"Double Weave Class at Vavning Studio"

As I mentioned last week, I attended a "one person" class (me!) on "Double Weave" at Vavning Studio, down in Shopiere, WI, which is about 1 hour south of Madison. With it so close, I drove back and forth each day, although when I have attended other classes, people stayed at local motels or stayed in their RV's right in the studios parking lot (right, Karen?). ;)

The weaving studio is in the lowest level, which used to be the "Fellowship Hall", and I believe it still lives up to its name. It makes it super easy to bring in looms and equipment from your car.

Juanita, the owner of the studio, had sent me an email with instructions on how to have the loom dressed upon arrival for the class. My warp ended up 6" wide, after realizing I'd made a mistake in calculations and unwinding my 1st warp and adding 2" more. :) I'd originally measured out what I "thought" was an 8" warp, only to realize when I was threading the heddles I would end up with only 4". Each inch of measured out warp would "in reality" only be 1/2" when threaded through the reed. In double weave, you need 2 layers of warp, one for the top, or front of the piece, and one for the bottom, the back of the woven piece. Luckily, it was not a problem unwinding the warp (due to its shorter, workshop sampler length), leaving the heddles threaded, and adding an inch more of warp to each side, rewinding it back onto the warp beam, and continuing threading where I left off. :)

My 1st project piece on the sampler was weaving a tube. I mean that literally......weaving "in the round" so that the fabric is woven front and back in one continuous piece of fabric. This became a small pillow, stuffed with "fiberfill", and because it is on my sampler, it was then closed while still on the loom. Here it is "stuffed", closed on the beginning end, but still open on the finished end.

A side view showing its thickness prior to weaving it closed (sorry about the glare from the camera's flash).

After closing the 1st pillow, I continued on and wove a 2nd small pillow, using a different weft. I should mention and explain the pattern that was created by the warp. When measuring the warp, I did so with 2 warp ends, 1 of each color. If I'd been careful, I would have ended up with the 2 colors separated, 1 becoming the "top" of the weaving, and the other becoming the back color. As you can see, I was not careful, so the warp threads randomly switched places, and created this pattern. I'm not unhappy about this, but wanted to make sure I pointed it out.

2nd pillow stuffed and ready to be closed. That is Juanita in the photo, sitting close by and giving me step by step instructions. ;)

Next up on the "double weave sampler" was to weave 2 layers of fabric simultaneously, but "not connected" at each side. The shuttle is being held between the 2 layers, showing what that sequence of shaft changing creates. My top layer of fabric was blue weft, and the lower layer used gold weft. Above that section is a short woven area using plain weave (blue weft), to end or close the "open edged pocket", and to allow for the beginning of another open edged pocket, having the gold weft on top this time, with the blue in back.

The 2nd pocket closed, more plain weave, with yet another small open edged pocket woven, and then closed with plain weave. The reddish yarn was used as scrap yarn so I could cut the sampler off at home, leaving the rest of the warp on so that I could have the sampler as a visual resource when practicing the double weave techniques.

More on double weave tomorrow........