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.
16 February 2012
Whew!
Done! The header band is completely woven. It's just a smidgen shy of 72" long, incorporating 1660 warp ends: 828 loops plus four thicker ends for reinforced selvedges.
The yarn behaved very well. It's really strong but fine, smooth instead of hairy. I did not have any breakages, fewer than six tangles, and no knots that I could detect in the entire warping process.
That is one very big pile of yarn, over 13 ounces worth. Many of the bundles have unchained themselves most of the way due to that lovely smooth texture. It's really kind of a tangly mess right now. But I'm very excited and at the same time even more scared. The project is a little more real now.
Next step will be to secure it to the loom.
The yarn behaved very well. It's really strong but fine, smooth instead of hairy. I did not have any breakages, fewer than six tangles, and no knots that I could detect in the entire warping process.
That is one very big pile of yarn, over 13 ounces worth. Many of the bundles have unchained themselves most of the way due to that lovely smooth texture. It's really kind of a tangly mess right now. But I'm very excited and at the same time even more scared. The project is a little more real now.
Next step will be to secure it to the loom.
15 February 2012
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!
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!
11 February 2012
More warping
I'm up to 40 completed inches of header band/warp now. I've had some problems with vertigo this week that have kept me from warping as much as I'd like, but it's coming along pretty well nonetheless. I should probably time myself again now that I'm somewhere past the middle of the band.
09 February 2012
Big chunk done
I've now done 28" of the header band, so that's more than a third of the warp prepared. It's starting to get faster, and I'm less sore than I was earlier in the week. It's all good.
Loom validation
Due to the requirements of this project, Greg and I knew we'd need a very wide loom rather than the more narrow ones shown in most of the ancient Greek depictions. Accordingly, we focused most closely on the depictions of the looms on the Amasis lekythos and Chiusi 1831. Although I believed the loom to be completely justifiable at the width we decided, I couldn't specifically document it the way I have been able to document so many other types of loom and textile projects. That made me just a little bit uneasy, not knowing exactly whether or where to draw that research line that means "beyond this is artistic license that might be flawed." But we decided to let the product of the loom tell us what the loom should be like. Since then I have tried to live with the niggling little doubts I retained.
That changed yesterday, after I received my copy of a book that's extremely relevant to the project. While the article I wanted the book for was disappointing in its general nature, other articles were surprisingly useful. One of them detailed an archaeological site from the correct culture and period where a gynaikon (women's quarters) portion of a house was found, including a row of loomweights between a pair of postholes. The postholes were for the histopodes (uprights) of a loom. It is possible to know something about the width of the loom from this find.
I was delighted to discover that the loom I am working on is right in the zone!
I always enjoy it when I find something after the fact to validate a project decision I've made. While it is always better to know before the fact rather than after, it's still better to know than not to know.
That changed yesterday, after I received my copy of a book that's extremely relevant to the project. While the article I wanted the book for was disappointing in its general nature, other articles were surprisingly useful. One of them detailed an archaeological site from the correct culture and period where a gynaikon (women's quarters) portion of a house was found, including a row of loomweights between a pair of postholes. The postholes were for the histopodes (uprights) of a loom. It is possible to know something about the width of the loom from this find.
I was delighted to discover that the loom I am working on is right in the zone!
I always enjoy it when I find something after the fact to validate a project decision I've made. While it is always better to know before the fact rather than after, it's still better to know than not to know.
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