The sequinned chair

- a double weave with pockets including sequins


The chair itself is a sister to the one with text - all four sisters can be seen here.

So: the fabric was meant for upholstery, with pockets including glittering objects (in this case ordinary plastic sequins). Thus, the base cloth had to be "the same" in the pocket areas as in the plain areas - which made me do the pockets with a supplementary warp/weft.

I wanted to create a structure that showed the stitching of the supplementary threads as little as possible on the face of the cloth. To see the result better I chose to use different colours for the pocket warps/wefts. The sample and detail pictures shows that the construction worked fairly well.

When wet finishing the sample I learned that plastic sequins do not like a hot wash – they loose their sparkle. They also do not like a hot press – they get flat and sticky enough to adhere to the fabric.

The final cloth was wet finished at a lower temperature, and was mangled rather than pressed.

Note: I often use several colours when constructing a weave just to make it easier to see the structure(s).

Below is the draft, and a picture of the sample.

Six selvedges, but how many layers?

Some years ago I was a member of Complex weavers' double weave study group. The challenge was "3-D-construction".
So... my idea was to make a shawl: two layers, with the bottom layer forming "fins" coming up through the top layer. Like this:

I wanted to weave 2 picks per layer, which meant a contruction with 6 shuttle-passes in the bottom-and-fin layer per two picks in the upper layer. The sketch below illustrate the shuttle passes in the yellow layer. The dots mark where the shuttle exits the shed(s).

After much tinkering, I had a draft. NOTE: the colours are there only to make it easier to "read" the structure. In the draft below, the bottom layer (yellow in reality) ha a brown warp, the "fins" have a red warp, and the upper layer (orange in reality) is purple. I gave the six yellow shuttle passes three different colours. (Click on picture to get a larger version)

I used, I believe, cotton 16/2 at 10 ends per cm per layer, which means I had a total of 20 epcm where the layers were "just" double, and 30 epcm where the fins were.

It was time to weave - and IT WORKED!!
Below is the first yellow pass - from the right selvedge through the first fin:


Below is the tird yellow pass - the first fin is done, now the shuttle goes in the lower layer through the second fin:


The first orange pass - from right to left, just a straight layer:


Unfortunately I hadn't really paid attention to the reverse side of the construction. Construction-wise, it looks kind of okay - but it is boring... a boring flat yellow layer.
This is (so far!) the only shawl I have made that has a very obvious "wrong" side...