Plain weave is the simplest weave structure. It’s the one kids learn in kindergarten: the weft goes over one warp and under the next one, alternating on the second row. If you’re a knitter, you can think of plain weave as the garter stitch of weaving.
Rigid-heddle looms are plain-weave machines; plain weave is built into the structure of the heddle. But does that mean plain weave is the only structure you can weave on a rigid-heddle loom? Not at all. One of the fun challenges of rigid-heddle weaving is figuring out how to weave complex cloth on a simple loom. Throughout the ages, clever weavers have used rigid heddles and other simple looms to weave amazing textiles.
In this chapter and the next, we’ll explore ways to create structures other than plain weave in rigid-heddle cloth. What I’m calling “slow and fancy” includes leno, Brooks bouquet, Spanish lace, Danish medallion, soumak, tapestry, transparencies, and pickup patterning. But before we get into those, let’s take a deeper look at weave structure.
In woven cloth there is warp — the threads running up and down the loom — and weft — the thread you throw across the loom on a shuttle. Where they interlock is cloth. In the photo at right, the plain-weave sample shows a cloth with no floats: all threads are locked down at the top, bottom, and both sides in every pick. There’s no way they can slip past each other. Now look at the photo below it, a 1×2 twill. The weft thread travels under one warp thread and then over the next two warp threads. These jumps are called “floats” in the parlance of weaving because they float over the top of other threads.
Floats serve several purposes in cloth. When the fabric is taken off the loom and washed, the threads that float over others aren’t tied down as strongly as they would be in plain weave and can migrate around a bit in the cloth. This is why a twill fabric shrinks more than plain weave when you wash it, and it tends to be thicker than plain weave. It’s also why twill fabrics are more flexible. The tiny bits of slack provided by all the floats throughout the fabric let it be more fluid. In fact, the longer the floats, the more flexible and fluid the cloth, but you have to balance stability against motion in the cloth. For example, the extreme case of a long float would be a thread that doesn’t interlock at all (a loose thread). It’s the most flexible structure you can create with that yarn, but I wouldn’t want to make a skirt out of it. (There are cultures where string skirts exist, but they tend to be warmer than Seattle.)
Because the floats allow the threads underneath to slide closer together during wet-finishing (see Wet-Finishing and Shrinkage), twills need to be sett more densely than the same yarn woven in plain weave. If you don’t set the warp threads more densely, your weft will pack in too far and ruin the diagonal line of the twill, or, if you beat lightly to maintain the line, the fabric will be sleazy.
No matter what weave structure you’re working with, a rule of thumb used by most weavers is to limit floats to a maximum of floating over three other threads. There are specialty fabrics where you might want a longer float length to allow for big migrations in your cloth: honeycomb is one example. In those cases, we’re trading stability for a dramatic effect. The important concept to learn about structure is how to make the design-versus-stability trade-off in your cloth consciously, instead of having it crop up in your cloth as an unwelcome surprise.
Weave structure is a lot like stitch patterns in knitting. Weavers use warp and weft floats in much the same way as knitters use knit and purl stitches. Like any translation from one language to another, it’s not a perfect match, but here are some weaving/knitting structure analogies.
Tabby. If you go on to read other weaving books (and I hope you do), you might run across the term tabby. This is not a new structure — it’s another term for plain weave. The difference is that tabby is used when plain weave is serving the purpose of tying together a looser weave structure, usually by alternating with it, for example, one pick of a pattern weave, such as overshot or summer-and-winter, and one pick of tabby.
Twills are named by the location of weft floats in the structure: the first number indicates how many warp threads are up, and the second number indicates how many warp threads are down. So in a 1×3 twill, the weft travels under one warp thread and then floats over three warp threads.
An interesting aside: If you flip a 1×3 twill over, you’ll find a 3×1 twill fabric on the other side, as, from this perspective, the weft travels under three warp threads and then floats over one warp thread. Knowing that the complement to your twill is on the other side of your fabric is useful both in design and troubleshooting.
In this 1×2 twill, the fabric at the left shows the red weft traveling under 1 blue warp thread and floating over 2 blue warps. At the right, which shows the reverse side of the same fabric, the weft travels under 2 warp thread and floats over 1.
One of the wonderful things about simple looms is that you can still weave complicated structures and patterns on them. You can weave fabric where each thread is controlled independently, like in those most complicated of looms, the Jacquard loom. This is what native weavers in Guatemala, Laos, Ghana, and other places across the world have done for millennia on simple backstrap and rigid-heddle looms. They didn’t let the lack of a computer-controlled, multi-harness loom prevent them from creating the fabrics of their dreams, and neither should you. By hand-manipulating the threads to create custom sheds, you can weave a tremendous variety of cloth. I like to think of this as slow-and-fancy weaving.
The trade-off, however, is time. Hand-manipulating threads is slow, which is, of course, why the electronically driven Jacquard loom was invented. In this section, we’ll embrace the slow and look at ways to hand-manipulate threads to create intricate fabrics. In the following chapter, Fast and Fancy, we’ll use a bit of cleverness and get the loom to store the pattern we’re weaving. In that section we’ll make cloth faster, but we will have a more limited selection of pattern options.
When you’re hand-manipulating the threads, each pick is a new adventure. You can change your mind at any time and weave it differently. The equipment doesn’t lock you into any particular pattern. In our fast-paced world, we often don’t appreciate the value and freedom of the slow. I think of these weave structures as a reminder that faster doesn’t always mean better.
Leno uses twist to create openness in the threads, resulting in an airy fabric often used for curtains or areas of lace in clothing. It is an ancient weave structure, with examples of its use all over the world. Leno is created by twisting one set of warp threads over an adjacent set of warp threads. You use your fingers to make this twist, store it on a pickup stick, and then turn the pickup stick on edge to create a shed. It takes a bit of dexterity at first, but the motion is easy to master with a bit of practice. It’s easier to manipulate the warp threads if you loosen the tension one click of the brake. You can work these twists on an open or a closed shed, with slightly different results depending on which you choose.
If you want to have an even number of leno twists across the width of your warp, make sure that the bundle size multiplies evenly into the number of warp threads on the loom. If you aren’t concerned about each leno twist matching exactly, you can sneak any extra threads into the last few bundles on either side of the warp.
A pickup stick is a wide, flat stick that is at least as long as the warp is wide. They’re often pointed on one or both ends to make them easier to slide under and “pick up” threads. You can use them to open a shed in the threads you’ve picked up by turning them on edge. When purchasing or making a pickup stick, check that it’s wide enough to create a good shed when turned on end. I prefer pickup sticks that are between 1" and 2" wide.
Leno is always woven in pairs of rows: in the first pick you manually insert the twist, and in the second pick the warp releases the twist, giving you a “free” pick of leno. If you kept adding twist each pick without allowing the corresponding untwist row, the warp would eventually become too tight to weave (unless you were weaving on a warp-weighted loom, which is outside the scope of this book).
Continue steps 1–3 all the way across the warp.
One of the fun things about leno is how many different ways you can weave this simple technique. Here are some variations to play with (study the photos for more examples):
Direction of twist. You can twist some bundles to the left, others to right, to create a subtle undulating effect in your cloth (a).
Bundle size. Experiment with the number of threads in your bundles. A 1×1 leno creates a delicate, refined lace, whereas as 6×6 leno is a bold architectural element in your cloth. The number of threads in your bundles depends on both the size of your yarns (typically you’ll want more threads per bundle for finer yarns) and the scale you want for your lace (more threads mean bigger lace holes). You can even mix different-size bundles in the same row (c). If you do this, however, be aware that larger bundles will be taller than bundles with fewer threads, causing some unevenness in your cloth that will either bug or delight you, depending on your goal. Be aware that you’ll get a lot of draw-in when you weave leno. If you combine it with plain weave, expect wavy selvedges.
Uneven groupings. There is no rule that says you have to twist the bundles evenly. Experiment with a 1×2 leno, or a 2×3 (b). Having uneven groupings adds texture to leno and highlights the direction of twist.
Pickup designs. You can combine areas of leno with areas of plain weave to create lacy designs in your cloth. This is especially fun for cloth such as curtains or lamp shades that will be backlit, illuminating the open areas as in the candle cover on the next page. Note: One caveat to leno pickup designs inside plain weave cloth is that rows of leno are taller than rows of plain weave, so to keep the areas of plain weave solid, you’ll have to weave extra rows in the plain-weave areas. As you can see in the photo below (d), the weft weaves three rows of plain weave on the right, before entering the leno section of the cloth. It then weaves the leno, and then three rows of plain weave on the left before going back to weave the second pick of leno. The number of plain-weave picks needed may vary, depending on the scale of the leno.
