Hi all,
I picked up Candace Crockett's book Card Weaving yesterday and started playing around with card weaving. I have been trying to understand how card weaving "thinks", relative to weaving on a floor loom, and have arrived at some ideas that I'd like to check with more experienced weavers.
First, it seems to me that drafting-wise, the basic method that Crockett outlines (square, four-holed cards; turning all the cards as a single group) is the equivalent of weaving on a four-shaft loom with four treadles, except that consecutive treadles must be adjacent. If you label the holes A, B, C, D, and line them up together when you thread, all the threads in hole “A” will be up or down at the same time, all the threads in “B” will be up or down in the same time, and so on. This makes it equivalent to raising or lowering the shafts on a four-shaft loom, and since there are four holes, you have four “shafts”. Treadles are a bit more complex, but not by much. Each card has only four orientations – AB up, BC up, CD up, DA up. Any time you throw a shot of weft, it has to go through one of those orientations. So there are only four possible orientations, and therefore only four “treadles”.
The treadles must be consecutive because you always (? not sure) turn the cards a quarter-turn. So AB must always be followed by BC or DA; it can never be followed by CD. More restrictive than on a conventional loom.
Where it gets interesting, IMO, is when you start separating the cards into groups and turning the groups separately. Now you have two sets of 4-shaft cards, giving you effectively an 8-shaft loom, with each set of shafts having the treadle limitations mentioned before. There are of course practical limitations on this – mostly having to do with the size of the shed in the cards – but at least in theory, it is quite possible to get lots of “shafts” using different groups of cards.
Where it starts getting really complicated (and where my visualization breaks down) is that you can effectively change an individual set of four threads from one group of four shafts to another, just by sliding the card forward or backward into another group. I think what happens is that the four threads must appear on the "shafts" in the new group in the same rotating sequence (because the thread in hole A is still in hole A, etc.), so there are some limitations, but from my beginner’s perspective it looks like you can change the threading pattern on the fly! Very exciting for someone who is used to floor looms where it’s impossible (or very complicated) to change the threading once it’s set.
Is there a more advanced text on card weaving theory where I can check my conclusions/ideas?
My eventual goal is to weave the double-happiness symbol in this photo, which I designed on 24 shafts, as a cardwoven ribbon instead of a narrow loom-woven ribbon. This ribbon will go down the edges of the wedding-coat I am designing for, well, my wedding! I think if I can do this by cardweaving, it will produce a nicer edge than a loom-woven ribbon. (The double happiness symbols are the chinese characters closest to the neckline.) If anyone's interested, I have posted the .wif file for the double happiness draft on Weavolution, at http://www.weavolution.com/node/653 .
Anyway, this is my first attempt at understanding cardweaving - thoughts? Suggestions for more advanced books that can help me understand the theory of cardweaving?
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