Sampling with Deflected Double Weave -- and Loving It!

Above is a 12-shaft Deflected Double Weave pattern using 10/2 pearl cotton in three colors in both warp and weft: blue, purple, and sage green. An unlikely combination, yes, but that's what I had in my stash -- and I tend to like unlikely combinations.

I've been weaving away on my 16-shaft Toika Eeva, which is a joy to work on because it's a compudobby and I can change the tieup and treadling with a click of a button for every sample I want to weave. This is all in preparation for a workshop for the Teleraña Fiber Arts Guild -- and boy did they do me a favor! I'm not just talking about inviting me. It's really about the request they made: I tend to use wool with Deflected Double Weave and the program chairs gently asked me not to do that. Fact is, they don't have much use for wool in Arizona, other than for rugs ;o)

So I had to wrap my head around designing Deflected Double Weave patterns that could be woven with cellulose fibers and silk, with a lot of pizazz in the design and the option to weave as collapse fabrics. I decided to substitute Colcolastic (a combination of cotton and Lycra that shrinks up immediately in water), woven ribbon (which compresses and moves about when used as weft), wool/stainless steel yarn (all right, it's wool, but just a teeny bit) and gold gimp, which crinkles up and draws fabric in, creating some interesting textures.

Here's the drawdown I used for the sample above.

As I went about sampling, I changed the tieup and the treadling as well as the weft yarns, because the name of the workshop is "Designing with Deflected Double Weave." It's all about experimenting and seeing what happens. Here are some of the samples I wove up.

This is one of my favorites, using this drawdown.

The photo shows you the back side of the draft, which I like better. The collapse effect comes from using a sage-green-colored Colcolastic yarn in the weft for the portion that has the green and black stripes. 

Here's another design sample:

The magenta horizontal stripes are four picks of hand-dyed rayon ribbon, which compresses vertically. Here's what the same sample looks like without the ribbon weft.

As you can see, the rayon ribbon makes a big difference, adding both color and texture. Here's the drawdown for that sample.

Note that the tieup is the same as for the first drawdown in this post. The only variation is the treadling and the use of just two colors in the weft (rather than 4).

So yes, Eeva and I had a lot of fun with these samples! We wove this, using another variation in the tieup and treadling:

And this, using wool/stainless steel yarn as one of the wefts...

And this, using gold gimp as one of the wefts. My theory for why this yarn collapses: because it has a polymer core wound up in a shiny material that includes metal (for the gold color), the polymer curls up a bit when you wash the sample in hot water, while the gold wrapping gets clunky and bends. That's my theory, anyway.

And just because I had so much fun with this pattern, I want to share with you some of the color variations I came up with as I created the original design in Fiberworks. No accompanying text, just lots of color! Remember that these are all the same draft -- demonstrating that Deflected Double Weave is a color-and-effect weave (meaning that the pattern you see is formed by the colors and is quite different from the weave structure itself). There is much fun to be had in choosing colors.

I'm thinking I would like to weave up yardage incorporating all of these colorways across the warp, as almost a color gamp. Which one is your favorite? 

Thanks for reading!