Back after a long hiatus

The family situation that pulled my attention away from weaving for so long has improved, and I am finding I have space in my life again for challenging yet inessential activities.  Since I last posted here I have acquired the reference article I needed to read, learned a lot more about pre-Roman tapestry weaves, and mentally solved the last questions I had about how to weave this project.  More on these issues as I get closer to the parts of the project where they become relevant; suffice it to say, there has been a lot of string-related squeeing around here in the past month or so.

Today I mended six broken warp threads—again, all from the center of the warp.  Then I checked the whole warp to make sure it's all in good weaving order.  I will spend some time this afternoon reviewing my posts and notes to help me re-learn the dance.  I'm glad I left myself those breadcrumbs!

Tomorrow I hope to resume weaving after I go pick up the book the library has on hold for me.

Refusing to quit

After my last post I went off and looked over my notes to make sure I was remembering the dance properly. I wasn't, and it's a good thing I checked. But then the first time I tried to weave again another thread broke.

I admit it: I walked away again.

Ever since then I've been trying to think analytically about the project. Why is it so hard for me to just get back in there, fix the broken threads, and go back to weaving?

Some of my reluctance comes from the general lack of energy I've had to devote to anything other than interpersonal activity with my family this year. We really have faced unprecedented challenges. All right, acknowledge and move on. What else?

Partly the quality control geek inside me is having conniptions at all the repairs I'm having to do. After all this effort and expense, she says, what am I going to have to show for it? If I'm lucky, I'll have an indifferently made piece that is proof of concept rather than art. The quality control geek is never satisfied with imperfect work; I spend a lot of time squelching her so I can hear the muse a little more clearly. Lately I haven't had enough energy to squelch her, and so I was stuck in a bad place where the work just seemed like it was a case of diminishing returns.

But then the other night ὁ πάτρων (Il Patron) came for a visit. He wasn't there to visit the loom; it was purely a social call, and we all had a really good time watching "Jason and the Argonauts" in memory of Ray Harryhausen. Still, at one point he asked about my progress. Then I watched him walk over to it and gently touch the web. He looked at it with this combination of wonder and longing in his eyes. That right there, that is my antidote to the voice of the inner quality control geek. I had forgotten about the magic in this undertaking, and he reminded me about it without saying anything. OK, great; I'm over the hump of mid-project dejection. What else?

Well, after I got past the "this project sucks" moment, there were really only three other problems I could articulate. They all have to do with the tapestry woven portion of the project.

All my experience with tapestry weaving up to this point has been with small pieces. The piece on my tapestry loom right now, which is half done, is only about 6.5"x13". While I've become very comfortable estimating how much dyed weft I'll need for a project of that size or smaller, I really haven't even been able to face the fact that I have no clue how much dyed weft I'll need for the chiton band. Yesterday, though, an answer came to me: I will apply my mad math skillz!

The piece currently on my tapestry loom required me to dye four one-ounce skeins of weft. The weft I am using is a known quantity, and I've been working with it for years. Since I am more or less at the halfway point in that tapestry right now, all I have to do is weigh the unused balls of weft to find out (roughly) how much weft I've used so far. If I double that, I'll have how much weft is going to be required for the whole piece, i.e., 169 square inches of tapestry. Now, since I already ascertained that the tapestry section of the chiton will be at approximately the same sett as the other tapestry project, I just need to apply that math. I am planning for a band that goes from selvedge to selvedge and will be about 8" long, so I estimate that to be about 585 square inches of tapestry. That means I'll need about three and a half times as much weft for the chiton project as I do for the smaller piece. (Call it four, insists my inner quality control geek.)

Earlier today I went into the dining room to sit down at the table with some coffee and calculate these numbers. I was all excited about getting to do some good geeky textile math. But when I got there, the loom was staring at me forlornly. Was I going to have fun without it, right in front of it? So I decided to take my desire to do this math, to solve this problem, and let the doing of it be my reward for solving the prior problem of the broken warp thread.

Remember that broken thread? I mentioned it at the top of the entry. I fixed it this morning. And then I fixed six more that broke after it. I had to re-knit a heddle and unweave two passes too. But I finally got it all squared away. I wove two passes, a there-and-back-again, without anything breaking. It even looks pretty good considering how much the warp has been stressed lately.

Then I came in here to blog about my progress, which led sneakily to my doing the math live, in real time as I blogged about why it had been a problem. (I suppose that makes this a meta post too.) But I've still got two more points to make.

Another thing that worried me was dyestuffs. I knew I would be using two dyestuffs, one of which is in limited supply because I grew it myself. Yesterday I went looking for dyestuffs in the projects cabinet, the place where we keep all the weird raw materials: jet, soapstone, bone, beeswax, lamp black, calcium carbonate, dried herbs, oils, dyestuffs, that kind of stuff. I found plenty enough alum and dyestuffs to complete a pretty big project. And now that I know the actual size of the yarn pile I'll need to dye, I can relax. I have about twice as much dyestuff available as I will need for this project.

Now I finally have enough information that I can see my path forward, not just on the plain weaving but on the tapestry part. There's a lot of busy work involved in getting the yarn dyed. I can use busy work to progress with the project even on those days when I can't bring myself to weave. But hopefully I've solved enough of the technical problems that the weaving process isn't going to be difficult until I get to the beginning of the tapestry section.

Mustn't think about that yet, though. That's the last problem, the only thing I haven't even got a provisional solution for yet. Maybe I'll find a way to get ahold of the article I need to help me solve the riddle of the transition section.

The honeymoon is over

One can only weave so long before a warp breaks. Yesterday I had a selvedge break, and today a regular warp broke.

The selvedge telegraphed its intention by stretching over the course of a day or two until the weight was resting on the ground. I used a pair of Navajo warp singles yarns for each selvedge. It's more loosely spun than I like, but it was the best choice I had. So now I know it's going to be troublesome and I can keep an eye out for it. I may wind up having to put some more twist into it to keep its integrity. It is, however, not unspinning itself; those warp weights are remarkably good at staying in place. It probably has something to do with those flat sides that snuggle up against their neighbors.

The regular warp break was due to a rough spot in one of my wooden tools. It caught on one ply of a warp thread and stretched it until it broke. I tried splicing the warp back together, but there wasn't much to work with and so I wound up knotting in a repair section. Luckily, it's on the back of the chiton.

I shall have to work on smoothing that rough spot down before it eats any more warps.

The good news is, I have six inches of woven cloth. That's an eighth of the project. There's a tiny piece of me that never thought I'd get this far, so I'm pretty stoked.

The next task is to even out the warp spacing in the woven cloth before reeling some of it up onto the cloth beam. This is a surprisingly easy task, readily accomplished by the pointed end of just about any tool. (I like the bone needle best for this purpose.) I can even do it with my fingers in the areas near the selvedge. But even if I can't get the warp distributed as evenly as I'd like, I'm not going to worry. Irregularities are inevitable according to what I've read. Particularly, Martin Ciszuk talks about his experience with the occurrence of "denser and more open warp areas" in his reconstructed weaves, just as he says are found on archaeological and ethnographic examples.

ARGH!

I need a copy of an article in an issue of Bulletin du CIETA. Unfortunately, that back issue is out of print according to CIETA, so I can't just buy a copy. And there's not a library within several hundred miles that has a subscription.

*drums feet on floor helplessly*

Oh well, back to weaving.

Feeding my head

As I wove the header band, I found that it went faster if I listened to music. The music I kept coming back to again and again was "Mythologem" by Isirion (my favorite indie band). Several of the songs on that album have ancient Greek subject matter. I found the instrumental "Song of the Seven Sirens" put me in a very appropriate ancient Greek frame of mind. But I don't have a lot of other music that's relevant. Hmmm. I think it's finally time to acquire a copy of Eleni Karaindrou's music for The Trojan Women, which I hear is very good.

I've also been doing some reading this last week. My patron lent me The Last Voyage of Odysseus (Karen L. Carey, Ohio University Press, 1983) and Odysseus: A Life (Charles Rowan Beye, Hyperion, 2004). After I finished those I started rereading Phillip Parotti's The Greek Generals Talk: Memoirs of the Trojan War (University of Illinois Press, 1986), after which I'll probably take on his The Trojan Generals Talk: Memoirs of the Greek War (University of Illinois Press, 1988).

I've also found two non-fiction books I want to read. One is The Craft of Zeus: Myths of Weaving and Fabric by John Scheid and Jesper Svenbro. The other is Ann Bergren's Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and the Female in Greek Thought.

All this is in addition to the hard research I'm doing. And of course, there is always my red-headed traveler; I'm cherry-picking both the Odyssey and the Iliad as I go about this, just for the sheer pleasure of tracing his path. The fact that his path leads past so many looms is, well, part of the point of it for me.

Dropped/twisted threads

I've been looking at published work on an interesting topic, one that I've been wondering about for many years. It started because I was warping. Warping by myself is rather like yoga. The deliberate, repetitive movements foster a very thoughtful process, loosening all sorts of ideas to float to the surface of my mind.

I keep remembering how some of the textiles I'm using as sources display crossed threads where the header band ends and the web begins. Some of the threads aren't crossed in a regular fashion that would suggest intentionality or, perhaps, a technical reason based on loom type. It's quite possible they're crossed accidentally, perhaps due to inconsistencies in warping technique such as a loop being twisted as it goes over a peg. Or maybe the warp wasn't prepared with a cross, and it's an error introduced during the picking of the first tabby shed.

But as I wove the header band, I kept noticing something: the last warp thread on the fringe side of the band, i.e., the one right next to the textile's warp, tends to loosen up and drift away from the other warp threads of the band. I have been wondering whether those occasional crossed threads in the original textiles were placed intentionally, to help encourage that loose band warp thread back into place alongside its fellows.

That thought process isn't complete yet. But it set me to thinking about the crossing of warp yarns. That idea reminded me of the problem inherent in going from tabby weave to weft-faced extended tabby weave (the tapestry sections). The sett I'm using to weave the tabby ground weave is way too dense to allow me to weave the tapestry portions on the same plain tabby. Sooner or later, I would need to know some ways to manage that problem, and so I have begun to go through the relevant material in my library.

The piece I am planning is not like a Coptic tunic, with isolated inset tapestry elements. The tapestry sections on this piece go completely across the warp, with no flanking tabby weave to manage. Up until yesterday I'd been assuming I would be using a simple extended tabby like in the medieval cloth of ray textiles, i.e., shots of half-basket that alternate and are beaten down to become strongly weft-faced. In theory, that should work fine since, as with cloth of ray, the stripes go all the way across the warp.

But I see in the Coptic material two other types of solutions that were used not just on the isolated inserts but also on the full-width bands. One of them is, according to the literature, not possible to do on the warp-weighted loom. So now I'm considering various implementations of the other solution, the one that is possible to do on the warp-weighted loom.

I'm also looking for copies of more of the literature on the topic, which I think will require a run to the university library. One article, the de Jonghe one from Bulletin du CIETA, I'll probably not be able to get. I used to do my CIETA research at the Auerbach Library in the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. (It was well worth being a Friend of the Library for access to their research library.) But there's no CIETA collection near me now, alas; the nearest one is five hours away. It's also been my experience that CIETA articles are not available via ILL.

Anyway, I'm definitely not finished thinking about this yet. The threads are trying to do some dancing in my head, part topology and part the dance that the threads always do when I weave. But since I don't know this dance yet, it's a little confusing to try and follow along with it. It's a good thing I have some more warping to do: I do my best thinking while I warp!

On schedule

Taking a break from warping. I've got the loom up, the warping rig set up, and three inches of header band woven. Only 67 more to go!

I had a little difficulty with the first inch of header band: I was so worried about beating too hard that I wound up beating too loosely. That first inch is over an inch and a quarter! But by the second inch I'd settled down into an effortless gauge.

It's tough warping by yourself when warping calls for transporting weft loops longer than 6' onto a peg. This is one part of the process that, no matter which historic practice I'm researching, is usually in the dark. I don't know how "they" did it, whether "they" is the historic Scandinavians and north Europeans I've been studying or the ancient Greeks whom I'm studying now. Hoffmann's work in The Warp-Weighted Loom, documenting how the Sami weavers wove header bands for their grener in the first part of the 20th century, is very valuable, but I'm not convinced that it represents a universal technique or even one that's relevant to studies of weaving 2300 years previous to it. Anyway, I long ago worked out a method for warping my Iceland/Greenland style loom using an upright tablet weaving loom (repro of the one found in the Oseberg burial mound) and an assistant. But right now I don't have an assistant, and I don't even have that loom any more. Instead, I'm using the equivalent of a warping board: several pegs across which the weft loops zigzag. I've already learned just how far I have to travel with each loop before bringing it back to begin wrapping it around the pegs. Fortunately, I enjoy such rote, repetitious movements for the quality assurance I think they produce. :-)

I'm using a small rigid heddle for the header band warps, and a small frame loom to manage the unwoven warp.

I'm continuing to use the method for separating and maintaining the cross that I learned in Hoffman. I find that pre-counting the threads now, during the warping, makes it easier to put equal numbers of threads on the weights later on. If I had weights that were not approximately all the same weight, that'd be a different problem. But this is the problem I have always had, and this is how I have learned to solve it. Accordingly, I am making a separate slip-knotted bundle of each inch of warp.

I need to put something under my band weaving area. Right now I'm working on the dining room table, which happens to be covered with a clean white cloth. I can scarcely see all the white yarn against the white tablecloth; I need a backdrop of some sort to help these old eyes.

Well, that's enough sitting. Back to warping!

Pretty colors

Sometime a couple of weeks ago I saw a photo of a header band being created directly on a cloth beam. I keep trying to retrace my steps, but I haven't been able to relocate that photo. I'm not going to do my warping that way, but I'd like to examine the context of that photo again.

I had a brainstorm today about how to handle the shed rod. Perhaps it was that fall on the stairs last Monday that leads me to look for simpler, less physically stressful methods of warping. I think this time I shall have to sit in a chair while I tie on loomweights instead of sitting on the ground as I customarily do.

Having worked out how I'm going to handle the header band, my attention has turned to appropriate dyestuffs. I'm researching what we know from archaeological contexts, historic documents, and literary references.

I am strongly tempted to take this opportunity to learn how to dye with alkanet, but I think I shall have to resist. It sure would be fun, though, to recreate one of the false purples from the Stockholm papyrus! Maybe next time. (And maybe by then I will have figured out just what "roasted Phrygian stone" is.)

Patience pays off

Yesterday the book I was waiting for arrived. It has more information than I had before (in the form of plates) but still doesn't tell me what I'd ideally like to know. So far my research has not turned up any subsequent published articles or chapters about this textile, although nearly 20 years have elapsed since the book was published.

I'm also frustrated to discover that a major article I'd very much like to read is in a rare book of proceedings not available to me here. It is, alas, happily resident in the library across the country that I used for 30 years. When I first started to do textile research in the 1980s, it was very difficult to find any information at all. The Internet has improved that situation a lot, and but publications are still very difficult to acquire if you're not explicitly involved in an academic context -- or not very well moneyed. It's at times like this that I tend to forget how much easier it is now than it was 25 years ago.

Today the yarn and half the loom weights arrived! Suddenly the project seems a lot more real....

I am waiting patiently

I have loomweights, yarn, and a research book coming in the mail. All of them are in transit somewhere, none of them are here yet.

So while I was practicing being patient I spent part of today reading up on some ancillary material, not very likely to be overtly helpful but good to know anyway. Some of the period material I'm encountering can actually benefit from the light shed upon those very techniques by Mary Meigs Atwater.

Research day

Today has been a research day.

I heard back from the museum. The person to whom my message had been routed sent me back a very pleasant and helpful response.

I found an article that I hadn't seen in any bibliographies, one which gives me a lot of insight into a find most of whose information was inaccessible to me. I just wish the plates were clearer, and that it had been written by a weaver. Still, I learned some really useful things from it that I will be integrating into the design phase.

I learned more about the ancient history of cotton. That's not mission critical for this project, but it was a related issue and I'm glad I understand it better now. Those of you who know me from other venues (she said, speaking to the as-yet-empty room) may recall my phrase about stomping cockroaches. Well, the popular history of the use of cotton around the Mediterranean is rife with cockroaches (i.e., unkillable pernicious false unfootnoted ideas) just waiting to be stomped. Now I feel like I have put on my StompyBoots and am ready for the next time one crawls out of the woodwork and needs to be squashed.

I also heard from my patron that the loomweights are done. So excited!

How heavy is that?

Today I've been firming up my understanding of loom weights. I now know what weight range I need, approximately how many weights I need, and what I'd like them to look like. An interested potter has given an estimate for providing the set; hopefully that problem can soon be marked "solved."

Today I also found two documents on the web concerning the building and usage of an ancient Greek style warp-weighted loom. My previous experience weaving on the Icelandic style warp-weighted loom keeps me from from benefiting from beginner documents, and I have come to some different conclusions than the authors of those documents. But I spent a lot of years out in the wilderness with this research, so I'm happy to add their works to my little library.

The museum I wrote to hasn't written me back about getting photos of some artifacts. Other than that, everything seems to be perking along nicely. I've got two yarns to compare (I'm using commercial for this project), and I have plenty of thread count footnotes. If that one last book would arrive, I'd have enough research on hand to feel confident about making some of the final choices -- although they can be punted for a little while yet while I consider matters of infrastructure: to wit, the loom.