Baa Humbug!
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I love taqueté, the works of Charles Dickens, and a good pun!
For the curmudgeons among us I present the "Baa Humbug" bookmark, featuring a festive sheep and a musical little bug.
Feeling the holiday spirit this year? Then try the more classic bookmark: "Wreath and Presents."
Both are 8-shaft designs woven on the same threading. So you can warp up the loom and then weave either design or both, depending on how your holidays go.
For weavers with more complex looms, I've provided a 16-shaft variation of the "Baa Humbug" bookmark.
These are fun to pop into cards, or you can attach a string and hang them up as decorations.
Project details
Equipment
- An 8-shaft or 16-shaft loom, depending on which variation you are weaving.
- Three shuttles or weaving bobbins for the weft.
Note: I recommend using either a table loom or a dobby loom for this project. Taqueté designs tend to have a lot of variation, and if you tried to weave this one on a floor loom, you'd soon run out of treadles. Because of this, taqueté drafts are typically presented as peg plans, as they are here.
Yarn
I used 8/2 Tencel, but other fibers work equally well.
Warp: White (approximately 140 yards).
Weft: White, green, and red (approximately 50 yards of each).
Sett
30 epi sleyed 3/dent in a 10-dent reed.
I reccommend sleying the selvedges at 4 ends per dent for greater strength.
This sett will produce a fabric with less drape than you'd want for a scarf, but these are bookmarks, so you want them to have a little body.
Weave Structure
Taqueté
Note: For more information about the taqueté weave structure, see Lillian Whipple’s excellent articles: Summer and Winter to Taqueté and Designing for Summer and Winter and Taqueté.
8-Shaft Weave Drafts
Download as WIF file |
Download as WIF file |
16-Shaft Weave Draft
Warping
Wind a warp of 56 ends, 2-1/2 yards long.
This will yield between five and seven bookmarks, depending on the length of fringe you leave between bookmarks.
You can weave this project either as a single bookmark on a narrow warp;
or as multiple bookmarks on a wide warp.
If you would like to weave several bookmarks at once, wind 56 ends for each bookmark and then position them in the reed so there is 1/2 inch of empty dents between each bookmark.
Note: If you decide to weave multiple bookmarks at once, remember that you will need the amount of warp and weft listed above for each bookmark stripe.
Weaving
Weave 1/2 inch of plain-weave header of at either end of the bookmarks. Between bookmarks, use either thick yarn or strips of paper to separate the bookmarks and leave unwoven warp for the fringe.
As you weave, keep the beat tight and even.
Taqueté patterns tend to have long repeats, and this one is no exception. If you are using a mechanical or computerized dobby loom, it will handle picking the shaft lifts for you.
If you are using a table loom, you will do this manually. I've found the following procedure useful for keeping my place in the lift plan.
I open the WIF file for the draft in a text editor or word processor. Because a WIF file is a human-readable text file, it contains a listing of the shafts to raise for each pick as numerical columns.
I print these out, place them on a piece of foam-core, cork, or styrofoam and keep track of my place with a T-pin.
One of the challenges when weaving with more than one shuttle (in this project, we use three) is to create tidy and consistent selvedges. The video below shows how I manage multiple shuttles.
If you are weaving several strips of bookmarks at once, floating selveges sleyed 1/2-inch beyond the main body of the warp can keep the selvedges of the edge bookmarks looking the same as the ones in the middle of the warp.
Finishing
Apply a textile glue at each end of the bookmarks and, if you are weaving multiple stripes of bookmarks, also down each side of the bookmarks. I use Frayblock from June Tailor, but there are several on the market. If you use a thick glue, like Sobo, I recommend diluting it.
Wash the bookmarks in a mild, inert, detergent and allow to air dry until slightly damp. Iron the bookmarks on low heat until they are dry and then carefully cut apart.
If you are weaving multiple bookmarks, trim the strips apart very carefully at the sides.
The amount of fringe you leave on your bookmarks is a matter of preference.
Happy Holiday Weaving!
Nancy-Cassandra Lea was introduced to weaving by Carla Giuffrida. She then studied Woven Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology under Nell Znamierowski and Desirée Koslin. She has worked in the industry, woven tapestries designed by Michelle Lester, and worked on textile conservation with Judith Eisenberg.
She has a workshop in Alabama, Selma Handwovens, and has been in love with taqueté since she first saw one of Lillian Whipple’s cards! This was followed by a workshop with Lillian in Texas and it will be quite a while before she gets “over it!” So many little pictures-so little time! She blogs as Alabama Weaver.
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Comments
Text editor
"MS Word" seems to work better on a Mac than TextEdit, although TextEdit is perfectly adequate. The advantage of "Word" is that you can format for columns, making it possible to fit a WIF on fewer pages.
Nancy c.
http://weaversouth.blogspot.com/
Taquete
Fun to see your submission! Didn't we have a grand time with Lillian here in Texas? Merry Christmas! Charlotte
Texas
that was a great conference, all around...and, thanks!
taquete bookmark and my tip to adjust a wiffile (color)
Dear Nancy and all you weavers,
i love this bookmark Nancy! specially the sheep-pattern. I want to weave it as a present for my spinning-friend.
Being dutch, i use a dutch weaving software programm, called 'winweef 10.1'. It is a good and simple programm.
But, whenever I download a wif with (a lot of or) only white in the warp, i cannot see the warp... Untill I suddenly realized that the color white was not visible. What to do.
I replaced the color white in both warp and weft into light gray... and tada... visible!!
Perhaps this tip is a bit simple... but it took this dummy rather a while to figure this out.
The printscreen-picture shows what I mean.
A little excuse for my dutch-english,
and happy X-mas everyone.
Betty Smit-Engelse (the Netherlands)
programme differences
Your English is just fine!!!
Thanks for the heads-up. Different programmes handle wifs from other programmes in their own way. I use "Weavemaker" for the original but also open and review in "Pixelloom," "Fiberworks," and "WeaveIt." Each one, aside from the basic draft, looks a little different. I think you need to try weaving it using the original draft. I am concerned that your programme seems to have altered the treadling so that the colours are not lying properly. Having the white and the red picks lie on top of one another, in the sheep, will cause you to come out with a "blend" rather than the solid colour.
The original was drafted to produce a white ground with the sheep and the bug in red and green.
Does anybody else out there use this programme so we could try an duplicate what's going on? I downloaded the WinWeef and noticed that it did not open my .wifs correctly. I opened the downloaded .wif into the programmes I mentioned above, and, other than some of the "view" options, it opened with threading and treadling intact.
Why not try opening in a different programme? Let me know if you have any other problems.
thanks, Nancy C.
programme differences, wif
Hello Nancy,
thanks for your comment. I see what you mean!! Though I like a white sheep, your intentional design was not like that...; I read the index and explanation to wif files from the author of Winweef, but it does not give me the answer. So today I will mail him!
Betty Smit-Engelse (the Netherlands)
as above...
Let me know how this develops? You can email me privately via my "blog" if you like. The link is there in my bio. I am fascinated by all the software out there and enjoy experimenting with all of them (the ones I can afford, at any rate (-;)
Have a look also at Lillian Whipple's articles, which give, IMO, the clearest explanations of the structures and how to create them I've ever run into.
Nancy C.
http://weaversouth.blogspot.com/
white
By the way, when I am drafting a tied pattern, I frequently change the background colour (usually white) in the treadling to a grey (or some other contrast) so I can see what is happening with those picks. It's a very, very useful thing to do and, thanks to the computer, you can do this so easily. Mistakes in the treadling pop right out.
Hope you're having fun with the sheep and her friend!
http://weaversouth.blogspot.com/
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