on October 25th, we held weaving workshop at the Färbehütte. Emma brought her 8 shafts table looms to the Elisabeet. Despite the weather forecast of 50% rain, we started the day with a beautiful autumn sunshine. Emma normally teaches her workshop in her studio, where the looms are comfortably set up. It was a bit of a challenge for us to bring the looms to the garden… but when we saw the looms sitting in the sun, we felt it was worth the effort to bring it outside.
The workshop started off with an introduction to weaving, basic construction of weave structure, how each parts of the loom is called and what functions they have, and how one uses it to weave. The looms Emma brought were set up in two different ways, in terms of warp threading. 2 of them were set up as straight draft (the warp thread is threaded as 1,2,3,….7,8,1,2,3…) and the other 2 were set up as point draft (1,2,3…7,8,7,6,5…3,2,1,2,3,…). Emma demonstrated how these settings result differently in the weave structures.
As I called the workshop “weave your jeans”, I specifically requested Emma that we should weave twill fabric, which is the typical jeans fabric. She introduced 3 different types of Twill structure we can try in the workshop.
The cotton thread we wove were dyed at the Färbehütte. It is the authentic indigo jeans fabric we wove. Depending on how many times the thread was dipped in indigo vat, it showed different shades of blue. Participants got creative in making patterns with the blue shades and weave structures.
The workshop lasted for two hours. and although it is short time, each of us manage to weave 5-10cm of fabric. It is fascinating that we can actually make a textile from scratch! (almost… we still had to buy a spanned cotton thread..)
Now many of us got hooked with weaving, and would like to weave more. Maybe Färbehütte needs a loom in future!
