A silk band in Krokbragd…

While my two private students worked hard for the last three days (see previous post), I pulled out my small inkle loom, the Inklette by Ashford, and sat nearby finishing off a lovely narrow band woven with WonderFil Spagetti, size 12 Egyptian Cotton.  The pattern is woven in Krokbragd, traditionally a three shuttle weft faced rug technique, turned and adapted for the two shaft inkle loom, which I talked about in my seminar at Complex Weavers last month.  Ann Dixon features this technique extensively in her book of patterns for the Inkle Loom.

Sidebar:  While teaching at Complex Weavers Seminar last month, I met Susan DuBois who is the new owner of Treenway Silks, formerly of Canada.  Treenway is now an American company, located in Colorado, and they specialize in small quantities (like 10 yard skeins) of  a half dozen different types of silk thread dyed in more than 100 colors and 74 variegated.  Since they were a Canadian company, and I don’t usually use silk, they were sort of off my radar, but now that they are an American company, and I am always looking for good sources of cool yarns in small quantity for use on the inkle loom, I sat up and paid attention.

I had worked with Treenway for many years when I wrote the forecast column for Handwoven Magazine.  Each forecast had me culling through the yarn offerings of seven or eight different yarn vendors, hundreds and hundreds of styles and colors, to find the best matches for the individual colors in the forecast.  Karen Selk at Treenway was always very generous in sending me whatever I needed in a very timely manner, and I had acquired over the years, a small collection of 10 yard skeins in 8/2, 20/2 and fine silk cord.  I didn’t have a lot of each color, in most cases only about 10 yards or less, especially if it was one of the colors I used for the forecast column, then I definitely had only a couple of yards to work with.

Since I finished up my Krokbragd band, and had an empty loom, and I’ll be teaching inkle weaving at the NY Sheep and Wool Festival, and turned Krokbragd is becoming one of my favorite complex techniques since it doesn’t involve pick-up and you can get up a little speed, I needed to refill the loom, and decided to try to use some of the silk I had collected from Treenway to see how it did.

I had a little pile of 8/2 colors, and silly me, I failed to take a photo of the whole careful measuring process to see what I had, but I worked in 14 colors, some just a shade off from each other and I drafted and warped another Krokbragd band.

I’m really really happy with the results.  The band weaves quickly and is luminous.  What isn’t apparent from the photo, is the outermost yellowish tips of the floral shape are actually a variegated, one of the Montano series “La Veta” and I was able to shift the four ends I got from one skein, so the colors would match up in ikat fashion, the engineering of the repeat is excellent.

Stay tuned…