"Not so Livestock" Competition - Andean Pebble Weave

On my last post, I mentioned Sangre's very successful event, the Shrewsbury Faire.  As the name implies, the event was themed as a medieval faire in the market town of Shrewsbury in England. As any proper faire, there were plenty of competitions. We had a very yummy baking contest, a cordial tasting, and a "Not so Livestock" competition.  This last one involved people bringing in their crafts with some sort of livestock theme to be judged by the Duchess (no actual livestock need apply). I decided that I would enter this competition, and managed to land a third place ribbon (also woven by myself).

Since I've been on a pickup streak, I technique I decided to go for this time was Andean Pebble Weave.  Luckily Anne Dixon's book has a couple of very nice animal motif patterns which I was able to use.  I chose swan and rabbit patters (both medieval feast fare) with some additional patterns to separate the motifs.  I also went one step further and decided to add an interesting little border pattern on either side. All in all, this is the most complicated piece I have ever woven, so it was probably not a good idea to start 2 days before the event. Once I started weaving I realized how very time consuming this technique is.  Even the "plain" weave requires a lot of pickup. Since it was just a short demonstration pattern, though, it did not take as long as it could've.

The Andean Pebble Weave technique for inkle is not exactly the same as the authentic South American craft, which is done with a backstrap loom. Rather it is a recreation of the same motifs and styles adapted for use on an inkle loom. The basic idea is to have the loom warped such that the shed is separated into background and pattern threads. Background will always be heddled and pattern will always be unheddled. This means that by doing a plain weave, you will actually get alternating bars of pattern and background.  The pebble texture is created by pickup and is ultimately achieved by alternating two steps:

1. Weave one pick of plain background.
2. Weave one pick of the pattern by dropping/picking up alternating pattern threads.

Repeating this will create a "pebble" pattern, with dots of pattern staggered every other pick, and the background threads forming a sort of diamond shaped pattern around them. This produces a very striking and beautiful look.

Now onto the actual weaving. this being a very complex pattern, the total number of warp threads came out to 90. It became immediately obvious that my heddles were far too thick to accommodate that many threads on my inkle loom. This meant that I had to make new heddles. 45 of them.

The inkle loom all warped

90 warp threads means very tiny heddles

Notice the separation of pattern and background threads in the shed

Since I used an amalgamation of different pattern from the book with some personal additions, I had to draft my own pattern. As always, Excel makes this a whole lot easier than doing it by hand. The pattern turned out to be about two pages long. 

I would not exactly call weaving for this technique difficult, but it is time consuming and requires a lot of concentration to keep from making mistakes.  This is just due to the comparatively huge amount of pickup that needs to be done compared to other techniques like Baltic Style.  Here the background does not form naturally, so care needs to be given to picking up to create the background every other pick.

Half of the pattern used

The swan's head

There we a few minor mistakes in picking up that I did not notice until it was too late to unweave, but the largest issue I came upon was getting the band width to stabilize. In order to keep the pebbles in the background well separated, the band needs to be woven somewhat loosely. I began way too lose and it took about a couple inches to get down to where I wanted the width of the band to be. However, even being very careful, the width of the band very gradually decreased as the weaving progressed. Fortunately, it's not noticeable unless you fold it over itself.  Since this is just a presentation piece, I am not too worried about it.

Below under the cut are some additional images with closeups of the motifs.

First Attempts at Baltic Style Pickup

Time for another project update. This time it will be about pick up inkle weaving.  I've been wanting to try this technique out ever since I bought the wonderful book The Weaver's Inkle Pattern Directory by Anne Dixon. This desire to work on pickup also coincided with our latest SCA event, the Shrewsbury Faire. As part of the faire, there were baking and "livestock" competitions, and I volunteered to make prize ribbons. That turned out to be a very good excuse to give pickup a try.

The first thing I did was warp up the loom for the usual 2 yard length I use, and begin with a practice pattern in order to get the technique down. It's not very difficult once you get used to it, but can be somewhat tedious. The specific technique I used was Baltic style pickup, which involves warping in the sequence B-B-P-B-B-P ... with alternate threads heddled and unheddled and with the pattern (P) threads being thicker than the background (B) threads or doubled up.

Baltic Style threading scheme for 9 pattern threads

I used #10 crochet thread for the background and #3 for the pattern. For the weft I used the same thread as the backgrond, this is a requirements for this technique, as the weft thread does show through the background.  This band has 9 pattern threads.

First few repeats I wove, slow going, but not too difficult.

A great feature of Baltic Style pickup is that the reverse side of the band will have a color-mirrored version of the pattern. This can lead to some very interesting shapes.

the reverse of the band also has a cool pattern!

Once I wove a couple of feel of that band, I used some popsicle sticks (buy them in bulk, they are super useful!) to create separations and began on the prize ribbons.  For the third place, there is already a font drafter out in Anne Dixon;s book, so it was easy enough to use that. I chose a slightly different pattern from the same book. One thing which I quickly learned is that when weaving letters, special care must be taken, otherwise the letters will come out looking spiky as in the upper band shown below. My way to fix this was to use a popsicle stick (like I said, very useful) to push the pattern threads back towards the woven band at every pick. This makes them pop out of the body of the band and makes the floats come out cleanly.

Third place prize ribbons, note the top one had some issues with the spiky T.

I next set up a short warp for the first place. This time I used a blue background and metallic gold pattern. I did not have #3 gold thread so I doubled up on it to get the correct texture.  This is something I do not recommend. By having doubled up threads rather than a single thick one, the opportunity for mistakes is greatly increased.  These ribbons use 13 pattern threads.

First place prize ribbons.

I also made some second place ribbons with red background and white patter (11 pattern threads), which I think came out by far the best of the three sets. Unfortunately I neglected to take any pictures of them and they have already made their way to the contest winners.

The font patterns for 1st and 2nd place I had to draft myself since there are no font patterns included in the book for those number of pattern threads.

Beginnings - How I learned to love the inkle loom

My introduction to weaving came about 5 months ago, during our shire's demonstration at Camelot Days.  This was also our second SCA event, so we were still a bit apprehensive about the whole thing.  Not that we did not like the people or the environment, we were just still shy and unsure as to whether we would have anything useful to contribute.

It was sort of awkward arriving there and seeing most of the shire members working on something or other while we had nothing really to show.  Luckily, our shire has some very welcoming and helpful members and we found a home for the day in the tent on Lady Morgan, our local fibers expert. She asked whether I would like to give a try using this funny looking implement called an inkle loom and the rest is history.

This first piece was already warped an about 6 inches were already woven. I figured I'd give it a try, and with Lady Morgan's guidance, I managed to finish the whole belt within a couple of house. Many mistakes were made. Luckily the belt was a simple plain red number, and the inkle loom is extremely forgiving of mistakes. The edges were horrendous but that's exactly what can be expected of a beginner.

My very first attempt on the inkle loom. I look very focused, which I was!

I had not expected to enjoy myself as much as I did and I basically sat there with just a couple of quick breaks util the thing was complete. It may be ugly as sin in hindsight, but I was extremely proud of myself.

I enjoyed myself so much, in fact, that I had Lady Morgan teach me how to warp the loom and got to working on my second belt  that very day. It was supposed to have a single chain pattern in yellow on a green background, but of course I screwed up the warping so I ended up with something somewhat different. I was still very happy with it, however, and the improvement in the edges could be seen as the weaving on that one belt progressed.

Oh, but that was not the end of our adventures at Camelot Days. I completed that second belt on day 2 and immediately warped a third. I was only able to get through a foot or so of that one, but completed it at home over the next few days.

Here is a comparison of those 3 belts, progressing from top to bottom:

First belt, nightmarish edges.

Second belt, edges are wonky at first, still wonky near the end, but improved.

Third belt, edges are somewhat sloppy at first, but have basically stabilized near the end. This is the first belt I'd call usable.

As the pictures make quote clear, the improvement over those 3 belts was marked. My obsession with the craft was also quite firmly cemented by that point.

I was so hooked that I had purchased the loom I worked on by the end of that 2-day event.