Chambray (otherwise known as an end-on-end) originated in Cambrai, Northern France, where the fabric was first designed and used to create sunbonnets. The warp thread is of one color and the weft thread (running selvage to selvage) is always white. From a distance this gives the impression of a solid color, but up close a more intricate pattern is revealed.

Poplin is a plain weave and is a durable fabric. It has a ribbed appearance, which is formed by using coarser weft yarns (running selvage to selvage). Shirts made from this material are easy to iron and do not wrinkle easily.

Poplin has a more pronounced rib than broadcloth

Originally, the first poplin was made from silk at Avignon, France in the 1400’s. Its name comes from papeline, which refers to the papal residence at Avignon.

Broadcloth resembles poplin, except for its more subtle ribbed appearance. It originated from medieval England and at that time was only made from wool.

I often point out that clothing, in many ways, is a numbers game. Before a shirt, trouser or suit is even made the numbers have already begun to influence the quality of the garment. That is to say, poorly constructed menswear can still be made from excellent fabric but elegantly produced clothing can never be made from inferior fabric.

In deciphering the quality of a cotton shirt fabric take note of its thread count, which refers to the number of threads within one square inch. A high count indicates durability, fineness and luxury whereas a low count obviously implies the opposite. For our bespoke program and ready-to-wear lines, Antonio Valente hand picks fabrics from Italian boutique mills that have a minimum thread  count of 2 by 2 ply 100’s and as high as 2 by 2 ply 200’s.

When a fabric is woven, the length is called the weft and the width is the warp. A thread count per square inch of 1 by 1 ply 120’s, for example,  has 120 threads along the weft and 120 strands running across the warp for a total of 240 threads. However, a fabric’s count and quality may significantly increase if the ply is doubled. Consequently, a 2 by 2 ply 120’s, which has two threads twisted together within each strand, will have 240 threads along the weft and 240 across the warp for a total of 480 threads per square inch. By augmenting the number of threads per square inch, a fabric becomes stronger and more durable. Also, the threads that are used to weave a 2 by 2 ply fabric must be finer so a shirt will feel softer and more luxurious. Lastly, the amount of thread woven into a 2 by 2 ply fabric is drastically greater, meaning less space in between the strands, which creates a smoother surface and notably decreases the risk of shrinkage. As the thread count increases, these attributes become more and more prevalent. On the other end of the quality spectrum, low end shirts may have a count as low as 1 by 1 ply 50’s! In some cases, thread counts may be vaguely labeled to imply a higher quality than is actually the case, for example, if an 80’s fabric has a 2 ply warp but a 1 ply weft, it may be described as a 2 ply 80’s. Moreover, vague terms, such as Sea Island Cotton or Egyptian Cotton, may be used to mislead or avoid naming a fabric’s specifications. If uncertain about the true quality of a shirt then also inspect how it is made. A poorly manufactured garment will always show its true colours.

Unlike a dress shirt, deciphering the thread count of a trouser, sport jacket or suit is a little more complicated. To start, the best wool yarns are found in Australia and New Zealand, specifically Merino Wool, while the best fabrics are from Italy. A fabric’s quality is based on the fibre’s diameter, which is measured by microns, and then translated into Super numbers to indicate the wool’s fineness, for example, a Super 160’s wool is equivalent to 15.75 microns, which is considered excellent. In fact, any fibre with a diameter lower than 19.5 microns or a count of Super 90’s and higher is categorized, to varying degrees, as “Fine” quality wool. Antonio visits only the best mills in Italy to hand-pick woolens for his ready-to-wear collections and bespoke program with a minimum count of Super 100’s high twist Merino Wool (18.75 microns) and goes as high as Super 160’s 4 harness Merino Wool.

A wool’s thread count becomes more intricate when different types of weaves are introduced. A Super 100’s, for instance, may be woven 4 different ways, all of which will have varying degrees of quality. For example, a basic wool will not perform as well as a high twist and a high twist will not equal a 3 or even 4 harness fabric. With a high twist, the yarns are first twisted then woven, which infuses them with a tendency to spring back to their original form. As a result, a high twist trouser performs extremely well. However, drape and durability are most impressive if a trouser is sewn from a 4 harness fabric, which has the most yarns per square inch since they are woven in four directions, length, width and on both diagonals.

When shopping for fine menswear, thread count isn’t the only indicator of quality but it is a great starting point. A well-made garment should begin with excellent fabrics but also include innovative procedures, quality materials and inspiring designs. For other relevant shirt and trouser quality indicators, click on our look book link and flip to the last few pages.

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I picked this large empty brown sewing box up for $5 at the Weaver’s Guild meeting yesterday.♥ I knew what it was straight away as I have a little pink one I aquired last year from a charity shop for about the same money but it was full with threads and accessories.
Lexie (5) & I got to sorting out some of my sewing ’stuff’ and this is what the boxes look like from the inside now.
A fact about me: My favorite word is haberdashery

I’m taking my coffee through an IV right now, early morning classes are hard. My teacher is an adorable little old lady, teaching us about the Warp and Weft of fabrics. It’s an introduction to textiles… so far it’s been interesting. 

When I lived in Massachusetts years ago, I had a good friend from Tennessee who used to give me gifts of  irises.  I learned that they were the state’s official  flower.   And for some reason I’ve always remembered that.  Now that I am a resident of Memphis tucked away in the far southwest corner of the state and bordered by the Mississippi River, I’ve come to truly appreciate irises. Especially in early August.  I never realized how many varieties and colors there were.

Map of Tennessee

Because of their rich colors and textures, irises have for a long time been a beloved subject for artists.  Though these irises aren’t from Tennessee, they were painted by an artist who shares my Dutch ancestral heritage.

Irises painted by Vincent van Gogh

And so this painting became my inspiration to create a rep weave wall hanging  based on the colors and design of van Gogh’s irises.  My weaving is not completed yet, but here’s a glimpse while it still sits on my loom.

Irises in Rep Weave on Loom

Instead of a field of irises, I designed three large blooms in three different shades of purple.   When completed, this wall hanging will measure approximately 30″ wide and 50″ long.  I wanted to capture a “prairie style” block design with a visual imagery of long columns and squared off blocks – a suitable pattern to rep weave structure. My warp is 5/2 perle cotton doubled and threaded at 24 ends per inch. I find that the doubled cotton strands cover the weft nicely when sett at this epi.  My weft requires two shuttles as the weft rows alternate thick and thin yarn, as is customary in rep weave.  The thick weft is comprised of two strands of 100% cotton, Peaches and Creme by Elmore-Pisgah. The doubled peaches and cream strands are wound around the ski shuttle.  The color is olive which is primarily seen at the selvages.  The thin weft yarn is a 16/2 cotton in turquoise that I just found in my stash. This is wound on the bobbin in the boat shuttle.  And so each shuttle is thrown alternately in successive rows to create the design in the pattern.

This piece is almost finished, and once the ends are hemmed and sewn , then I will post a photo of it here. But as with all my other work, during the weaving process I am always thinking of my next project.  And I so fell in love with van Gogh’s painting that I think that I’ll stick with the theme of irises.  But I may try to design narrower columns and smaller blocks  of color so that the finished piece will  more resemble an entire field of irises instead of just three individual beauties.

]]> http://yarnnorway.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/vinter-weft/ Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:38:30 +0000 orgudunyasi http://yarnnorway.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/vinter-weft/

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playing with weft colours

Just trying to make a bit more progress before I go on vacation. This morning I experimented with sewing thread to figure out what colour to dye the 12/2 silk I bought for the weft of my new weaving project. I think I’ve settled on the light green (on the left side) – I think it will look nice and shimmery and maybe even have a bit of an embroidery effect, depending on the pattern I choose.

Despite my best efforts, I didn’t get the featherweight cardi done in time for my travels. But that’s ok, because what else is there to do on a roadtrip? I stubbornly refuse to believe C.’s claim that my retinas will fall out from knitting in a moving car.

half featherweight

And finally-

Is that?…Yes. It’s my engagement ring.

Handmade silver and gold by the talented Elizabeth Scott.

See you soon!

Related Post:  It’s You or the Yarn

I need your help . . . something has come up in tapestry class and it has really got me thinking.

I believe I have the smallest but most beautiful tapestry sampler in the class

The Tapestry Basics

Overall, the concept of making tapestry is much easier than I anticipated.

The Warp
There are threads that go one direction which are very tight and rigid – that’s called the warp.  It never changes once you set it and it is the hidden foundation of everything that you do in tapestry weaving.

The Weft
All the rest of the threads (the weft) are laid into the rigid warp – loosely – in the exact opposite direction – using the over-and-under cross-hatch technique that you would to make the lattice for the top of a cherry pie.

The weft is what the weaver gets to have fun with (or struggle with, depending) – what creates the artistic value of the piece – all the little decisions about what threads to place where in the warp to make the picture.

The Pack
As the tapestry weaver lays in the weft into the warp, the weaving gets beaten down into itself, packed into the cross-threads so to speak.  The more tension in the warp threads – the better the threads can get packed down to create a solid piece of weaving.

I simply love the humor in this "ancient" tapestry piece

Everything’s Pretty Simple Until . . .

It’s all pretty simple until I hear her say . . .

“The amount of tension in your warp is critical – if you don’t have tension in the warp – weaving cannot occur – you won’t be able to “pack” anything into your tapestry – essentially – nothing will be happening.”

She said this a few weeks back but I’ve been mulling it over ever since. Because its quite possible that this is a new way for me to view the stresses in my life.

For instance, without hour markers during the day, there would be less impetus to get things done.

But with hour markers as these vertical lines tracing their course through our day, we tend to pack more in . . . run a little faster in our hamster wheels, race from our morning workouts to our daily work, to our seminars, to our errands and home to our loved ones.

Without rigid deadlines barking at us, we would not march up the loom of progress towards our goals.   Instead we would lounge around and, likely, nothing much would be happening.

Perhaps Tension is Beautiful

If the hidden warp is what gives a tapestry the strength and backbone to take shape beneath a weaver’s fingers, perhaps hour markers, and deadlines, and rigidity and stress in our own lives is what ensures that our lives are beautiful . . . if only we could stand back to take a look at our weaving.

What Do You Think?

I am still toying with the idea and a second, separate yet connected idea which will come in post #2, but I wanted to let you in on what’s been going on in my head because I am starting to have an appreciation for deadlines and ticking clocks and demands of “I need this now” that fly across my desk at random times during the day.

What about you?  Could rigidity and tension in our lives be beautiful?

Photo Credit:
(Last FM Tapestry Piece: andronicusmax)

I recently made my third scarf on my 20inch Knitter’s Loom. While I thought I’d be eager to branch out from just plain weave (and worried that the rigid heddle would therefore bore me quickly), I actually find that there is something incredibly soothing about the plain weave, and it’s been a lot of fun to learn to play with color more so than texture.

I took a plethora of blue stash yarns, all cottons (except for one superwash wool and one bamboo). The bamboo was varigated blue and green and the superwash was blue and white. I warped up the stash yarns fairly randomly, then used doubled metallic silver crochet cotton as the weft (I also snuck in some of the crochet cotton in the warp). I used the 7.5dpi reed, as most of the yarns were between sport and light bulky.

I am very pleased with the results! I did have much more trouble than usual with the shed. My guess is that this is due to the fact I didn’t tie off the warp every time , I just skipped a few. I think that played a bit of havoc with my tension.

The weft is the yarn that is drawn under and over the warp yarn to create a fabric

This tapestry was woven as a learning tool.  I used a  section of the month of May from the Norwegian Baldishol Tapestry as my motif. This tapestry is believed to originate from the end of the 12th century .  I love the imagery in ancient tapestries and the story of this tapestry is fascinating.  This piece is woven on a 3/10 Linen Warp using Harrisville wool as the weft.  The colours of the Harrisville yarn were close with a slightly tweedy colour which I felt added a softness to the finished weaving.

http://www.aldus.dk/baldishol/default-eng.html

To start, here are my finished skeins that I forgot to photograph yesterday:

I had intended on having two different shades of the dark blue (a Procion MX Navy Dye) but because I was mostly estimating when it came to the conversions, there wasn’t a big difference in the color. There is a slight difference visible in the finished weaving, but it’s hard to tell in this photograph. The skeins were bound with strips of plastic bags to resist the dye when I put them into the dye baths, so when I unwound them and wove them into the warp, it procued an Ikat effect. I didn’t dye the skeins in any base color before doing my Ikat dying, so the undyed part of the weft is a natural shade.

Today, I spent a good amount of time unbinding the skeins, transfering them from an umbrella swift to a ball winder, and from balls to spools. Taking into account the time I spent weaving yesterday, it only took me about four hours of actual weaving to complete the project.

This is near the beginning of the piece. The bright white that you see is lace that I cut up from an old curtain I found at the thrift store; I thought it would be an interesting addition to the Sweedish Lace pattern.

Toward the end, I did have one warp thread break, but it was an easy fix and I’ve already sewn the extra thread back into the fabric. Not only that but I cut it from the loom, serged the edges, and it’s now hanging on the back of my bedroom door. Pictures of the final project in full when I get my hands on a better camera situation.

So I went into major crack down mode this weekend. Over Fall Break, the most I was able to do was get my warp combed out and ready for threading with the help of my darling roommate, Jacqueline. It took us a few hours, but by the end of it my warp was nice and straightened out. The bamboo is so heavenly soft; I couldn’t resist running my fingers through it several times.

I felt like I spent a million hours down at the Station Building this weekend sitting at my loom and not weaving. About four or five hours on Saturday getting the threads (500 ends) through the heddles, which was a lot longer than I expected. It was exhausting, so I decided to come back the next day to thread them through the dent reed, which took considerably less time, but still around two or three hours. I photographed the process in various stages below.

This is about three quarters of the way through, all through the heddles and halfway through the dent reed. Luckily my draft was pretty simple and I was able to keep up with it, only losing my place once and it wasn’t hard to find where I was again. I found threading the loom from back to front to be a lot easier than front to back (at least, once I remembered I could lower the breast beam and sit closer to the heddles- I don’t know how many times I banged my elbow!). I feel like the margin of error is a lot smaller, and it’s a lot more difficult to get threads crossed or to miss heddles.

Alas, I am all finished with threading! The feeling of relief that washed over me was so incredible. I did have two warp threads break on me, but it was as I was pulling them through the heddles- I guess a few ends had gotten frayed at some point in the process. Luckily they broke as I was pulling on them, so I easily removed them from the lineup and continued my pattern as normal. The end result is 498 ends then, thanks to the two fallen threads.

Here I have sectioned off the warp and tied it to the apron, adjusting the tension of each section until the tension is good and even. When I got to this point, all I wanted to do was weave, but I was so exhausted by that point (and I had to get dinner and get myself ready for the Great Halloween Lantern Parade!) that I didn’t even want to set up the the treadles, even though it’s a really simple sequence (see related post: Weave Draft). I left that, as well as filling in the front, for class on Monday.

Monday night I set out to make my skeins, all twenty five of them, sixteen of which I accomplished in class using the dowel method (which I learned in class):

• Set up two dowels apart from eachother, clamped down on a table, at a distance that equals the width of your warp. I had intended for my warp to be 25 inches across, but I guess somewhere along the line I lost two inches, so I’m down to 23.
• Wrap your yarn around the dowels as many times as you need to fill however many inches you want to cover on your warp. You can find out the ends per inch of your weft by weaving in an inch of plain weave and counting the lines.
• Tie off appropriate chokes and label with sharpie on masking tape attached to one of the ends, as necessary.

I didn’t want to stay in Station all night, however, so I took the rest of my yarn home intending to set up chairs the same way the dowels were set up, and as it turns out the diagonal distance between the legs of my kitchen chairs was the perfect distance for my skeins, so I flipped one over and made the rest of my skeins by wrapping my yarn around the chair legs.

I still had to bind them for the resist dying, so I stretched each skein back out by looping them around my feet, and, looking at my photographs, bound them with cut up plastic bags according to where objects were placed on the chair.

Lots of inventive negotiating with process.

All my skeins have been made, dyed, and dried. I forgot to take my camera with me when I went to work this morning, so I’ll post pictures of the dyed skeins (which came out great!) and the amount of weaving I’ve done to date (so far seven skeins). The Sweedish Lace Draft is really perfect for the ambiance I’m trying to capture with this project, and I’m really happy with how it’s turning out.

Jean very kindly spun my fibres again this year for me. Thanks Jean! The fibres I got to create with are Merino/Mohair and silk.

I wove a basic birds pattern with the silk as the warp on an 8s table loom. I get nervous weaving hand-spun yarn (had a bad experience last year, stuff nightmares are made of) I used crochet a lot on the finished piece. I crocheted up along both selvages to create a berry lace look for the edge of the scarf and garnished it with 2 crocheted flowers which I attached to the bottom left on both sides. I hope the new owner will be happy with it.

Would you be happy to get this in the mail?