Production weaving is a beast all its own. The goals seem completely at odds: make consistent cloth quickly, and make it look "handwoven." In the eyes of the American customer, consistent cloth looks mass produced and cheap. Of course, my tools are mechanical so the result is completely handmade, but it's not hard to end up with a result that is so consistent that it looks "machine made". Here are the tricks I use to make sure the result is immediately identifiable as handwoven and to make it efficient to produce.
1. Warp color stripes. These do a variety of jobs. They hide lost or doubled threads and make reed marks less evident. Color is the most obvious part of the design and gives people something they can grasp. For now, I'm using neutral-colored warps to retain flexibility in my weft choices.
2. Warp grist variety. Using a variety of yarn weights helps enhance the "handmade" feeling along with improving the effect of the color stripes.
3. Plied weft yarns. By winding several threads onto the bobbin together, an interesting effect occurs. The end-feed nature of the flyshuttle loosely twists the threads as they leave the bobbin. This twist creates an appearance that I call "treebark" after the Japanese name for a similar effect in shibori. (mokume) The effect can be subtle or striking depending on the contrast between thread colors. Either way, it helps a cloth to feel more rich and interesting.
4. Slub yarns. Used in the warp, the weft, or both, these give a little randomness and make a cloth feel more "informal" and "natural."
My goal as a designer is to use each of these factors in such a way that they create a natural overall feeling without any one technique becoming too dominant. It's a dance, and one that I can't wait to explore more and more in the coming years.
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