Crimp Cloth

This past weekend my weaving guild brought in Dianne Totten for a workshop in Crimp cloth. It was great. Dianne's a great teacher and wonderful person - I totally enjoyed learning from her. I'm so excited with the possibilities. I've only touched the surface as I had a 8H point twill and extended twill on my loom - so many samples woven but more could be....but then there are so many other weave structures that can be used. My loom was warped for weft crimp but then there's another whole side to this - warp crimp. How I wish I could set aside everything else I have to do and play with putting on many samples warps. If you ever have the opportunity to take this workshop from Dianne don't hesitate, but if that option isn't available to you she has two different videos out there, one on weaving crimp cloth, the other on sewing with that crimp cloth. They can be found on the Interweave Press website. I own the weaving one and am thinking I need to buy the sewing one.

I wove a total of 11 samples but honestly don't feel like taking photos of all to post here. So, here's one of the samples before and after crimping. My warp is 8/2 tencel, my weft is polyester sewing thread woven in a clasped weft technique. Most of my samples were woven using Orlon for the weft but I did a few with sewing thread and they turned out incredible, so lightweight.....not that the others were heavy but these were so yummy feeling.  The weft needed to be something that would hold the crimp when steamed, for warp crimp the warp needs to be a fiber that will hold the crimp. (details in Dianne's video). The white threads are my pull threads - I pulled it tight (sorry forgot to take a picture of that) like in shibori and tied it securely in preparation for steaming. It's hard to see above but there's a pattern to those pull threads to create columns.......I wove many samples with different patterns to the pull threads, the diamonds were pretty neat looking.

And here it is after steaming and after washing. See that incredible crimp?  It's permanent as long as I don't take an iron to it to flatten it out. You can see on the left that's where I had it threaded to an extended point twill, on the right it was just a point twill.

I found a picture of one of the samples pulled ready for the steamer, it's not the same sample as above but it shows what it looks like when the pull threads are pulled tightly. In this sample my ground cloth is a twill ratio tie-up - you can just see a bit of it above the crimping. My crimp threads are in a diamond design.....which you can't see. My weft was black orlon for this sample.

I'm so excited to try some scarves with ruffled trims. I wove a few samples with extra length for ruffles where I can experiment with hemming techniques. So, there will be some crimp scarves showing up on the blog but first I have a list of other weaving with deadlines........would love to just set those aside and jump into crimp cloth but I can't. I'd love to make a couple vests too. So many fun projects..........so little time!