When I first set out to write Doubleweave nine years ago, my intention was to include everything I knew about doubleweave, and when I was finished, I felt reasonably confident that I had accomplished that. I should have known just from reading my own words at the end of the original book that new ideas would keep coming and the journey would keep evolving.
And so it has! It’s therefore time for a revised and updated version of this book. I wanted to keep the best and most relevant projects from the original edition, while sharing with you a number of exciting new discoveries and projects.
When I was a beginning weaver in the late 1970s, I learned that there was a weave structure called doubleweave that allowed two layers of cloth to be woven at the same time, one above the other on the loom. To me, this sounded almost mythical, like carpets that can fly. Later, in a weaving theory class, I learned how the two layers could indeed weave separately from each other. It was one of those magical moments when the sun breaks through the clouds and a view that had previously been obscured suddenly becomes crystal clear.
Later still, I learned that there was a technique called doubleweave pick-up, in which the two layers could not only weave separately from each other, but could interchange at selected places, enabling the colors from one side to show up on the other, and vice versa. Now I was really intrigued! I had yearned for the ability to create designs that weren’t limited to going across the whole cloth from one selvedge to the other.
In the 35 years since weaving my first doubleweave piece, I’ve woven many things in a number of different weave structures, but doubleweave is the one that I come back to again and again. It never ceases to capture my imagination and challenge my intellect, and the results are no less magical to me than when I first learned the technique.
It’s always so interesting to see what sparks new ideas—rarely is it that the proverbial bolt of inspiration comes out of the clear blue sky. After the publication of Doubleweave, a request from a British weaving journal led me to stretch my block doubleweave muscles and create the eight-shaft version of my basic doubleweave sampler. In this revised book, you’ll find not only the original four-shaft sampler (page 24) but also instructions for setting it up in two blocks on eight shafts (page 98). This will give you many more opportunities for patterning on a single threading, as well as a great education in how block design works in doubleweave.
Ideas that had been on the back burner of my mind had time to percolate, which enabled me to figure out and weave the Doublewidth Log Cabin Blanket and the Triplewidth Tablecloth with Spot Bronson Center Panel (pages 76 and 118), two new projects in this edition that will give you experience weaving large and impressive textiles—the first with visual patterning on a four-shaft loom and the second with contrasting textures on an eight-shaft loom.
While weaving four-color samples for a recent magazine article, I found that I just couldn’t bring myself to reduce the palette I was working with to less than six colors, and suddenly Double Rainbow was born. Everything that I love about doubleweave and working with color has formed a perfect union, and I’m very excited to share it with you in this book (page 86), both for four shafts and for working in two blocks on eight shafts.
I’ve taught dozens of workshops in doubleweave during the past few years, and it’s a new adventure each time. Questions and puzzled looks from students have led to new ideas and have made me re-examine the ways that I explain things and the processes and drafts that I use. In this revision, I’ve made some changes to my systems of notation that I hope will make the concept of doubleweave easier to understand than ever.
Doubleweave was a popular weave structure in Europe and the United States, beginning in the eighteenth century.
The fascination with weaving two or more layers of cloth at the same time has been with us for a long time. While the exact origins of double cloth are unknown, it appears that both the Peruvians and the Chinese developed it during the first millennium BCE. Textile fragments dating back to 1000 BCE show us that weavers along the coast of Peru had already mastered many techniques in doubleweave using narrow backstrap looms with a shed stick and three or more heddle sticks. Bags were woven in tubular weave and cloths of two or more layers were woven accordion-style to achieve textiles wider than their 30-inch (76 cm) backstrap looms. Beautifully stylized human, animal, and geometric forms were woven into fabrics with pick-up interchange between the layers. Most of the double cloths that have survived, as well as the most complex, came from the late Nasca culture around 500 CE.
DOUBLEWEAVE FABRICS FROM ACROSS THE AGES.
A Colonial coverlet replica, an owl-motif pre-Columbian fabric from Peru, and a contemporary Bolivian belt.
On the other side of the world, written records tell us that the Chinese were weaving polychrome double and triple cloths during the first half of the Chou dynasty, 800 to 249 BCE. India has had a continuous tradition of using block-patterned doubleweave dating back to several centuries BCE, and there are fragments of double cloths from the same time period in Persia, where doubleweave was revived during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and again during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to create elaborate decorative hangings.
Knowledge of doubleweave traveled northward to Russia and Scandinavia, and from there traveled west to the rest of Europe. By the sixteenth century, doubleweave was commonly used in Scandinavia for household textiles and wall coverings, and intricate designs were being woven in a method of paired-thread pick-up that became known as finnweave. At the same time, doubleweave was used in England, Scotland, and Wales to produce thick, insulated fabrics for blankets and clothing.
Settlers from the European countries brought their weaving patterns and knowledge of doubleweave to the United States and Canada. Overshot designs were translated into doubleweave block patterns, which enabled weavers to use blocks of any size without the problems caused by overlong floats. Beautiful coverlets were woven in this technique, generally with a white cotton warp and indigo-dyed wool weft.
In the past few decades, there has been growing interest in pushing doubleweave outside its traditional boundaries and beyond the flat plane. We’re seeing the rules broken in projects incorporating three-dimensional pieces, deflected doubleweave, differential shrinkage, the use of yarns with different elasticity, and elaborate patterns woven in both loom-controlled and hand-picked layer exchange.
A CONTEMPORARY DOUBLE-SIDED BLANKET WOVEN IN STITCHED TWILL
Today, as handweavers are acquiring looms with more and more shafts, possibilities for expanding the boundaries of doubleweave are growing exponentially, and it’s easy to develop a case of “shaft envy” rather quickly. Yet some of the most amazing double cloths ever produced were created on simple backstrap looms with a handful of sticks, and in many cases, the simpler the loom, the more flexibility we have. For experimentation and for understanding the lift sequences in doubleweave, a table loom or direct tie-up on a floor loom is ideal. And as I often tell my students, your pick-up stick makes your loom a manual Jacquard loom.
In 2013, I was given the incredible opportunity (and challenge) to teach doubleweave to 20 master Quechua weavers in Peru using backstrap looms. With my limited backstrap experience and with very limited language in common—mostly just through watching what I did—they were well on their way to mastery of doubleweave within just a few hours. It was a rather humbling and inspiring experience to see what these weavers accomplished with very basic tools and a lot of enthusiasm. The lesson? Enjoy the technology that you have available, but don’t forget what power you have right at your fingertips!
My goal in writing this book is to give you a solid foundation in doubleweave techniques, and a clear understanding of how doubleweave works and how you can make it work for you. My hope is that in reading these pages, you’ll find the inspiration and confidence to explore the potential of this wonderful weave structure, and perhaps to make your own discoveries and find within them a new path of your own.
With an understanding of the basic techniques of doubleweave and a little bit of imagination and ingenuity, weavers are free to explore in any direction that they wish to go. I recommend taking a look at the bibliography for many sources of further inspiration.
This book takes an in-depth look at how doubleweave works on four shafts with a sampler project that illustrates a variety of techniques that can all be done on one warp with one threading and one tie-up. There are also detailed instructions for doubleweave pick-up. Before moving on to more shafts, we’ll look at several variations that can expand the possibilities on four shafts by introducing new threadings or multiple colors. You then take these principles and expand them to more shafts. A series of projects on eight shafts will explore some of the many possibilities, as well as give ideas for further variations.
This book is meant to be a hands-on experience. I’ve essentially taken the workshops that I teach and put them into these pages. Reading about doubleweave can only take you so far—you really need to sit down at the loom and do it yourself to truly understand (and have the fun of) weaving multiple layers of cloth. Whatever your skill level, I urge you to spend some time weaving the samples, thinking about what’s going on in the various layers as you weave, and developing your own ideas. Then let your imagination go wild and let the magic unfold.
As a beginning weaver in my midtwenties, I took a class from a woman in her midsixties who had been weaving for 50 years. She told me that it made her sad to think of all the things she wouldn’t have time to weave in her lifetime. And I thought, how wonderful to still have fresh ideas and be so interested in something that you’ve been doing for that long. It made me feel that weaving was something I would want to do for the rest of my life.
Well, I’m now getting close to the age that teacher was back then, with 40 years of weaving under my belt. The ideas keep coming, and I can’t imagine ever getting through the list of projects that I want to try. But rather than feeling sad that I’ll probably never get to the end of my list, much less the stash of yarn accumulated over the years, I feel incredibly fortunate that I found something I still feel passionately about after all this time. I’m having more fun than ever with doubleweave and can’t wait to get to my loom every day to try out new ideas. I hope you’ll be inspired to explore the techniques and projects in this book and that you’ll feel the same passion!
Doubleweave is unparalleled in its versatility as a weave structure. You can weave pieces that are two or more times as wide as your loom. You can weave pieces that are functional, sculptural, or purely decorative works of art. Doubleweave is both a weave structure in itself and a vehicle for exploring other weave structures. And with the ability to interchange threads of different colors from one layer to the other, the sky is the limit for color exploration.