Technical wool fabric: Sampling
Time has come to show you some samples again!
Let me remind you of what I am doing in this project: I want to create a dual sided 100% wool fabric which is tough and hardwearing on one side and soft and warming on the other side. I want to use wool from an old breed of sheep that has both long, coarse hairs which I call “over coat“ and soft, fluffy, shorter hairs which I call “under coat”. The aim is to make a cloth sample that can be used as an example to make the points that 1. You can make a very strong - and - wearable fabric out of wool, no plastic needed 2. Old breeds like the Icelandic sheep has wool that is very, very useful if used in the right way.
Herringbone sample front side
At the beginning of this project I had the idea that I would weave a dual sided herringbone twill. I have an Ashford table loom with four shafts and thought that a four shafted twill would to the job splendidly if I put the yarn spun out of the over coat hairs in the warp and the yarn made of under coat hair in the weft. Well, I set up a sample weave with eight single ply warp threads per centimeter and got to weaving. After heaving a header of linen yarn to space out the threads evenly I wove a few centimeters with over coat yarn because I was curious as to how an over coat only fabric would look and feel (turns out the result was very shiny and tough!). After that I wove with a white wool yarn to see how much the weft was covering the warp, which made me happy because I almost got full coverage! After that I proceeded with the black under coat yarn for the “real“ sample, and I was feeling pretty good about the project so far.
Herringbone sample back side
When I cut down the herringbone sample I saw that the backside, which I could not see while I was weaving the sample, did not turn out according to plan. My idea was that since the weft shows the most on one side, then the warp would surely show more on the other side. This didn’t really work out, as you can see if you look at the white sample section. The weft shows quite much at the backside as well, and the shiny + strong warp doesn’t get the spotlight it deserves at all.
This made me a bit grumpy because in my mind I had already spun, woven and sewn a very cool jacket for myself in a herringbone pattern. And now all my plans were destroyed! But I’m a big girl so I accepted that I would have to re-think my original plan, and after all this project was all about finding a way to make a good final product, not about following my initial idea.
One night I was flicking through a book on weaving and came upon the technique “monk’s belt“. This has traditionally been used to make decorative textiles in Sweden, and consists of a bottom tabby weave usually made of linen or cotton, with strands of colored wool floating above the bottom weave to create a pattern. It can look like this:
I have definitely screenshotted this image from digitaltmuseum.se.
Now, in traditional monk’s belt there is usually a fairly equal representation of the pattern threads on each side of the fabric. This is however not a technical prerequisite, so I started thinking… If I could make a bottom weave out of the tough over coat and use the soft under coat for the “pattern“ threads, but with the pattern as much on one side as possible… what would happen then? I gave it a try! I decided to keep the pattern threads floating for just under a centimeter, to catch as much air as possible while still avoiding risk of catching one’s fingers in the loops if the fabric was made into a garment.
As you can see in the left image, I started with weaving a plain tabby just to see how that would work out. It turns out that an overcoat tabby is a very very cool fabric in itself! then I added some while alpacka “pattern threads“, and after that, as can be seen to the right, the black under coat threads! As the under coat in this weave makes a much longer “jump“ before it is bound down with the over coat warp threads this fabric becomes a lot more fluffy, which in the end will mean that it it much warmer than the first sample.
Let’s have a look at the backside!
This backside looks much more promising! Here you can see the white sample yarn as rows of dots, and above them there is a hint of the same rows continued but with black yarn. The over coat wool gets shown off in a much better way here! If I had a loom with more shafts I would have made a herringbone backside and that would have been even cooler, but for now I’ll stick with the tabby.
I have decided to go forward with this technique and make a big sample, but with one change. I will be weaving the big sample in a two-ply yarn, since the single ply outer coat only yarn had a tendency to break apart. This was not due to abrasion or tangling, which is often the case with wool yarn, but due to the fibers being so slippery that they tended to slide apart during the weaving process. I have not had prrevious problem with outer coat only warps before, but my previous warps were spun on a spindle and because of this they were a lot smoother. Also they were thinner, I don’t know if that affected the result but i have a theory that it might. Anyway, I decided that my bigger sample would be made of a two-ply yarn with eight threads per centimeter, so I set out to spin a batch over coat yarn that was half as thick as the yarn I had been using up until now.
This project is funded by Nämnden för hemslöjdsfrågor, a national heritage council funded by the Swedish state.
Do you want to read my previous post about this subject? Here’s a link!