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Controlling Creative Chaos: Focus on the Warp 

Students learn non-traditional techniques for setting up and designing at the reed while working effectively and efficiently with multiple warps and diverse warp elements.

This is a jam packed class that is guaranteed to give new insight into what you are already weaving and what you might add to that in the future. Students will use instructor provided hand-painted warps in which the colors flow and change – creating designs in the woven fabric that appear complex in planning, but actually spring from making flexible and intuitive decisions as they are setup and woven. Students might choose to mix warps of different weights, textures and fiber content to create stripes within the space-dyed design. They will learn to cleanly split warp chains to use threads that their current project requires while saving extra warp threads for future projects. These workshop warps can be woven in a variety of weave structures: Plain weave, ribb, repp, turned taqueté, twills, double weave, etc with a single setup. Everyone’s class design will be unique so class members learn from their own projects as well as from the others. In this workshop we start the designing process by tying on to a dummy warp that students have threaded before class. Tying on is an essential step in our designing process. This workshop is not suitable for rigid heddle looms.

Instructor: Kathrin Weber
Duration: 3 day
Level: Intermediate
Categories: Weaving

Supplies that students will bring:

  • 4 to 8 Shaft loom warped with a 300 thread dummy warp (dummy into will be sent to students before the conference.)
  • Personal weaving tools: decent full-size scissors, tape measure, sley/threading hooks, two shuttles (boat for fine weft and stick/ski/rag for heavy weft).
  • Appropriate sticks or paper for winding 4.5-yard warp. Please make sure before class that you definitely have enough paper/sticks for a full 4.5-yard warp. An amazing number of students come without enough.
  • Calculator
  • 2 spring clamps big enough to clip onto your back beam
  • Roll of 1″ (no wider than 1″) yellow or green (preferred) painters tape. If those are unavailable blue painters masking tape will work.
  • Notebooks, pens for notes and handouts
  • Enough weft thread to begin project (weft info will be sent to students before the conference.)

Material Fee: $75 to $90
Materials Included: The material fee includes three 4.5 yard, 100 thread hand-dyed warp chains (a total of 300 threads) and class handouts