Developing awareness on extraneous movements while at the loom

I wove a great deal yesterday, after a few weeks of taking care of other stuff.

The Ocean-Born Mary scarf warp is still on the loom. 

I think I had been weaving for about an hour when it suddenly occurred to me that something was bugging me about *how* I was weaving - more specifically put, my hand movements surrounding the handling of the shuttle. 

I have been weaving for 36 years, but not until yesterday did I ever think to look critically at my bodily movements while handling the shuttle.

As I watched myself weave, I realized that as I catch the shuttle as it exits the shed, I draw it up and away from the shed and the beater, probably in an effort to not whack the shuttle with the beater while drawing the beater forward to beat the shot.

I had taken this real need to move the shuttle backwards and had, over the years, developed an exaggerated movement back and *up*, to the point at which I found myself holding the shuttle way above my head.  It was slightly less so when catching with the right hand, but still pretty much the same.  Big wasted movement, wasted energy, undue wear and tear on the body, and wasted time spent pulling the shuttle up and away, and then having to look down at the weaving to find the spot in the next shed where I should place the nose of the shuttle. 

So I imagined where the shuttle would be after a shot if it was being used in a fly-shuttle set-up.

And it wasn't over my head and way back.

I tried to imagine catching the shuttle without any undue movement; and with enough speed to get the edge of the shot into the corner of the shed and selvedge to bed it nicely, and it worked.

There arose a kind of movement that basically kept the shuttle at exactly the same level as it would need to be in order to accurately enter the next shed without exploding any of the selvedge threads.  As I drew the beater backwards to pack the weft up to the fell of the cloth, I found that I was able to still keep the shuttle close to where the next shed would open up, at exactly the same level, while at the same time drawing backwards with the shuttle to avoid hitting it with the beater.   All in all this gave rise to a kind of windshield wiper shape of movement, with approximately 2/3 less motion, no extraneous motions up and back, and with considerably less time.

As once Artur Rubenstein is said to have shut himself up once to 'relearn' how to touch the piano, I started very slowly to weave, but with only the exact movements I'd just explored.  It took a very long time, a few hours, but finally I was able to keep weaving that way without effort and without looking.  The net result was that the weaving progressed much faster, and the motion of throwing/catching the shuttle and pulling it, without changing its level, backwards to accomodate the beater suddenly became *one* smooth motion, and on a soft curve. 

After hours and hours of weaving like that I found I had progressed by about a yard more than I otherwise would have, even at my fastest previous pace.  And no pains in the rotator cuffs in my shoulder joints, either!

What a Weekend!!

Saturday was the much-anticipated visit of the Japanese weaver Fukuko Katsuura to my studio!

 

This was a huge honor.  Ms. Katsuura is 88 years old and came along with her son Hidefumi and his wife Frances, as well as my friend Liza and her husband Michael.  And weaving pal Tien was able to come as well, and bring her work along for show, which was wonderful!!  And though Carlos had a band rehearsal later, he was able to spend an hour or so with us.

 

I had been very worried that my Japanese would be too rusty, and it really was; however Liza and Hidefumi were tireless interpreters. 

 

We all had tea or coffee, and then show and tell.  Tien showed her amazing textiles first, including the legendary Kodachrome Jacket and Matching Tam, and several of her bright and beautiful shawls, and even a couple of swatches and photographs of her wedding dress, for which she herself had woven the elegant silk fabric.  I showed the Box of Beauty, all the habutai from generous Bryan Whitehead in Japan that I got last year and spent months and months dyeing.

 

After that we all piled downstairs to the studio.  Ms. Katsuura even wove five or six shots on the current warp, the Ocean-Born Mary scarf warp. 

After that we all went to lunch in the Castro and Mamaji.  Wonderful!!

 

 

The first two photos are the samples after wet-finishing.  The teal weft and the violet weft came out the best, though the real gold from John Marshall also looks spectacular!

 

 



 The second two photos are of the samples still on the loom. 

Threadedness.

I finished threading all the heddles in the Ocean-Born Mary scarf warp last night.  Not too bad, since there were only about 500 needed.  I did catch myself in a threading error near the end of the penultimate repeat - I had skipped one thread on harness #7.  I also discovered that I had to add seven additional string heddles on harness #5, and was dreading it, but it was not at all difficult to add them once they were in order.  Phew...

 

It's astonishing to see about twenty different colors in the warp become a gradient of blue-to-green-to-blue.  I am wondering how the advancing twill pattern will read once it's finished.  The warp is so many different colors, but the weft is just one color, deep tealish-green, to contrast with the riot of color in the warp.

 

This is the first warp I've ever done which uses a non-straight threading.  I was nervous about that, but it turned out pretty well (I won't know about other potential threading errors until the first couple of inches of weaving has been done).  The complex threading seems to be easily broken down into smaller chunks (in this case, it was little units of four, which was the number of ends in each crossing) and lends itself to an almost musical rhythmic mnemonic.  Twice I was interrupted in the middle of each 64-end threading sequence, though, and was not able to find my place again (a means of marking the place seems to be needed here) without counting all the way through the sequence again, which was headache-inducing and VERY SLOW.  Gah.  As long as I was able to keep going through the sequence it was quite fast.

 

What a terrific feeling to finish the threading.  Tonight, it'll be time to sley the reed (2 per dent in a 20-dent reed) and tie on; then to add four bars to the dobby chain and to input the pegs.  That's slow too, but shouldn't take more than an hour or so.  And then...finally...weaving!!

 

 



 

 

Fun Katazome Saturday and Half-Threaded Heddles

Saturday I took CalTrain down to Mountain View and Tien picked me up at the station.  We spent the day with her and her friend Carrie doing katazome (Japanese-technique rice paste resist stencil dyeing).  I'd never done it before, not really, and not successfully, but it turned out to be a great success.  It was the best indigo vat I've ever set, and it worked beautifully.  We got lovely blues!

Sunday, I finally completed winding the last two bouts of silk warp for the Ocean-Born Mary scarves, and beamed them.  Yesterday I was dreading getting started with the threading of the heddles - there's always that slight discomfort I have with putting the lease sticks through the cross, but it worked nicely and went MUCH faster than I had expected.  In no time I was threading the heddles.  We're going out this evening, but it took me two hours to thread about half of the heddles - in sequence too; this is the first time I've threaded heddles in anything other than a straight draw, so it took more concentration, and a certain kind of concentration, than I have needed before.  It's limited to eight harnesses this time, leaving the other eight fallow, and it seeeeeeeeems to have come out all right so far, though I am dreading the possibility of threading errors.  The threading sequence is only 63 units long, so it's not so bad.  I definitely kind of got into a nice rhythm with it, breaking it down into mini-units of four threads each, which is the number of threads I have in each bunch in the portee cross.

So hopefully I'll be able to finish the threading between tonight and tomorrow night, and have enough woven by Saturday so that it will show well.