Fringes, anyone?

Yesterday I was demo-ing at my, maybe 13th, 14th? "culture day". I had no inspiration, so I brought a "fringe blank", and a page from the fringe book. (There were several "blanks" left over from the guild meeting...

This was the model:

After (too) long, and several mistakes, I decided to abandon that project:

(OK, I do know that one needs to practice to obtain any knowledge, but some knowledge feels more, um, unnecessary than others)

Next, a piece of "lattice" fringe:

Then I made some ordinary twisted fringe. From left to right: 2-ply (8 strands/ply, 100 twists), 2-ply (8 strands/ply, 50 twists), 3-ply (8 strands/ply, 100 twists), 3-ply (8 strands/ply, 50 twists) The untwisted length was about 40 cm, the sett was 8 doubled cotton 16/2 per cm, so each of the 2-ply fringes takes about 1 cm of warp.

The rightmost fringe is made from 3 2-ply strands (6 strands/ply) with macramé knots. Top portion has the knots alternating, bottom portion has knots from omly one side (which makes a spiral).

The background in the first pictures is a blanket that has figured as a "weave of the month" on the national guild site (June 2010, I think). It can also be found on Weavolution, here, with the text in English.

Two shawls from the profile draft challenge

Remember the Profile Draft Challenge?

This is the original profile

I wanted to make something narrower, for a shawl, runner…

This is the profile I used for weaving

What I did, to get from the original to the profile I used:
First I mirrored the profile.
Since I wanted something narrow, I took out the middle, until only the outer motifs were left.
Hmm.
Something was needed in the middle. I put in an "opposite" motif.

This would be the ends of my long and narrow weave.

I selected a short sequence to be repeated for the long "middle piece".

As it is summer at the moment, I wanted to weave something light and airy - say a summer shawl in all linen.

"Airy" - that meant some kind of lace weave. (I’m hopeless with the names/classifications of lace weaves)

I used my weaving software’s block substitution feature to create a threading - the threading named "Atwater-Bronson lace". (I use Fiberworks-PCW.)
Then I played with the tieup, and came up with two different ones that I would look both "same" and "different".
Details of the upper right-hand corner, tie-ups included:

Overviews of the whole start end:

I wound a warp long enough for two shawls - linen 16/1 in four nuances of light blue, sett at 12 ends/cm. I wove it at about 9 – 9,5 picks/cm, the theory being that "drape" in a scarf is more important crosswise than leghtwise.

For the first shawl I used a light blue linen yarn (still 16/1) for weft; for the second I choose a slightly darker blue cotton 16/2.

Lace patterns rarely show on loom (especially with no difference in colour)

Both shawls after cutting off, fringes secured prior to twisting:

The fringe twisting was difficult - linen has a mind of it’s own! First, fringes had to be twisted "backwards" (they look so much better if one uses "uptwist" - since the singles are spun z direction, the fringes should be twisted z, too). After having twisted a gazillion fringes in the s direction, there was a lot of muscle memory to overcome to do it the other way - . Next, linen is a lot stiffer than cotton, and therefore it was difficult to "place" the fringe knots consistently. (I really should re-tie all of them, but that will have to wait some time…)

After wet finishing (machine wash, normal cycle at 60 C, very short spin) I let them dry a bit, then mangled. After mangling I "polished" them with a hot iron.

The one with cotton weft, hanging on the loom:

The other one was hopeless to photograph, but here is a detail:

Linen, especially newly washed, mangled and pressed, is not famous for drape :-).
However, when it has been worn some, it becomes very soft and drapey (but then you can’t really see the pattern…)

Twist and ...

then, more twist.

One can go to any lenght in search for the perfect fringe.
I don’t.

What I do is cut (in this case both layers) the unwoven warp to the desired lenght, on a gridded cutting board with a rolling knife. Usually I cut the other end to the same length (but not always – the double-layer shawls with offset selvages and offset beginnings/endings don’t necessarily need to be symmetrically fringed, IMO).

After that, I knot all "half-fringes", Then I twist them two-and-two, and trust my fingers to make all end-knots "the same".

The reasons I knot "half-fringes" are two: I don’t like too skinny fringes, and I don’t like too big/wide knots. In this case the fringes contain 12 ends, and at 10 epcm that would be over one cm, which I think is too much.

Of course I take care to count the number of turns, adjusting for yarn grist (in this case the blue warp is finer than the brown, so the blue fringes need relatively more twisting), adjusting for different lengths. (A longer description of my way can be found on my website, here – for Swedish, click here.)

Does it work to use fingers for final length-adjustment?

As you can see, the answer is yes (and no – but I think it is "good enough".
(For those of you who think my practices are sloppy, I recommend Susan Harvey’s tutorial. Myself, I never twist "backwards", for reasons given here.)

Fringes done, it is time for wet finishing.
I forgot to change the spin-cycle, so I had some very wrinkled scarves to deal with. No pressing was gong to help... but I decided to try mangling before I put them back in the washing machine. A small smoothing with the iron, twice through the mangle and another good press with lots of steam took care of the wrinkles.

Here they are, on the rack for the final drying:

All the same, but all different...

Making more of the fringe twisters

Yesternight (is that a word?) I assembled the first five of a new batch of fringe twisters.
As usual, they have cutlery for handles and chessmen for the turning knobs.

The next five are now drying, being ready to assemble tomorrow:

Of the ten, three have rather un-romantic stainless steel spoons, two have slighly smaller "silver" spoons.

Then, there are the specials - two have old steel knives, and three have rather fancy fish knives:

The steel knives are perfectly safe (dull-edged to the point of having been completely useless to eat something with...), but the fish knives have a slight point. But when I found them, I could not resist to use them!

They are all for sale - SEK 180 plus postage.   (This means a total of 225 inside Sweden.) A good x-mas present for a weaving friend?
Contact me at kerstin (at) bergdalaspinnhus (dot) com - I take PayPal, and ship to everywhere!

How to use them? Here is a description in English, here is the same in Swedish.  (Will be included in the shipment)

Fringe twisters

In between the sewing - a new batch of gowns is under way - I needed to do something more "rustic".
This is the result: a bunch of fringe twisters with gold forks for handles. As they were so easily bent I suspect they are real gold ;-)



After lots of experimenting I started to make three-pronged fringe twisters about a year ago. They all have cutlery for handles, and chessmen for the turning knobs. Now I have fine-tuned the process, so I dare offer them for sale for a bigger public... Should you be interested, e-mail me.

More on fringe twisting

or: how to make a nice-looking twisted fringe. (IMHO, of course ;-)

To make a twisted fringe, you take two (or three, or...) bundles of cut warp ends, twist them separately until "done", knot them together and let them twist back on themselves.
As easy as that, surely?

Well.
The spinner in me recognizes that as a "shorthand" way of describing it.

There are a couple of things to consider. The first is: the warp yarn (that you are going to twist, to make the fringe) - what kind of yarn is that? Is it a singles, a plied or a cabled yarn?
Let us for a moment disregard the cabled variety. Thus, you have either a single or a plied yarn. What is the difference (apart from the number of plies)? Most probably, most single yarns you have has a z twist, while most plied yarns are spun z, plied s. (Note: most, but not all, mill-spun yarns are spun z.)



To make the most "nice"-looking fringe, one should take the bundle, twist it in the same direction as the last twisting operation, then proceed as above. This means that an ordinary 2-ply (spun z, plied s) should be twisted s, then let be gone back - thus making an z-twisted fringe.

What will happen if one does it the other way? Well - twistíng it z will make the plies separate; letting it go back will make a twisted fringe of sorts, but it will look a lot different...

Below is a picture of two very simple and slim fringes: two ends of a 3-ply (spun z, plied s) linen rug warp. To the left they were then twisted s (and let go), to the right twisted z, then let go.



Weaving books often describe how one can twist two fringes "for the price of one" - doing it between blankets, shawls etc. This makes perfect sense if the whole run is sent to commercial finishing. (- in Sweden, commercial finishing mills used to want at least 12 meters of blankets, to even consider doing it.)
But.
What will happen if you do this is that the two fringes will be going in the opposite directions. For a blanket, that will be fulled and brushed, this might not be a problem - but it can be worth considering... If one wants the fringes to "look the same" on both ends of the piece, fringes should be twisted differently: if the start of one piece is done by twisting z, the end of the piece should be done by
twisting s.

Below is a picture of (the one) blanket I have done using this method. I deliberately followed the book, and twisted both ends in the same way. After fulling the differences are not very pronounced, but can still be seen.



For a cabled yarn (generally speaking: 2 z-singles plied z, 2 of these plied s) one has to try to see how the result differs. Usually, I end up by twisting in the last direction (in the example above twisting s).

For other observations on fringe twisting read here.

Observations on fringe twisting

The spinner in me has always wondered about one thing often said about fringe twisting.
Very often you see recommendations like "when you have twisted the two strands, make a knot and twist it 'backwards' until done", or "the battery-operated [...] is good, because you can make it go backwards too". I thought that the fringes would ply themselves until, not "done", but until "balanced", no matter what one tried to persuade them to do.
Finally, I had something to test it on - the experimental shawl (below)...: twisted two strands for about 60 turns, made a knot and let them ply themselves back in the blue part ot the fringe, twisted two strands for about 60 turns, made a knot and "force-plied" them back for 60 turns in the green band.
The 60-turns-plied-back fringes immediately un-plied themselves a bit when let free, but still looked tighter. Were, in fact - unplying one there were about 40-45 turns left of the "force-ply".
So I wet finished the piece - and... after wet finishing, there is no difference at all. There are about 34 "turns" in the second ply in both fringes.