Archive for July, 2007

I’m currently reading the fascinating book The Mummies of Urumchi by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Cherchen in the Tarim Basin, on the southern rim of the Silk Road has revealed some spectacular mummies, preserved in the permafrost for over 3,000 years. Astonishingly the well preserved textiles are the richest aspect of the find and a weaver will find the book like a good detective novel.

The best preserved mummy – Cherchen Man – was wearing a purply/red/brown woollen shirt and trousers woven from a natural dark wool dyed with a maroon dye. The actual weave on many of the clothes puzzled researchers as the cloth appeared to be cut on the bias line. However, it was the weave structure that made this seem the case. The weave is an unusual twill and I just had to have a go. So I warped up a piece of cardboard, sett the yarn(6/1 wool) at approx 18dpi and you can see the result. Named long-hop twill by the authors I prefer ‘Cherchen Man Weave’

The warping is slow going but rewarding as I like the look of it. It’s really important to weave with colours and designs that you just like.

You can see some of the ikat warp in the photo. The maroon with the white blocks on it.

I’ve found that the first ikat dilemma is the weaving technique itself. When you weave a balanced weave the weft colour intermingles with the warp effectively toning down or even destroying the bright sharp look of the warp. This may be what you want, but there are ways to enhance the warp colour. This is mainly done by weaving a warp faced fabric where the weft will have little colour influence on the textile.The down side of this approach is the possible stiffness of the fabric lacking drape needed for clothing or scarves. Using a much finer weft will help but I’ve found that warp faced weaving structures such as warp satin or false satin will retain both drape and warp colours.

I’ve been asked to do an ikat workshop next year (2008) for the Online Weavers, Spinners and Dyers which will be fun. Hopefully I can document some of it on my blog. But if you’re interested in fibre it’s a good group to join for workshops and information.

Now the painstaking process of ‘getting it all together’ for the loom. As each segment of the warp was dyed, painted or tied differently they all come together at the warping stage. Here I am spacing the threads in the raddle and putting the lease sticks in. It is very slow work for me as the narrow warps can get tangled easily and I find that a bit of extra patience at this point will reward me with a problem free warping. For this warp I wanted to get a jet black dye which is quite difficult in the fibre reactives I use. I use the black dye to achieve an indigo effect as it is very blue. However, I spoke to Kraftkolour and Graeme told me to add 10% Orange to 90% black – and wow! it worked great.

Working with Photoshop I’ve worked out a way with the help of "The Woven Pixel" to develop a what-if striping/ikat senario tool based on colours in a an image. No doubt I’m not the first to do this, but I still found it exciting!

Essentially a photo is coverted to indexed colour using a set number of colours. Here I’ve used 20, but I then combined similar colours and ended up with 16 colours in total. I extended the canvas at the bottom of the image with a black background and added little chips of colour that occur in the newly indexed image (I also created a custom colour table and swatches along the way so I can re-use this colour palette).

I then converted the image back to RGB. This is important. Now using the magic wand tool I can just select any colour chip and the same colours in the image will be selected – instantly!

I then copied the background layer and cut out the image part leaving the colour chips. You will need to uncheck the original background layer’s visability too.

I then drew a stripe pattern with multiple rectangles* and filled them with the colour chip selection. Now I had two layers- the original background and its copy with the stripe pattern on top all in the one file.

To experiment and change the colour stripes I selected a colour, made a new layer, then changed the colour of the fill.

This is just a basic idea of the process as it takes a bit of familiarity and perserverence with Photoshop to build up skills

I’ve had a little play with the Gimp and it seems to have the capabilities for doing this in a basic way, although I haven’t worked out how to set up your own colour table in it.

*A very hand tool in Photoshop is the Fixed Size option on the selection tool (the Gimp has this). You can instantly draw up stripes to exact sizes on your canvas.