Weaving La Rocca del San Gemini

13 October to 15 November 2024 - end date approximate

 

Our second day in Italy was a full day travelling to Tarquinia and the mosaic garden, but our looms were screwed together.  YAY!  Day three dawned with dry looms (finally!), a half-day trip to the waterfall, and it looked like we were ready to weave!  Some yarn was dyed.  Most of us had our designs.  We had measured and marked inches (and quarter and half inches) on the top and bottom horizontal bars of our looms.  We were all set to learn how to do tapestry weaving, which is different from basic weaving.

 

First we had to "warp the loom."  Basically, the warp is the vertical threads on a loom, and they are stationary.  The weft is the horizontal threads (we used yarn) that weaves back and forth across the warp to make the fabric or tapestry.

 

In our case, there was measuring and making sure we had ten warp threads per inch.  Tying the beginning cotton twine to the loom, looping around and counting as we go, making sure there are enough ups and downs to create the width of the tapestry.  Then tightly tying the end of the warp twine to the loom, and carefully moving the threads so they are fairly evenly spaced at the top and bottom of the loom.

 

There's also a weird twining thing we had to do across the bottom of the warp threads.  Because our looms were tubing, this gave us space between the warp threads, one being over the tubing and one under.  This makes it easier to know which thread to go over or under to create the weave.  The weird twine thing is supposed to make the warp threads, the overs and the unders, on the same plane.  Okay, that part made perfect sense.  Plus the tight horizontal line is kind of the base for the weft threads.  Also made sense.  I just don't know what it's called, and I also found out I don't do it well.

 

It involved a long piece of warp thread folded in half and attached to one upright on the loom.  Then that is woven horizontally between the vertical warp threads.  The doubled thread is woven one over and one under each warp thread, with two twists between.  Yeah, I made a total mess of that.  When someone tells me to twist two threads together, I assume one twist is 360º.  Turns out that 360º is two twists.  Maybe.  I’m still a little confused.  I definitely ended up with uneven twists between warps, so they were no longer evenly spaced.

 

I botched it so badly, Shelley redid mine.  You know it's bad when the teacher does it for the student.

 

Anyway, we began weaving! 

 

Well, before we could weave, we needed to draw the design on the actual warp threads.  This meant putting my drawing under the warp, and using a Sharpie (or other small point permanent marker) to draw the picture.  My design had a lot of straight edges, so I just used cardboard as a straight edge since I didn’t have a ruler.

 

Then we began weaving.  Going from left to right is easy, the warp threads are separated for this weaving direction by the tube used to make the loom.  But there isn’t a device to automatically switch which threads are over and unders, which happens on large looms for basic weaving.  So going from right to left meant picking up each “under” thread one by one, holding them in the right hand until we have maybe ten or fifteen of them, and then pass the yarn, the weft, through them.  Yes, slow and tedious!

 

But there are a few things that made it easier.  First, in order to create a design, it’s okay to work in sections.  The weaving doesn’t need to be totally horizontal across the entire width of the piece, it could be one section of horizontal in one color.  Then another section can be woven next to it.  This was very good news, because the first day of weaving I only had my indigo blue yarn, and my white yarn.  It was another two days until my cochineal red was dyed and then dry enough to use it for weaving!

 

So, there are special tricky ways to weave but change colors for different parts of the design without leaving a slit in the weaving.  Normally this means interlocking the two yarns, and it makes a tiny sawtooth sort of design.  But I was not good at this tricky color change, so my tower sides got a little crooked, as did the doorway.  My lower tower looks like it has lights between the crenellations in the roof.  Eh, this was my learning piece, so I wasn’t going to be all perfectionist about it.  But, well, it is a bit frustrating when things aren’t working the way they really should.

 

Eventually I kind of got the hang of things.  Certain parts worked fine, like my diagonal line.  Other parts are decidedly wonky, and the tower looks a bit like it’s shaking in an earthquake!  (Shelley’s husband is the one who came up with that description, and it’s very apt!)

 

Most of us wove every afternoon, after mornings spent exploring various towns as described in the previous blogs.  (Our dyers continued to dye, and I want to devote a separate blog to the gorgeous yarns they created.)  Our last day, 20 October, was a Sunday and we were scheduled to explore Terni.  Most of us opted to stay and do more weaving, so we could be as close to finished as possible.

 

My piece was just about half done by the time our ten day class was finished, so I packed the entire loom in my luggage, along with the small balls of yarn.  (I wrapped the weaving section in paper to make sure my clothes and such didn't unweave anything!)  Definitely made my luggage heavier, along with my black truffle products – my luggage leaving Italy was fifteen pounds heavier than when I arrived!

 

I managed to finish my piece in Tucson, and tied off the warp threads using the Maori technique.  Different cultures have different weaving techniques.  Modern weaving borrows from those many cultures, but tends to use the names of the original cultures for those specific techniques.

 

Yes, the left side got extremely crooked.  There are ways to “bubble” the weft yarn so it doesn’t pull, but apparently I didn’t leave enough slack to keep it nice and even.  As I said, this was all a learning process for me.

 

Last thing that is a bit odd about tapestry weaving – weft yarn is attached to the warp threads with a loop around and under technique, and the short end is left hanging.  Every time a new color is added, or more yarn of the same color is added, there’s a little short end hanging on the back.  This is a weird French tapestry technique; other cultures don’t do this, and there are ways to prevent the woven yarn from coming undone.  But I’ll talk about that in another blog.

 

So I have my first little tapestry.  I’ll eventually sew a cotton fabric on the back to cover those hanging yarn bits, as well as the warp threads. 

 

All in all, it was fun.  It was interesting.  Not sure I’ll make tapestry weaving my new medium, but it’s always good to learn something totally new.