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!
Picking the purple threads
Weaving orange while selected purple threads are raised
Picking up the orange threads
Selected orange threads stay above while half of the purple threads are raised.
Keeping track
The finished piece (8″ X 8″)
Another finished piece (8″ X 8″)