Sarah Nelson Counterpane Sampling

I was lucky enough to assist Susan Leveille’s counterpane class at the Folk School at the end of September and it has sent me on a sampling journey, exploring the counterpane drafts of Sarah Nelson included in Francis L. Goodrich’s Coverlet and Counterpane Drafts by Barbara Miller and Deb Schillo. Before class, Susan asked us to wind a warp using UNmercerized cotton in white or natural, as fine as we could get it (I could only get my hands on 20/2 before class started), 15-18” wide. I wound my warp to be sett at 32 epi.

I chose to work from the No. 8 draft “Huckyback, Satin and Plain” for my class samples. I started sampling with various wefts of different thicknesses, and I found that using the same material as the warp (20/2 cotton) worked best with this configuration. Pictured below are those samples on the loom and after washing.

I worked up a few samples in honeycomb treadling as well, using the same tabby weft as above and a fluffier 5/3 cotton for the honeycomb cord. Sarah didn’t mention working it this way in her samples, but Susan brought an antique honeycomb counterpane to show us so I wanted to try it out while I had that to reference. Below left is Susan’s antique, my sample is on the right.

Just for fun I also tried it using blue cotton unmercerized weft—it really makes it easy to see the floats in the warp and weft and provides some interesting texture.

One small criticism I have of the layout of this book is that the computer drawdowns are sooooo tiny that it’s really hard to read them. This problem led me to trying something different, which was working from the drafts in the old notation as Sarah wrote them, as well as trying to follow her treadling patterns, which are written out in full sentences, instead of in a drawdown. This has proven really fun and has helped me be able to read the cloth itself better, instead of relying on the computer draft. It’s been so enlightening to weave these samples that I have started working through all of the Sarah Nelson drafts, this time using the 30/2 unmercerized cotton I wanted to use on the first batch. More to come on each of those samples!

Project details:

• Draft: Sarah Nelson’s No. 8 Huckyback, Satin and Plain from Frances Goodrich’s Coverlets & Counterpanes

• 32 epi

• 16.5” wide in reed

• Wound 4 yards of warp

• Warp and weft: 20/2 unmercerized cotton, honeycomb cord: 5/3 unmercerized cotton

Wedge Weave Workshop with Connie Lippert

I’m coming off a workshop (ok it was 2 weeks ago) with the wonderful Connie Lippert at John C. Campbell Folk School focused on wedge weave, a variation on pulled warp tapestry technique. I love tapestry studio time because it gives me the space to ask questions and weave samples to try to find the answers. Pictured at right is my first piece in progress. I had a whole slew of things to test out in this sample, including:

• turning back the weft after every thread vs. every other thread (changes the angle of the wedge)

• weaving a shape in “horizontal” tapestry (i.e. the way I normally do) in the middle of a wedge

• weaving wedges in 2 directions to meet with a slit in the middle

• navigating how to continue a color up the piece and working out where to start + end weft bundles to create the shapes I wanted

Above you can see the difference that wet finishing made in the way the warp moved. Top left image is with the piece still on the loom, top right is after cutting off, and bottom is after wet finishing. This sample I finished in my normal way which is a light spray with water and a gentle steam iron, but I didn’t pin it as I usually do when blocking to allow the warp to move.

I wove the next sample to test out a few color gradient techniques, including hatching, pick & pick, and color blending in weft bundles.

In the top section, I sampled weaving a larger horizontally-woven rectangle with a shadow to test out sewing slits and see if the warp movement would affect that seam. Wet finishing didn’t have a huge impact on the shape of the rectangles or the sewn slit, but the edges of the wedges right next to the orange rectangle did move quite a bit, as you can see below.

I finished this piece using Connie’s method: soaking a few towels in warm water and laying them overnight on the tapestry, sitting on a piece of plastic sheeting, then removing the towels and letting the piece dry.

All in all it was such a treat to be a part of a tapestry workshop again! Connie is so knowledgeable on this topic and it was so great to finally get a chance to learn from her.

Project details:

• 12/6 cotton seine twine warp

• Vevgarn Frid wool weft, usually used held double, sometimes with cotton accent threads added

A&B Wedding Coverlet

Two of my dear friends got married this weekend. I wanted to weave them an heirloom they could treasure and that would keep them warm for the rest of their lives. It had also been about a year since I had woven a coverlet, and I was itching to get back into overshot. I spent a long time searching for a draft and eventually settled on “Double Compass Work” from Margeurite Davison’s A Handweaver’s Source Book (not the green book, but the one that’s entirely block drafts) because of its resemblance to Wedding Ring quilt patterns.

For warp / tabby weft, I chose an unmercerized 16/2 natural cotton from Yarn Barn. I picked it before settling on the draft and mostly because I could get enough of it quickly, but next time would choose a thinner yarn for this project. The wool is Harrisville Shetland in Evergreen.

I chose a sett of 28 epi — this is what worked out with a whole number of repeats across the width of each panel. It was a little close for my liking and made the tabby areas appear just a little bit warp faced. Each panel was 43” wide in the reed already at this sett, and I didn’t want to make the piece too big so I had to work with it.

I also didn’t spend enough time up front deciding what the border would look like; I just sent it off in one direction along a twill diagonal (left). I really didn’t like what this did to the bottom of the circles on the rest of the draft. I pulled out the border and rethreaded it (right). Much better.

My next trial came when I discovered, after weaving a whole sampler piece, cutting it off, and weaving a full 12” of the real coverlet, that I had made a threading error. I found it because I was following my diagonal line of pattern weft blocks and came upon a tabby square where there should have been a solid pattern square, shown inside the red outline above. Luckily because only this small section was misthreaded, I only had to correct a few threads. I snipped them out, made new string heddles for them, and tacked down the warp ends with a T pin to weave back in later.

You can see below the error on the right side vs. the correct threading on the left. The red arrows point to the same areas of the pattern, which should look identical. The yellow line shows where I made the repair, and the blue arrows point to the now-identical areas after the repair.

Most of the rest of the coverlet was chugging along in the weaving zone. I added my initials, the year, and the couple’s initials along the bottom of each panel using a traditional pickup method found in The Coverlet Book by Helene Bress. The letters are made of floats over a background box where every other thread is raised (in my case, harnesses 1 & 3) within the box. The rest of the panel is woven as normal.

And now it lives out west with its people! I cried a lot when I gave it to my friends. I’m really proud especially of how well I matched the seams and I hope it brings them joy for a long time to come.

Project details:

• “Double Compass” four harness overshot draft from Marguerite Davison’s Handweaver’s Source Book

• 28 epi, sleyed 2-2-3 in a 12 dent reed

• 43” wide panels in the reed, 37” wide after wet finishing

• each panel woven to 133.5” total length under tension

• 15 yard warp which gave me enough extra for about 1 yard of sampling

• final measurements: 110” x 115”

• tabby & warp: 16/2 unmercerized Natural cotton from Yarn Barn

• pattern weft: Harrisville Shetland in Evergreen

Inkle Shoelaces

My shoelaces broke so I wove some new ones on an inkle loom. It turns out making a tube is a pretty simple concept—insert the shuttle into the open shed from only one side rather than moving it back & forth, and pull tight to make a tube.

Project details: I didn’t write these down (shame) but I used 2 shades of blue perle cotton, maybe an 8/2? And I think there were 13 warp threads. Super simple

18th c. Handwoven Apron

I have sewn a few garments from my handwoven fabric before, but since delving into the world of historical costuming last winter I’ve been dreaming about sewing some practical clothes from my handwovens. I was inspired first by an instagram post from Elisabeth Hill (@plainweave) sampling 10/2 cotton at different setts to get an idea of the hand of the fabric each sett would produce.

check sett samples in 8, 10, & 12 ends/cm

I wove the above samples with unmercerized 10/2 cotton, resleying the same 8 end check to 8, 10, & 12 ends/cm. I found that the 10 ends/cm (which is about the same as 24 epi) was my favorite for clothing fabric. I knew also that I wanted to weave a blue & white check pattern for my apron fabric. This article from 18th Century Notebook provided a lot of contemporary images for checked aprons and was really helpful for deciding on the length I needed as well. I wound up perusing sample books in the online collections of Winterthur, where I found this sample book of fabrics from 1767 from Henry Remsen Jr. & Co., an importer of goods based in New York City in the 18th century. This book includes many fabric samplers including a ton of check variations. I decided on the following warp stripe pattern, which I wove in the same order with the weft colors in order to produce a check:

4 blue / 8 white / 2 blue / 2 white / 2 blue / 8 white, repeated 26 times in straight draw sett at 10 ends/cm

(So I know the teal-y blue I used isn’t exactly period appropriate but it was leftover from the check samples & what I had, so I used it.)

fabric on the loom

I wove this fabric with the intention of following the apron sew along from Burnley & Trowbridge for the construction of the piece, so I used the info they provided to settle on a width. The fabric was about 44cm wide in the reed, which was how it worked out with my weaving width & diving evenly (3 panels) into the average apron width of 114-127cm. I wove each panel to be about 1 yard long; giving myself room to sample I wound a 5.5 yd warp. Also I because I wove this on my counterbalance loom which I have not taken the time to get set up really properly, there are a couple of spots where the weft runs over some warp threads it isn’t meant to which you can see in the above pic.

My checks didn’t end up matching perfectly but that didn’t bother me & I wasn’t going to waste fabric trying to line everything up perfectly. I felled the 3 panels together and hemmed all around 3 edges, leaving the top edge raw. I took this piece of fabric with me to a month-long weaving mentorship program at the John C Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC. While I brought some commercially woven twill tape with me, I picked up inkle loom weaving and decided to weave some tape of my own to use for the apron strings.

tape bundle & apron fabric

I pulled the draft for the tape from Handwoven Tape: Understanding and Weaving Early American and Contemporary Tape by Susan Faulkner Weaver. The blue & white are the same threads I used for the rest of the fabric, and the red is a 2-ply hemp that I have used before for tapestry warp. This tape pattern is based on a tape sewn to grain bag from Pennsylvania. I modified the draft slightly to make it compatible with an inkle loom.

weaving fabric to cover binding

I also realized that I neglected to bring extra fabric for the binding, but luckily I had room at the end of a sample warp to weave up a small piece of plain weave for this. While I used the same blue weft from the apron, the warp was a mercerized natural 20/2 cotton.

I didn’t take any pics of the sewing process, but I did do it all by hand which I love & was very soothing. For the last step I had to monogram it in reversible cross stitch of course. And the goats have already tried to eat the ends of the apron ties.

project details:

• straight draw, 4 harness

• 10 ends/cm, sleyed 2-3-2-3 in 4 dents/cm reed

• 42 cm wide

• 5.5 yd warp

• check: (4 blue / 8 white / 2 blue / 2 white / 2 blue / 8 white) x 26, 4 blue