Thursday, August 16, 2018

Handwoven Wedding Dress (May 3, 1992)

As a fearless beginning weaver, I designed & wove the fabric for my wedding dress.  My husband's Aunt Ingrid designed & sewed it.  My dress made the centerfold of Weaver's Magazine ("Lace Wedding Dress" Issue #21: pp31,33)  in 1993.

It all started in early 1990 when I realized I had always wanted to learn how to weave and had never been able to figure out where & how to start.  I did not even know what a harness or a heddle was, but it made sense that it would be easier to figure these things out (including how to weave) if I owned a loom.  My father was a big believer that one could avoid a lot of implementation problems by using the highest quality tools.  I bought a 4 harness modular 40" Folding Dobby Loom from AVL and followed the AVL weaving instructions precisely.  Within a couple of months I had upgraded my AVL to a 16 harness dobby.  Because it was a spectacular loom & I followed instructions carefully I never had any technical problems.  My tension was even & selvages smooth.  The books I bought from AVL (e.g., Handbook of Weaves by Eleanor Best) helped me learn how to draft.  I did, however, have a lot to learn.  My early weaving featured flimsy place mats & stiff napkins.  The color choices that worked so well in needlepoint & machine knitting rendered woven fabric that looked like a muddy mess (2 different hues with the same color value).

Monday, August 13, 2018

This is the draft for a towel that will be a September wedding gift.  The warp is 5/2 natural Mercerized Egyptian Combed Cotton from RM Yarns sett 20 EPI.  The weft will be blue 5/2 mercerized cotton from Webs at 20 PPI.