Satins and Sateens (Part I)

Marcy Petrini

May, 2017 

In the current issue of Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot (Issue 190 Summer 2017), Penny Morgan in her President’s letter showed a beautiful fabric and briefly mentioned satin and sateen. 

The question came up: how do you weave a satin? And how do you weave a sateen?

A satin is an unbalanced weave: one side is weft-dominant, sometimes referred to as the “sateen” side (left fabric below), the other side is warp-dominant, referred to as the “satin” side (right side below). Of course, once off the loom, this distinction doesn’t matter; by looking at the fabric below, there is no way of telling which side was up on the loom. But generally, for ease of treadling, we often lift the fewer shafts possible, thus weaving the sateen side up.

From the fabric, we can see that the floats are not organized; they are interrupted or stitched down intermittently by a single warp thread; we start with a straight draw and stitch it by a step. There are a rules on how to obtain possible steps. 

We need at least 5 shafts to weave a satin, for reasons that become clear when we look at the rules for the steps. And not all straight draws above 5 can be woven as satins; 6, for example, can’t. Here is why:

 Here is how we apply the steps, using as an example the 5-shaft satin and the two possible steps:

It doesn’t matter which step we use, the fabrics are very similar, as shown in the following drawdown, black warp is a step of 2, blue warp a step of 3; the first half of the treadling produces the sateen side, the second half the satin side.

Click here for the full-sized draft draft for this 5 shaft satin (a PDF will open in a new window).

Are steps for 7 and 8 shaft satins possible? Yes! Do you see why? And do you see why we cannot have a 4-shaft satin? It is also possible to thread a straight draw and apply the step to the treadling. How does that fabric differ?

Next blog will address the answers to these questions and more.

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Trying Something New

Marcy Petrini

March, 2017 

Do you remember the awkward feeling when you started to weave? Having to look up how to do the next step, not been able to figure out why something didn’t look right, or thinking, as one of my student once told me, “I don’t even know what I don’t know.” But there was also the satisfaction of having accomplished something pretty special. “It’s magic”, I tell my students, “we have a bunch of threads and we turn them into cloth.”

The feeling of satisfaction has stayed with me, but I must admit that my awkwardness with weaving has gone, and that’s true for many people who weave regularly once they have woven for a while. “How hard can it be?” seems to be the replacement feeling. And that may be fueled by the general public. When we demonstrate spinning – and we just had our sheep to shawl demonstration earlier this month – people come up to us, see us seamlessly draft our fiber which turns into thread and is wrapped into the bobbin, and ask: “so, all you do is just hold that fiber in your hand, right?” (Here I am spinning while my friend Guild President Gio Chinchar is knitting).

But in teaching, especially beginning weaving, I found that it’s not good not to remember that awkward feeling. I don’t want to think “How hard can it be?” I want to remember what it was like starting out with cones of yarn, a loom, various tools – and a wonderfully patient teacher.

A while back, I realized that I could recapture that awkward feeling by starting something new. I stumbled on the thought when I decided to take a white oak basket weaving class. How hard can it be? I thought, I already know how to weave. Wrong! White oak weavers, as they call them, don’t bend like yarn! I still love baskets, but instead of making them, I support my fellow basket weavers. But the idea was born: every couple of years, I should learn something new – or, rather, I should say, I would attempt to learn something new, just to have that awkward feeling. Most of the activities stop at a class, like the basketry, others lingered a bit longer, like crocheting, until I decided that I would rather knit after all. The topics are not always fiber related, since at work one of my tasks was teaching, so I had the same issue. Sometimes the topics are self-taught, as in the early 1980s when I learned a new-to-me computer language called Pascal for work, and then I used it to write a computer program to do a drawdown.

And then there are the few new skills that stick. In the mid-80s, one of our members was going to teach a spinning class for our Chimneyville Weavers Guild – was I interested? This was going to be a big commitment since she had no extra wheels, so each participant would have to buy one. My husband convinced me that a wheel could be sold if I decided I didn’t like spinning, and anyway I may need it to ply yarns for my weaving. First we tried spindling, not my favorite; then she taught us to card; I saw it as a necessary step to the final goal. But once I started spinning on a wheel, I was hooked. I wasn’t the only one; our guild was eventually renamed the Chimneyville Weavers and Spinners Guild (CWSG).

Now it happened again – this time with kumihimo braids. In January, CWSG member (and HGA 1st Vice President) Kathy Perito presented a mini workshop on braiding. I decided I should participate, although I had seen people at Convergence and Kathy braid, and it seemed impenetrable. How do you know where to move all of those strands of yarn? But soon I found that the step-by-step rhythmic movement of the strands is mesmerizing and addictive.

I prefer a disk, as I love to sit at the end of the day braiding curled up on the coach with a glass of bubbly and a cat. I am slow, and I have only made eight-strand round braids so far – 6 of them – but every time I do one, I learn a little bit more. And isn’t this how we become proficient at our crafts? Here are a few of my braids: 

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The Finished Plaited Twill Shawl

Marcy Petrini

April, 2017 

In the September 2016 blog I posted the draft of a 40-shaft plaited twill which I had hoped to weave. Eventually I did. I finished it a few weeks back and now Terry has taken some pictures. I really like the shawl. 

For warp I used sea silk, 70% silk, 30% seacell (437 yards = 3.5 oz.), color Sangria, space-dyed reds, with stripes of the color Violetta, solid red. I set it a bit openly, 12 epi so that the larger weft, 2/5 Gemstone silk (260 yards = 3.5 oz.) in color Rose Gold allows the pattern to show well. 

Here is a photo of the shawl. You can see that the plaiting, sometimes called braiding, is asymmetrical and I like that.

a close up: 

Then I wondered whether I really needed such a difference in the grist of the warp and weft for the pattern to show. So, I decided to weave it with a smaller weft.

I didn’t have enough of the sea silk for another shawl, but I had enough of the Violetta for a scarf. This time I set it at 18 epi and used 8/2 silk in gold from my stash (416 yards = 3.5 oz.). That warp is still on the loom, and the pattern does show… stay tuned, a comparison is coming up.

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Birds of a Feather Exhibit

Marcy Petrini

February, 2017 

At the December meeting of the Chimneyville Weavers and Spinners Guild, the inspiration for our 2017 show was announced: “Birds of a Feather”. Our Guild member (and Craftsmen’s Guild of Mississippi president) Sharon Williams will mount the exhibit on March 1, so I didn’t have much time to plan and execute a project.

Luckily, birds are very colorful, so it’s not hard to match bird to yarn – or finished product to a bird!

A triangular shawl that I knitted with handspun late last year is going to the show; I had taken all yarns of silk and wools, other animal fibers and bamboo that I had been spinning and knitted them together. I was unsure how large of a piece the yarn I had would make. I could have knitted a sample and made the appropriate measurements, but I chose to improvise. I knew I had enough to make a shawl, I just didn’t know how big. In such cases, I make a triangular shawl, starting at the bottom and knitting up until I run out of yarn.

The needle size should be approximately 3 times the grist of the yarn. To figure it out, then, I take 3 strands of yarn and using a knitting needle gauge, I find the hole into which the 3 strands fit comfortably, not too tight, but not too lose. In the example below, using a commercial yarn, three strands fit into the size 10 needle hole. This is a good place to start.

For this project, there were yarns that were thicker than others. I decided to alternate two rows of the thicker and two rows of the thinner yarns; as I ran out of one yarn, I substituted a similar one. That way the transition in yarn color is pretty gradual. For yarns that were thinner yet, I used two strands together.

To knit, I start with one loop, then I knit in the front and back (Kf&b) of the loop so I have two stitches. For the third row, I knit 1, and Kf&b in the 2nd stitch. Now there are three stitches. From that point on, I knit 1, Kf&b, then knit to the end. Thus I increase one stitch at the beginning of every row to make the triangle.

The combination of the colors in each yarn, the colors of the alternating yarns, the colors of the yarns as they are substituted makes for a very bird-like appearance, I think. 

The colors in birds’ feathers are not all pigments, but are structural coloration; that is, there is interference of the wave lengths of light as they bounce off the microscopic structures of the feathers. Did you ever see a rainbow on the surface of an oil patch after a rain? Then you have seen wave interference. You know those colors weren’t in the oil.

Since I knit until I run out of yarn, I have to make sure that I have enough to cast off. Toward the end, I measure a length of yarn that is 4 to 5 times the width of the piece and mark it, and then I make sure that I don’t knit past the marker. That rule of thumb works well for large size needles – I was using 11; for smaller needles, 3 to 4 times the width is sufficient.

Here is the shawl. It will be exhibited at the George Berry Gallery at the Mississippi Craft Center. Does it remind you of a bird?

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