Designing stripes Two further ideas

Designing Stripes.

I love stripes and designing stripes for a particular purpose. (see my post for April 2015)

However, I also practice designing stripes using narrow warp faced bands.  They are very quick to weave and are a great way of deciding which colours go well together.

Designing band patterns.

The first decision is band use which gives me a range of appropriate yarns to use. The use will also indicate the desirable band width.

I have sets of bands woven with 60 warp ends each of which has three stripes.  I have sets of bands in silk, cotton, cottolin and linen as these are the usual threads that I use.  If I need a band of a particular width, I can look at my sample of bands in a particular thread to see approximately how many warp ends I need for a particular width.  The individual bands in three colour stripes make width measurement easy. Each colour is 20 warp ends.

Here is a sample of my page of cotton bands.

One of my reference pages in my own files of striped bands

Once I have the approximate number of warp ends and type of yarn to use I can think about designing a band pattern.

My book The Art of Simple Band Weaving is a compilation of many of the narrow warp faced bands that I have woven.  It is also my guide when designing. I look through the pictures of woven bands to see the effect that I want to produce.  The bands are divided into broad colour groups, so I can see what I have woven before and what colours produce particular effects.

I have discovered that I prefer symmetrical patterns so sometimes I deliberately design a non-symmetrical pattern.  Sometimes it is useful to break out from familiar and well tried ways! Weaving a short sample for a narrow band is not time consuming but can be a valuable way of trying out new colour combinations and pattern stripes.

Another source of ideas and inspiration is the internet. I have been pinning pictures onto my Pinterest board as it is very convenient to have a record of different materials with stripes. Do check out this resource as it is a very convenient way of grouping similar images together. The link is on my blog page.

Old weaving books can also have useful tips.  This chart came from a weaving book published in the 1920,s

Stripe pattern templates 

This is a graphic outline of common stripe sequences.

Last year. I organised a workshop about stripes for the Durham Guild. One exercise involved everyone choosing their favourite colours.  They coloured in the graphic chart to produce a number of different stripe ideas. Here are a few of their examples.

Yarns were chosen and made into a yarn wrap to see how the colours and proportions worked together. This was a warm up exercise to help them think about colours and spacings.

Designing with colour.

I love to practice designing stripes using narrow warp faced bands.  They are very quick to weave and are a great way of deciding which colours go well together for many different weaving projects.

In The Art of Band Weaving, I describe how I find new colour and pattern combinations. Here is an example of the method of playing with colour combinations.

Look at the picture of a peacock feather.

picture of a peacock feather

Take two pieces of card and place them over the picture.  Leave a narrow space between the two cards and you have a stripe of colours.

A stripe of the picture

From this stripe I designed this band.

I used 2/60 silk used double to make the band wider.

There are 46 warp ends for this band

My Swedish band loom is so quick and easy to use.  I wove this band for this blog.

The band being woven on my Swedish band loom.

Here is a close up of the band. The actual width is 1.5 cm.

A close up of the band.

Enjoy experimenting with yarns and stripes.

Happy weaving.

Susan J Foulkes  June 2016

Stripes

I love stripes and I enjoy designing new stripes.  After finishing my last blog I thought about the lovely book about Estonian skirt stripes  Virumaa Seelikud. Taking inspiration from the book I decided to design two stripes to share with you. For details of the book look at the previous blog entry in March or the  book list on the blog.

Here is a sample page so that you can see the high quality of this book.

Virumaa Seelikud  by Kersti Loite

Making yarn wraps.

Making a yarn wrap is a good way of looking at colour and proportion before you start weaving. Here is yarn wrap taken from the skirt material which dates from 1909. The yarn wrap is a guide.

Yarn wrap

If you look at the yarn wrap you can see 2 white yarns 4 pale pink 4 dark pink then 4 black.  In the centre there are 4 pale blue.

If you wanted to weave a narrow band so that this is what appears on the surface you need to double the warp ends for each colour. There are 90 warp ends.  I wove the band using 16/2 cotton and it is 2.4 cm in width.

band woven with 16/2 cotton

drawdown for weaving a narrow band

On page 89 there is a lovely stripe design for woven material for a skirt.  I looked at one element of the stripe pattern and made a yarn wrap using 16/2 cotton. For a narrower band you can alter the width of each strip.  Here I have halved the number for each stripe.  Using different yarn will also affect the width of the band.

Yarn wrap for narrow band

For this band I used 55 warp ends.  I used the number of yarns that can be seen on the surface of the yarn wrap.

Band woven with 16/2 cotton.

drawdown for narrow band

The woven bands

Do look at the page on Plain Weave Warp Faced Bands on my blog for another example.

Stripe Inspiration.

Here are two more books which I bought several years ago which are a good source of inspiration for stripes.

Stripe Design Textile Patterns in Japan
2005  ISBN 4-89444-422-4















The second book is small but contains 650 examples of patterns from Japan

Japanese Textiles II Stripes and Lattices
ISBN 4-86152-024-X

Tea Towels

I have just finished weaving a set of small tea towels for our motor home.
Warp: cottolin in four shades: pale grey dark grey burgundy and pale burgundy.
Weft: One towel -  burgundy; one towel - pale burgundy and the final towel is woven as drawn in.
Sett: 20 ends per inch

Woven on 8 shafts 

Weave structure: plain weave.  I used 8 shafts but plain weave can be woven using any even number of shafts.

Stripes can be turned into checks very easily but take longer to weave as more shuttles have to be used.

Three tea towels

Check pattern on loom

Susan J Foulkes  April 2015

Designing simple warp faced bands.

I love designing striped bands to use as hanging tags for towels.  Here are two designs for my latest tea towels. For these simple designs, the colour order of the warp ends determines the pattern. There are a number of pattern effects that can be used for warp faced bands like these.

To design a new stripe, I use the PCW weave program from Fiberworks. This enables me to see how the different colours of the warp threads will look when woven as a warp faced band. I keep records of all the bands that I design.  My book The Art of Simple Band Weaving, has over 150 patterns for narrow warp faced bands.  In the first part of the book, 15 simple pattern effects are illustrated and examples show how these patterns can be adapted.  These two red and white bands are based on the bead motif.

Woven with a red weft

The bands are woven in cottolin, the same thread used for the towels.  There are 33 warp ends for each band. They are warp faced so the weft has to be pulled tight to bring the warp ends together.

Woven with a white weft

There are two designs as the towels are woven with different wefts and may be either predominantly red or white. The single red and white warp spots are made with two warp ends together so that they stand out clearly. This is indicated on the top of the diagram by a thicker rectangle. I like this effect.

I wove the bands on my Swedish band loom. The warp was 63 inches in length which made a band of 43 inches.  There is always some loom waste at the beginning and end of the band.  There would be less loom waste if woven on an inkle loom.

 Here are the finished bands.

Band width: approx 0.5 inches (15 mm)

The red and white tea towels.

The two tea towels are woven in plain weave in cottolin, sett at 20 epi.  Two colours alternate for the warp.
Weave structure: Plain weave
Warp ends: 482
Reed: 10  with  2 ends per dent
Sett: 20 epi

all white weft

2 red then 2 white weft

Dimensions before washing.

Length after hemming:  27 inches (69 cm)                 width: 22.75 inches (58 cm)

Dimensions after washing.

Length after hemming:  25.5 inches (65 cm)              width: 21.25 inches (54 cm)


And here are the tea towels.

Red and white tea towels with contrasting tags.


Happy weaving!

Durham Weaver
June 2014