Lisa and I swapped blog writing duties once more, so I’m on again…

My daughter lives in Boulder, CO, so I killed two birds with one stone and went to the Complex Weavers Seminars in nearby Denver after visiting her.

The core of the conference is five 2-hour seminar sessions spread over two and a half days. The hallmark of all the talks I listen to was the great curiosity of the speaker, coupled with an even greater desire to understand: what is this interlacement? Is it really different from familiar structures? What can it do? How can it be woven? What happens if I change the tie-up/threading/treadling/sett/yarns…? The latter question usually leads to a gamp or two where some options are investigated systematically. And there are oodles of samples showing how all these drafts actually look when woven. "Systematic investigation" could be in the subtitle of many of the talks at the conference.

I had registered long enough beforehand that I had only a vague memory of what talks I was planning to attend. It turns out that three out of the five talks I picked were centered around the double two-tie (D2T) threading system. I had skimmed The Book on the subject (Double Two-Tie Unit Weaves, by Clotilde Barrett ad Eunice Smith, originally published in 1983, revised edition in 2016) a few times before, without noticeable effect on my understanding of the subject matter. Yeah yeah, D2T is the lobster’s dress shirt, but I had yet to find a good reason to knuckle down and really understand it. Well, Linda Schultz has me (almost) convinced.

Linda has written a series of articles in the Complex Weavers Journal taking D2T through its paces (see at the end of this post for the list of Linda’s articles). I listened to both the talks she gave at the conference. The first one was rather technical, and it mostly whetted my appetite for Linda’s second talk, about drafting block double weave in D2T.

D2T is not a structure; it is a threading system that can be deployed to draft a broad range of structures. D2T offers more patterning possibilities than the usual way of drafting these structures, which is why it is so exciting. However, unlike the “normal way” of drafting (where the threading/treadling and/or tie-up make some sense, generally), what the draft “does” is far from obvious without the draw down: see below how good old 2/2 twill looks in a D2T guise.

An example of a D2T draft, here to weave a 2/2 twill (this is Figure 1 from The Book). The threading has whiffs of Summer & Winter, right? S&W also has tie-downs and pattern shafts, but it uses only one pattern shaft per block: the standard threading block is 1, N, 2, N, (instead of 1, N, 2, N+1 for D2T), which is why we get six blocks of S&W on 8 shafts.

One of the structures that can be drafted with D2T is block double weave. As seen above, D2T offers three blocks on 8 shafts, instead of the two blocks available in the classic double weave draft. (As is often the case in weaving, drafting block double weave on D2T has already been described (see The Best of Weaver’s on double weave, pp. 100-102).)

I realize that you are not any the wiser on how to proceed to draft 3 blocks of double weave with D2T—and I am not sure that I am, either… I will have to pore over my notes from the talk and the slides that Linda kindly sent to attendees, but the possibilities are alluring!

This was the first time I attended the Complex Weavers Seminars, and it took me a little while to find my bearings. In addition to knowing very few people, I was mightily distracted by the all the incredible textiles walking around the corridors. There was handwoven cloth turned into one-of-a-kind shirts, skirts, jackets and coats, but there were mostly a lot of scarves, each more gorgeous than the next! Some scarves had a practical use (some of the seminar rooms were very cold), but many were mostly decorative: weavers can’t help showing off, especially when around other weavers! And weavers in this crowd can pack quite a lot in a small piece of cloth.

I’m setting this as a challenge for myself: weave some small, finely wrought scarves to show off—ahem, wear—at the next Complex Weavers seminars!

Linda Schultzs’s articles in The Complex Weavers Journal. (All the issues of the journal are available to Complex Weavers members on www.complex-weavers.org; the membership is only $35 / year and the journal is a gold mine for many things weaving—just sayin’.)

Parallel Drafting in Double Two-Tie Weaves, CWJ Feb 2022, pp. 33–39

Double Two-Tie Structure Pair Sets, CWJ Oct 2022, pp. 5–14

Patterned Double Weave on a Double Two-Tie Threading, CWJ Feb 2023, pp. 18–22

New Structures for Extended Parallel Weaves, CWJ Jun 2023, pp.4–9