White on White

For a lot of weavers, colour is king.  I love colour, but I have also worked a lot with black and white, and in my most recent pieces, white on white.  I really enjoy this challenge as the structure of the fabric becomes more important.

I wove three diffrent patterns for this projects, I only warped up once, but changed my tie up and treadling for each pattern so I had related patterns for each piece.

 The warp for this fabric is 20/2 tencel and the weft is a fine polyester that I had a large cop of in my stash.  I chose it because it was an optical white whilst the tencel was a softer white so there was a small contrast to help show off the patterns.

The dress I made is a three layer shift with an uneven hem.

 I finished the dress by binding the neck and armholes with handmade silk bias binding.  Then I beaded near the hem and just a few on the left neck area.

 After I had finished this project I tied on a new warp and wove a wrap using the same yarns and also using the three patterns as well.  I took images of the tie-on process.

 Before I cut off the dress fabric, I wove a few picks of plain weave with a contrating yarn.  This means that the warp yarns can be picked off the the woven rows in exactly the right order.

 I wsn't using the whole width of the original fabric, so I started my tie on part way across the old warp.

It looks like a mess once all the knots are ties, but every warp yarn is in order.

 Just a good tug on the new warp and it all straightens out and winds on easily.  It does take a while to tie all those knots (I use an overhand knot for this) but you know that your threading is correct.

The wrap has a lovely drape.