Barbara Schutzgruber – Storyteller & Weaver

No matter how much pre-planning I do
sometimes projects just have life of their own!

Back in February I put a warp onto the loom to weave yardage to make a garment for the Ann Arbor Fiberarts Guild‘s annual Fiber Feast: Fashion Show, Luncheon, and Sale.

My loom’s weaving width is only 24in/61cm so I would need to weave ‘double-width’ cloth. This involves weaving two layers of cloth at the same time that are connected/jointed along one side. I wanted the colors in the warp to shift across the fabric rather than stripes so advance planning was a must as I would need to know the proper color order for the top and bottom layers.

The woodland ferns which grow throughout the 10 acres at RiverBend, my property on the Tittabawassee River, were the inspiration for the warp colors. [see RiverBend posts Nov 2013,  Dec 2013 Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4]

Using an excel spreadsheet I mapped out my colors for the warp

and wound the top and bottom layers at the same time. The warp is rayon boucle shifting through 4 colors for the top/right side when opened up, a solid darker green for the bottom/left side when opened up and I used a solid color tencel for the weft.

Side view when weaving:

Things were moving along at a slow but steady pace UNTIL I started having tension issues with the bottom layer of my warp causing a lot of adjustments to be made.

Then with only 24″ left to weave on my 4 yard warp, I was knocked off my feet by ‘the bronchitis from hell’ which took 3 weeks to get past. Now it’s March and the jury date for the runway garments was fast approaching!

I finished my last 24″, cut the yardage off the loom and opened the fabric to find weaving errors/floats on the bottom side. This is not uncommon as I cannot easily see the bottom layer when weaving.

These floats can be fixed fairly easily using a needle and warp yarn to weave by hand the correct the pattern.
The biggest problem was a gap created by the issues with my warp tension.

Luckily I was able to gently manipulate the warp and weft yarns to close the gap fairly well. All of this took multiple days to correct before I was able to wash and dry the fabric. By adjusting the placement of the pattern pieces for my garment I was able to work around the much smaller ‘gap’ problem area and it was ready by the jury session = whew!!

Woodland Ferns Tunic
will strut the catwalk at Fiber Feast!