Christine Purse, Victoria Handweavers’ and Spinners’ Guild, Victoria, BC
Winner: Best with Linen, sponsored by Glimakra
Name/Description: Winter Night – Noh coat variation
Made For?: Woman
Size: NA
Fabric Construction: Woven
Fabric Construction – Other:
Woven Structure: Plain weave with huck lace sections and Theo Moorman inlay on back. Woven on 10 harnesses with additional pick-up for the inlay (I ran out of treadles). Woven on an AVL Mechanical Dobby 36″.
Yarn Details and SETT: 10/2 natural cottolin for both warp and weft sett at 18 epi/ppi. The inlay is a 12/3, 50/50 silk and merino blend. The tie-down threads are cotton thread.
Handspun Details:
Stitches:
Special Treatments: The cottolin warp yarn was hand-dyed with Procion MX in turquoise and cobalt blue. The cottolin weft yarn was hand-dyed with Procion MX in turquoise, medium blue and cobalt blue.
Textile Finishing: The yardage was machine washed and hung to dry.
Textile Challenges: It has been a long time since I had dyed cellulose fibre so it took a few tries to get the shades I wanted. I wanted a smooth gradation from a turquoise to cobalt blue, in both the warp and weft. Unfortunately, I couldn’t work out how to dye the weft so I settled for three colours of weft and a counted interchange of colours. Dip dyeing a cottolin warp was a recipe for major tangles–next time I will paint the warp under a light tension.
Garment Construction: The garment was inspired by the Noh Coat challenge from the 2023 ANWG conference, but I wanted a collar on the coat. The pattern is unchanged except for the addition of the collar. Because my loom is 36″ wide, I wove the fabric in two panels, a left front/back panel and a right front/back panel. One panel also included yardage for the collar and the other panel included yardage for the bias tape. The two panels were woven separately, not as continuous yardage, so I could change the location of the huck lace.I chose to weave my own bias tape to finish the edges. The original coat used leather and I felt my bias tape would give the edges of coat a similar structure to leather. I included a square of the right size to make enough bias tape and wove it as part of the fabric. I then sewed the square into a tube and cut the stripes on the bias to make a continuous bias strip.
Lining: The seams are finished with commercial bias tape and the pockets are lined with commercial fabric from my scrap bin.
Special Features: The inlay is drawn from my interest in astronomy and particularly the moon. I completed the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s (RASC) Explore the Moon observing program which involved identification and sketching of many of the craters, seas, and mountain ranges on the moon. I wanted to explore to phases of the moon set against the colours of a winter sky in the evening.
Pattern: Noh Coat by Bonnie Cashin from the Threads magazine as circulated by the ANWG 2023 Noh Coat Challenge committee.
Garment Challenges: I discovered that one colour section on the back of the coat was several inches longer than the others. This meant the colour changes would not line up. It was a disaster! After much thought, I cut out the extra material and sewed the section back together. I used a lot of steam and muscle to get the seam to lie really flat. I also pulled out and rewove with a needle the diamonds of huck lace affected by the shortening so that the lace pattern remained consistent.
