2012 Year in Review

It's always fun to take this day to look back on the weaving from this year!

January

 

February

March

April

May

June

 

 July

August

September

October

November

 

December

 

 

 

Whew!!  What a year!!

Happy New Year 2013!

Can't wait to see what my loom inspires me to do this year!

Crackle treadled as Summer and Winter

When I first tried the regular summer and winter weave structure, I loved it!  I loved it so much, I wrote a tutorial about it on the weavingtoday.com website in spring 2011!  You can view it here.

When I first saw in the texts the crackle treadled as summer and winter, I wasn't too impressed.  I was actually trying to avoid doing summer and winter with crackle, but this sample warp is so very long and I ran out of everything else I wanted to do with it already!  I mean, as a whole, this summer and winter in crackle sample still doesn't move me much:

I think it's those half filled in squares... I mean, what are they supposed to be?  They look clumsy, sloppy, and half-done in-between the full ones and empty ones.

But when you get really close...

I mean REALLY CLOSE, and look at the color interactions, it's a really great weave! 

I think I like crackle treadled as summer and winter more now than I did 15 minutes ago!

Maybe it will wash up nicely, too!

Here are some more summer and winter experiments!

12/2 treadled the same as above (1a 2b 2a 1b)

PS.  Some of these look curved, like a smile, because I have my floating threads under tension still and it's pulling it off balance!

12/2 treadled as 1a2b

8/2 weft treadled as 1a2b

This last crackle experiment is my most favorite sample of all the summer and winter samples!  I really like how balanced it feels, like there is a light square, med square, and dark square and it's balanced in each square.  I also like how it looks.  Oddly, this one also looks the most like one of the more traditional crackle weaves!

Traditional crackle? Overshot crackle?

I have been using two different crackle books as my reference through this crackle experiment.  They are both good books, but I don't like either of them whole-heartily.  Also, I don't necessarily recommend one over the other.  They are both equally confusing AND sometimes useful references!  One is written more like a combination of book reports (which is driving me crazy) and neither of them are written to just follow through from start to finish.  They are just written assuming you already have an understanding of the subject... and sometimes they contradict each other.

For example, take the explanation of "traditional".  One of the books claims that the first samples I produced were the traditional kind of crackle, while the other book calls it "Crackle in Italian-Manner".  I would like to claim that it doesn't really matter what it's called, but it bothers me to find these idiosyncrasies.  And then the sample I just finished might or might not have two names also!

Well, despite my irritations with the literature I have, here are some more examples.  These may or may not be the traditional way of treadling crackle!  One book calls this method traditional, another book calls it crackle woven as overshot.  So, whatever it's called, I did shafts 1-2 rotated with tabby wefts a & b for the first section, then shafts 2-3 rotated with tabby wefts a & b for the second section, etc.  

These have 8/4 pattern wefts mixed with 12/2 tabby wefts:

These samples only used 12/2:

(They aren't very square because I was running out of yarn and was too lazy to get up and put some more on the shuttle!  I figured, what's the point?  I get it, even like this!)

These samples are really making me wonder what I could do with some of my profile drafts that I have.  Would it look best with a profile draft that only has 2 squares?  Or would a 4, 6, or 8 profile draft be cool looking?  There are so many things that I want to try!

I think I am having a lot of fun this time around just trying out different ideas in my head that I have gathered from these books.  However, I feel that we, as weavers, are in real need of some simpler texts on crackle weave... maybe a book that says, "Thread your loom like this, weave like this, this, and this.  You should be noticing the following characteristics.  Now try this, this, and this."  If I were to write a book, I would take a much different approach than these texts.  I would start from the very, very beginning and work my way up, in an organized manner, with great pictures and great explanations.  Hmm... something to crunch on.