My nephew and his wife are expecting their second child in early December -- so of course I had to weave them a baby blanket. That's what weavers do, right? It had to be machine washable (but I dryed it on the line, to prevent shrinking), without long floats, soft to the touch (of course), and, at least in my opinion, made with natural fiber. Again, in my opinion, cotton is the way to go, particularly unmercerized cotton because it's softer and loftier than mercerized cotton. Like pretty much everyone else, I love pattern #728 from A Weaver's Book of 8-Shaft Patterns by Carol Strickl ..read more

  Above: My favorite piece among all the weaving I've seen by Eva Stossel, in networked double weave on 16 shafts, with warp and weft in 20/2 cotton. I really like the tesselation effect. Which brings me to the point of this blog post: Eva Stossel (you can visit her blog at www.evasweaving.wordpress.com) is, in my humble opinion, one of the best weavers around the country these days.  Take a look: Another 16-shaft network-drafted double weave, again using tesselations. Even more interesting: If you walk far enough away from the photo on your screen, you'll see an overall pattern i ..read more

It all started with Handweaving.net, as it I'm guessing it does for many of us.  One of the easiest ways to create an Echo design is to look on Handweaving.net for patterns with advancing-point-twill threadings, such as Ms and Ws, Gebrochene, or Crackle. These threadings can easily be made into Echo designs, simply by clicking "Parallel Repeat" on the "Warp" drop-down menu in Fiberworks Silver and then interleaving a threading line that's parallel to the original threading, separated by an interval of half the shafts you're using. A bit of weaving terminology here -- because I remembe ..read more

  Summer -- my favorite design and the sample that has the most errors, darn it. Autumn -- my favorite sample so far. This photo has more blue in it than the cloth itself. Winter, which my spouse thinks looks like summer, but I see it as cool and icy. Again, the photo is bluer than the real cloth.  Maybe it needs a thicker, grayer weft.  (Note to self: Do not ask spouse's opinion if they are not weavers.) Spring. This one is inarguably spring. I don't know where this one fits in but I love periwinkle.  So maybe it's bluebell season, something like that. So ..read more

The photo resolution isn't good enough to show it very well -- but the warp for this piece (viewed horizontally) is 240/2 silk! Or maybe it's 260/2, which is another yarn she often used for warps.... That's Lillian Whipple's superpower: weaving with silk so fine that most of us would need our reading glasses to see it. Here are a few more of her ever-so-delicate, feather-light "kimono" weavings, each one a work of art on its own, each about 1" wide by 2" long. Many weavers boast of having an entire collection of Lillian's pieces. That's because, at every Convergence conference fo ..read more

  Way back in the misty past -- that is, about two years ago, my memory being what it is -- I was flying out of Rochester on my way to teach a workshop. As it happened, I had a beautiful view out the window looking east over the Finger Lakes. They're a series of 11 lakes in western New York State that all stretch north to south, long and lean, like fingers. (In the image below, you can see them in the winter and you can sort of see where I live, in Rochester, NY, in the top left-hand corner of the photo, with Irondequoit Bay flowing south and Lake Ontario filling the northern ..read more

Every other year, in some city in the U.S., weavers travel from all around the globe to attend two of the best conferences worldwide: Convergence, sponsored by the Handweavers' Guild of America, and "Seminars," sponsored by Complex Weavers. There are classes, talks, gatherings formal and informal, vendors (of course), and exhibits (of course). Among the best-attended exhibits are Complexity, an international show sponsored by Complex Weavers, and the Convergence fashion show.  And every other year, I challenge myself to weave and apply to both of these shows. (Some pieces are juried in ..read more

  Let's start with the photo above: a series of samples woven on eight shafts in deflected doubleweave by Marta Shannon. It's just one picture of dozens of interesting, colorful, and always original samples created by weavers in my workshop this past weekend: "Deflected Doubleweave for Collapse Fabrics." The goal of my workshop was twofold: 1) to teach weavers to recognize and even design deflected doubleweave patterns and 2) to push the already tactile, off-the-grid quality of DDW by using "energized" yarns such as Colcolastic, metallic gimp, wool-stainless steel, silk-stainless steel ..read more

  For me, hands down, my list starts with this one. Not because this is how I learned to weave or even because this is how I learned that weaving has cosmic possibilities. It's because I can't stop learning from this book and I love the beauty and intricacy of the ideas in this book. Sometimes I can't fathom what she's writing about, but I keep trying. What's more important: Taking care of a book or reading it a lot? I spent maybe a decade weaving my way through this one.  And writing notes on it -- in pen -- which is not very classy. "Strickler," that's how weavers describe ..read more

*Warning: This post is just partly about fiber. Remember those test patterns on your old black and white TV? They were typically accompanied by an ear-piercing alarm to tell us that a TV station (we had three back then) was malfunctioning for some reason or other. Kids like my sisters and me -- who loved watching the Three Stooges and Bugs Bunny and Spanky and Our Gang -- were out of luck. Truth be told, I'm experiencing technical difficulties right now, accompanied by malfunctions in my weaving, ever since our house was damaged by water -- more like flooded with water -- last September 1 ..read more