, is not as intuitive or easy to use as Photoshop's. Still, if you're armed with an RGB value from Photoshop or some other photo editor, it's easy peasey to enter it into the RGB fields at the bottom - the other fields will take care of themselves:


Here you can see that I've entered the RGB value from Photoshop (20, 72, 69) at the bottom of the editor and the colour at the top has miraculously changed to match my ball of yarn. You might also be able to tell that I've entered my five colours in the first five positions in the left hand column of the colour palette to the right (skipping the white one at the top). As a bonus, you can also see the stripe arrangement I settled on in the end for my blanket warp.

Happily, I have enough yarn for the warp in my stash, so I can start winding bobbins and then winding on right away. I might have to order a little for the weft since I'll put on enough for three blankets but then again I might just dig through the stash and improvise with what I've got on hand. At least in the weft I can still let my stripes be totally spontaneous!


1. Incidentally, the hex value below those - the one that starts with the hash (#) - is the colour code you'd use in html. If you ever want to make a webpage background or text match your photo, that guy's the one you want.

Back in the saddle again...

Wow, it's amazing how gainful employment can interfere with productivity! I had a proper, paying job this winter so all things textile pretty much went on hold while I earned enough money to allow me to continue to follow my high fibre diet for the rest of 2008. There are hints of further employment in the wings but if any of them pan out they should only be for a day or two a week and ought to allow me to weave much more than I have in recent months. Thank goodness!

I did manage to get a few things done since my last post. I got Patricia's blanket done and sent to her. I wove two more blankets from the same warp with totally different weft colours, too. For Patricia's, I used the same colours as in the warp but for the second one I used a soft grey heather and for the third I used a dark brown. The brown was an experiment that turned out really well - most people who saw both the grey and the brown preferred the brown. I also included some thick stripes of three our four strands of the 2 ply weft in one shed and really liked the effect.

Here's a pic:


After those blankets I did another set in red, mulberry and teal (another really nice combo) for someone who'd placed an order for Christmas.

Here's one:

And here's the other (not yet wet finished in this pic):



And after that I went to my dear ol' Mom's (Hi, Mom!) house for two weeks to return the favour she did me last Spring, at least in theory. She was participating in the Vashon Island Studio Tour and I went to help her set up and do some demonstrating. As it turned out I did a lot more playing and visiting than helping I'm afraid, but I did get to meet all her weaverly friends, many of her weaving students, go to a Seattle Weavers' Guild meeting, and see all kinds of incredible fine craft around Vashon and the Keiskamma Altarpiece at St Mark's (wow!!!). All that, and I managed to do a set of 10 placemats (Lucille in Vert Fonce) done on one of Mom's looms that a friend had ordered for a Christmas present, too. Am I good or what?

When I got home from Seattle in mid-December, I had an order for a set of placemats from one of my best customers (Hi, Holly!) which - oh happy day! - just happened to be the palette already on my small loom (Riverstones in Seaton) so I could do them quickly in time for Christmas. She also brought me a swatch of her mother's new kitchen curtain fabric and asked me to make a set to match for a post-Christmas present.

Here's the fabric and the placemats that I made to go with.


Sadly, it's not a very good picture, but the placemats were evidently a hit because Holly's mother has ordered more to match. :) And the scanner has since been replaced, so the colour quality in my photos should improve!

That pretty much sums up the weaving I got done over the winter. Next on the docket: planning and preparing warps for my next weaving class which begins in two weeks' time. We're doing a round robin of runners in fibres and structures that don't get used very often around here, at least not in the weaving circles I run in. At this point I'm planning on halvdrall, ripsmatta, an eight shaft huck lace, an eight shaft fancy twill, a four shaft twill gamp, monk's belt, shadow weave, and - depending on how many students registered - whatever else takes my fancy. Two of my good friends who are basket weavers but haven't tried loom weaving before are both planning to take the class, as are a few people from my weavers' guild who want to try the different structures and fibres. It should be fun!

Once the class is organized, it's back to the loom. I've got to do the placemats for Holly's mom and weave off the rest of that warp, and then I'll start working on the two big orders I got last fall that didn't need to be done for Christmas. One of the aforementioned friends who's taking my weaving class has ordered a set of placemats and napkins to go with the pottery she's having custom made, and another of my very best customers has ordered a set of three bolsters (one 60", two 30") and a blanket to cover a daybed. She also ordered a cotton blanket and matching fabric to cover a chair in my Beach palette.

All that, and my shop is opening in less than a month! It's a busy time! Good thing that whole gainful employment thing is over so I can go back to slaving away for peanuts!

How much fibre is there in peanuts, I wonder...

My latest warp! Patricia saw my work in our shop back in May and ordered a blanket. She has a somewhat eclectic combination of styles and patterns in her bedroom, so chose a number of colours to tie them all together. It was the teal colour (oddly named "grey heather") that she fell in love with in the shop, so I emphasized that for her. This angle shows the wide white and multicoloured stripe off to nice effect:




The second photo shows a close up of the white and multi-coloured stripe. It's the first time in a long while that I've done narrow stripes of regularly arranged colours, and I like it! As you can see, the multi stripe is half meadow green, one quarter yellow and one quarter copper. Since there's less of the yellow and copper in the warp than anything else, those are the colours I've emphasized in the weft stripes, which I've done in alternating plain and basket weave.



The last angle shows the ratio of white/multi to teal a bit better. Really, about 2/3rds of the warp is teal and the rest is the off-centre stripe. I based stripe width and placement on the Fibonacci series.