I am not a sampler kinda gal. Except, as Kord tells me, when it comes to Whitman’s Samplers -- that’s a different story.
I understand the purpose -- samplers are a quick and easy way to learn or practice new skills. But I am always disappointed with the end product -- what am I supposed to do with it? And I never really feel like the skills sink in because the samplers aren’t big enough for me to build muscle memory.
I suppose this is the genius behind Jane Stafford’s program. Every new technique is accompanied by a pattern and kit with enough yarn to weave many, many, many things. My guess is that after weaving all the things, your hands and feet (if you are using a floor loom) just know what to do.
About a year ago I decided to conquer Deflected Double Weave with these gorgeous towels by Elisabeth Hill. I say ‘conquer’ because honestly, I was pretty intimidated. Normally I plunge right in to something because I don’t know enough to be intimidated. But DDW looked so complicated -- all those pattern switches, and how do you manage the selvedge without breaking the graphic? I even went as far as bribing Lisa with lunch and a trip to Peter Patchis Yarns (IYKYK--it’s an amazing place, but that’s a separate post) if she would talk me through it.
We both bought a lot of yarn that day, but I recall not understanding a word she said about Deflected Double Weave.
Eventually I just picked up the pattern, followed the directions, wove the towels and wondered why I had been so nervous. Generally I think weaving is magic, but this was beyond magic. It was graphic and bold and fun and easy, until I tried sampling some of my own motifs and discovered float sequences floating where they weren’t supposed to. So, in honor of Jane, I put on a long warp, enough to weave many towels with as many different treadling combinations as possible. And that’s when I started to understand the structure. The magic, as they say, is in the mess. Or, in this case, the (full-sized) sample.
Double Weave creates two layers of cloth simultaneously (sometimes connected, sometimes not). On a 4-shaft loom, one can weave two layers of Plain Weave cloth. In deflected weaves, floats curve around areas of plain weave. So Deflected Double Weave is just a mash-up of the two, right?
Sort of, I guess.
The “curving” in these towels is pretty subtle. I believe you have to use yarns with differential shrinkage to get the full effect, and this project is in 8/2 cotton.
With 4-shaft DDW you are indeed weaving 2 layers (one light, one dark in this example) of Plain Weave that change positions with each sequence, so the layers are interleaved for the entire cloth.
Notice the examples so far are woven with two shuttles. Confident that the DDW police were not going to arrest me, I used only one weft color, just to see what would happen. I started with the horizontal stripe pattern, which struck me as the easiest. Working with a single color let me see what was happening much more clearly, which is that you are weaving floats and plain weave on every row.
And the back/under side is opposite -- in this case vertical lines.
I did not weave the vertical line treadling in a single color because in the software program the graphic looked very similar to the back side of what I had just woven, but with a muddier motif. Instead, I experimented with weaving only the dark color treadled with alternating horizontal and vertical sequences, and got this fabulously textured towel, which looks like little canvas-weave floats surrounded by plain weave.
I tried to do the same with the light weft then understood the implication of the light warp not extending selvedge to selvedge. Had I continued weaving, I would have had to drop the 4 dark warp ends on each side.
From here I went back to the starting point of most 4-shaft Deflected Double Weave patterns -- the horizontal stripes. And I was reminded about the need to move the light weft shuttle out of the way when weaving with the dark weft shuttle. Because if you don’t, this happens:
When I wove Lisa’s towels I felt like I fumbled around every single time I finished with a light-weft sequence. Where does the shuttle go again? Above the cloth? Below the cloth? Lisa made this great video explaining what to do when, but I could never get my brain to think about the cloth in terms of what block was weaving next. And then I realized the light weft needs to hang with its vertical warp threads when it is not in use in order to allow the dark weft to weave freely. That means when weaving horizontal stripes on top, the light weft rests below the cloth (because the underside weaves opposite of the top), and when weaving vertical stripes, it rests on top of the cloth. Now, when you resume weaving with the light weft you have to move it back to where it ended its last sequence (above or below the cloth) to position it correctly for the first shed in its sequence.
Once I had those basics down, I got a little swagger and starting mixing motifs -- switching back and forth between vertical and horizontal stripes. And this is where more learning happened.
If you go back to the earlier photos, you can see floats and plain weave stacked on top of each other and securely in place. That happens when weaving all horizontal or all vertical stripes, but, as I discovered, when you want to change from one to the other, you have to transition within the same weft color, and then pick up the new treadling sequence with the other color. In other words, you can’t treadle for horizontal stripes in one weft, then vertical stripes with the other weft, then back to horizontal with the first. The horizontal floats will slide right over the plain weave of the other color because (I think) it is a separate layer and is not interleaved. If you really want to do this however, Marci Petrini show how in her 2019 blog post -- by anchoring the two layers together with Plain Weave picks on either side of the horizontal floats.
Once I got that sorted out, I started playing with reckless, albeit educated, abandon -- combining vertical and horizontal stripes, along with those little canvas-weave like dots.
I offer up eight variations (or maybe I should say “samples”) in this pattern on Etsy if you want to give it a go.
Phew! That was a lot technical stuff. If you’ve gotten this far, congratulations! I don’t go into this degree of depth in the pattern (although it is long, has lots of pictures and shows the selvedge management a bit more), so you can follow the instructions without getting mired in detail. But I hope this is helpful (be aware that it only scratches the surface) and inspires you to try 4-shaft Deflected Double Weave if you haven’t already, or at least encourages you to experiment!
Thanks for reading!
For those of you in the US -- happy unofficial start to fall!
xx
Christine
Okay, very interesting, but I have to wait a bit and then reread. I am a slow, cautious weaver, so I have to take more time to absorb this. Thanks for your interesting ideas😊.
DDW is incredibly fun to weave. If you pay attention to where the yarn needs to be when you change colors, it’s really not complicated. It’s one of my favorite things to weave!