Weaving Huck Lace!

October 20, 2010

I know how to do Filet Crochet, it’s very open, lacy, looks beautiful using fine yarns, and patterns can be easily designed on graph paper. So, I thought why not try to weave something like this. From the many types of lace weaves, I chose Huck Lace. I spent hours designing 7-block profile drafts for Huck and plain weave blocks that I could weave on my 16-shaft treadle loom.

Although a main subject on a background is nice, I was really trying to design a profile draft with a balance between the Huck and the plain weave areas so that the negative and positive spaces would be equally important. This way the patterns formed by the Huck areas as well as the plain weave areas would be interesting.

I came up with a profile draft I thought would work, and what started out to be a lacy shawl ended up as a curtain because I love the way it looks when light passes through it. Following are images, drafts and other details about it.

Huck Lace Curtain (pearl cotton) 2010

Huck Lace Curtain (pearl cotton) 2010 (detail 1)

Huck Lace Curtain (pearl cotton) 2010 (detail 2)

Profile Draft and Partial Weaving Draft :

After designing the profile draft, I used the “block substitution” feature in my weaving program to generate a complete thread-by-thread weaving draft. But you don’t really need a full thread-by-thread draft; just follow the block order in the profile draft. For example, if you look at the Profile Draft and Partial Weaving Draft below, reading right to left and top to bottom, the first block is threaded and treadled as: 1-6-1-6-1, 2-5-2-5-2, 1-6-1-6-1; the next block as: 2-7-2-7-2, 1-8-1-8-1, 2-7-2-7-2; and so on.

PROFILE DRAFT for Huck Lace Curtain

Partial Weaving Draft for Huck Lace Curtain

Lace & Spot Weave Variations

May 21, 2014

Many Lace and Spot Weaves are created by warp floats and weft floats on a plain weave background. Lace has openings or holes and spot weave has closed spots. In my favorite book on weave structures, The Primary Structures of Fabrics, Irene Emery classifies Lace and Spot Weaves, including Huck, Lace Bronson, and Mock Leno, under float weaves derived from plain weave. To a weaver a “float” often means a mistake, an unintentional skip of warp or weft that is longer than it should be, but floats are actually good in the case of a plain weave background patterned by areas of float weave.

Having worked with Huck Lace and Mock Leno, I wanted to try something a little different using floats on a plain weave background. Instead of starting with a profile draft and using traditional blocks that you find with most Lace and Spot Weaves, I designed threadings and treadlings of unbroken point twills – similar to Gebrochene – with twill tie-ups and wove samples on 8 shafts and a fancier pattern on 15 shafts. I’m happy to share photos and drafts of my work, starting with the fancy one first.

Fancy Lace & Spot Weave Variation – 15 shafts

To weave this fancy pattern I used 10/2 pearl cotton with a sett of 24 epi and about the same ppi. I used 15, not 16, shafts because after designing the pattern I played around with it making adjustments and it looked better this way. Following is the final draft and photos of the woven piece after washing and ironing. You can see that the corners of the piece are threaded and treadled as straight twill and the center areas are a combination of short and long unbroken point twills:

Draft for Fancy Lace & Spot Weave Variation

Fancy Lace & Spot Weave Variation – warp & weft floats on plain weave, pearl cotton, 2014

EVA STOSSEL'S WEAVING BLOG

In my blog post, “Weaving Huck Lace!” I wrote about my experience with weaving patterns designed with clear cut blocks of plain weave and Huck Lace. I later wrote another post, “Lace & Spot Weave Variations” about patterns designed with warp floats and weft floats on a plain weave background. So here I am again playing around with lace weaves, designing profile drafts and using block substitution, trying to create something interesting. I came up with a few drafts that I liked and wove a scarf and a shawl, here they are followed with some drafts and notes:

Huck Lace Effect Scarf

I used a 20/2 flecked cotton/acrylic yarn to weave this scarf at 30 e.p.i. and about the same p.p.i. on 8 shafts. The pattern looked really nice after wet finishing (hand washing and steam ironing).

I started with a profile draft and used block substitution using Fiberworks weaving software to generate the thread-by-thread draft. It’s so easy to do this: click on Tools, click on Block Substitution in the drop-down menu, click on Lace Weaves, and click on one of the choices – I chose “Huck Lace effect.” On this first try the result was nice but not very interesting:

Then I made a little change to the profile draft that looked hopeful, and I liked the resulting thread-by-thread draft so I used this draft for the Scarf:

Huck Lace Effect Shawl