Monthly Archives: June 2019

Double Weave Pick-up

I have been playing around lately with double weave-pick up. I taught a class in West Virginia on double-weave and had enough of my sampler warp left to practice the technique. It’s pretty time consuming and you have to really pay attention, much more so than when weaving scarves. I found the meditative quality pleasant.
In double weave the loom is set up so that two layers of cloth are woven simultaneously, one above the other. If you want, you can form an image by hand-manipulating how the two layers of cloth interact. This is called double weave pick-up. When you weave double weave pick-up, you use a stick to pick up some threads from the bottom layer and weave them into the top layer, then pick up other threads to weave top layer threads into the bottom layer. Below you can see part of my process and a couple of finished pieces.
I used 10/2 cotton threaded at 32 ends per inch (16 ends per inch in each layer). The colors were deep purple and red-orange. When the colors are next to each other they read as orange and blue. As a side note, I wove some of these pieces while UVA was winning the NCAA basketball championship. Their colors are orange and blue–go ‘Hoo’s!

Here I have picked up the purple threads to keep them on top.

Picking the purple threads

I have raised the half of the orange threads and the selected purple threads stay up while I weave with orange.

Weaving orange while selected purple threads are raised

Here I have picked up the orange threads.

Picking up the orange threads

Here I have raised half of the purple threads. The selected orange threads stay above while I weave with purple thread.

Selected orange threads stay above while half of the purple threads are raised.

This is how I keep track of where I am.

Keeping track

This is the finished piece.

The finished piece (8″ X 8″)

Here's one of the finished pieces.

Another finished piece (8″ X 8″)

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