Week 11 – Mondays are for weaving – Perugia trials
Well, almost anyway. I spent most of the day re-creating a 2×2 cross at the back stretcher bar, moved the raddle out of the way and put the first set of lease sticks behind the stretcher bar. The warp had decided to twist together into a sort of roping in the raddle dents. My weaving expert friend said to keep the lease sticks in to prevent the roping coming into the heddles. Some weavers remove the lease sticks as they start to weave, but I do not trust myself enough to do that. I need the help whenever I break a warp end to make sure I make the mend in the right spot. The plan was always to leave them in. I guess that I’ll just have two sets of lease sticks for this warp.
More black eyelet cord came through the post so I could at last place the final treadle cord. I also exchanged the cord from the bottom harness stick to the lamms to black, making it easier to see which lamms are sinking and which lifting.
Since I have done the tie-up with the new, longer, damast heddles I also had to adjust the cords for the shafts up a few eyelets to make the warp run through the middle of the eyes. I am still not happy with how I do this. Juggling all the weight to make the adjustments to the harness cords, and down to the lamms and re-doing the one tie-down cord from white to black while a warp was tensioned in the loom was less than fun.
I did finally manage to tie-on to the cloth beam and throw a few picks, which showed me that the premature tie-down to the treadles was done much too high and has to be re-done. By that time the daylight was all gone, and my neck was hurting from all of my loom gymnastics.
Even more supplies
To be able to weave some fun pattern in the Perugia towels I have to be able to pick up and save pattern rows on half shafts behind the harnesses. I had unfortunately used all of my warp sticks when I beamed the warp, so I did not have them available for half shafts as had been my plan so I had to move on to plan B
Plan B was to get trim wood from Bauhaus and cut that down to appropriate lengths. They’re readily available, good dimensions and not at all expensive. So I headed out to buy that, but decided to stop by all the second hand shops first – where I picked up a treasure trove of weaving supplies.
I found two full length (for my loom 100 cm) reeds for 50 sek each at Helping Hand. One 40/10 and the other 30/10 which were dents I did not already have. At the same store I found a big bundle of stick shuttles for 35 sek, which I thought I could use for my half-heddles. The tiny cute boat shuttle was a bargain and it along with the perfectly finished un-cut piece of 6 dish towels from Oskarströms, was waiting for me at Kupan.
From Erikshjälpen I picked up a bundle of metal curtain rods which I was planning to cut down in a home-made winding station where I can suspend rolls for warping. The second half of the winding station ended up being two bi-fold wine bottle stands from Återbruket. They’ll fold away to take minimal space. I cut off one of the U-bends from the curtain rods at the cut-station at Bauhaus, which was my last stop on this shopping tour.
At Bauhaus I did not get any wood, but I did pick up a few eyelet bolts to try on my treadles to see if I could change my tie-up.
The stick-shuttles were mostly the right length for my Perugia pick-up patterns – just – but when I put one in and then tried to make a shed I discovered that they were much too wide. So I broke out some hand-tools and cut down a handful of them to half the width to be able to use them as half shafts.
Speaking of the Perugia pick-up patterns: I took inspiration from Duelling Rabbits Handweaving’s video on Damask with half-heddles and went ahead and recorded the pattern I needed to pick up on my phone so I could just listen to myself reading the sequence rather than look back and forth to a piece of paper and get lost in bare numbers. I had to do a couple of passes of the reading to be able to match it to the speed of actually picking up ends.
I was somewhat disheartened to discover upon finishing row 5 that I have probably made a mistake on row 4. It is taking a long time to pick up the pattern, and for the border I am currently trying to make I have ten rows.
I do not think there’s a way for me to save more than those ten rows, so if I want another pattern I have to take them out and start over from scratch. I will weave each border twice for whatever project I’m doing though – as pretty much all extant towels are symmetrical end to end, meant to either hang over a table or an arm or a pretty rod by a hand-washing station in the house so that both ends will be suspended from the centre and pretty much all evidence shows that the border patterns are mirrored on either end. It is very dangerous to say _always_ and _all_ for re-enactors. There is always the chance for new evidence or a minority report item to pop up and completely discredit current knowledge. But let’s say 90% of towels made in this style are mirrored.
I have sketched another couple of borders I could do, but in uncharacteristically egocentric ways I have incorporated seeblätter in two of three borders. I have been known to give away items I have made on a whim and the best way I know to prevent that is to mark them during the making as belonging to me. My friends have often told me during the making of a thing to make sure to mark it to prevent spontaneous gifting.
But I do like giving stuff away to appreciative people. I am also perhaps hoping I could sell a few, to cover the expenses of all these new pieces of equipment I have needed to purchase.
Half-heddles counted out
On Friday I finally managed to push through and pick-up all ten pattern rows and attach them to half-heddle sticks. I rewarded myself with snacks and wine and rallied enough to do the last three rows before calling it a night.
Fearsome snowstorm outside, hair torn out inside
Having finished all ten pick-up rows the night before I started Saturday by attempting to lay pattern wefts. I remembered to put down two weft threads per pick. The third pattern shed got tied down in the previous rows, so I had to pause and return to the back of the loom for a couple of hours to transfer too many pick-up groups to their own half heddles. That meant going through the first three pattern rows and adding twice as many heddles to enable me to find the other sheds.
I managed – almost- to go through all ten pattern rows and throw weft picks. I did run out of pattern weft before the last picks of weft. But by that point I had already identified several issues with the pattern. Finding a shed for the last two rows was pretty horrendous, and I have more experimentation to do to be able to put this technique into production.
Problem 1: My pattern rows are not all aligned. I have an issue with the first row – which was pretty much impossible to diagnose before I had a second row in. There are also a couple of other rows that are off by one pixel here and there.
Problem 2: The pattern is elongated, and no longer to square, which is not what I want. I might have to go with another thread for the pattern – or throw single weft threads for each pattern pick and go down to three picks rather than 2 picks of 2 threads each.
Problem 3: I still can not make the later sheds easily. I have to either go back in and move many more units of pattern pick-ups to individual heddles. It might be easier if I had a deeper loom. I think ten pattern rows are two too many for my loom and my current skill level.
Back to the drawing board
So, either I go back and re-count all my rows, or I make a new, shorter pattern. So I went back to the drawing board and made a new, shorter pattern.
I spent Sunday taking out the first border pattern from the loom, and with a new system of checks counted up the second pattern of 8 rows. I took extra care to count all my blocks to start, and putting in a visual indicator for each pattern repeat, so I would have six checkpoints throughout the pick-up process. If I miscounted in one repeat I could immediately spot it and do that one over, rather than continue from the erroneous point to compound the error like I did on the first border.
Week 12 – Mondays are for weaving
I was able to do a full repeat of my new border pattern on Monday, and verified that I have the full border correct on my half-heddles. Even though I only picked up eight rows, compared to my first sampler’s ten, I used up about 100 more heddles for it. That means I was taking more care to not bundle too many pixels in my pattern in one heddle – which is what made finding the shed on the first attempt much harder than it needed to be.
I was very happy that I managed this border pattern without errors, and I am almost happy with the pattern I ended up with. Seeing it in the flesh, there were some tweaks I would have liked to do to make some elements stand out better. However, it is perfectly good enough to finally actually start weaving a Perugia towel for myself! Six years after starting to weave because that’s what I wanted to create.
The weaving itself did not take too much longer than any other weave. The diamond twill background was only a matter of counting. I had first planned to make three nested lozenges within a framework, which would have meant a treadling repeat of 22, but looking closer at the towel I wanted to recreate I opted for three nested lozenges, which meant a treadling repeat of 16 instead.
The original I can aim to replicate, with my own designed pattern is V&A Museum object O356296. I emailed the Museum to ask if they had any more details about the object. They are still in the process of moving all their textiles so were unable to look at it for me. The only other information they had were the dimensions: 5ft2in by 1ft9in. In metric this is 157,5 by 53,3 cm.
The structure of this one is fairly simple, a border composed of three major sections at either end of the towel. The secions are mostly extended tabby stripes of various widths, and one pattern row mirrored around the widest extended tabby stripe. The pattern is actually quite narrow, I think maybe eight or ten pattern rows, which I can do. I will not use that towel’s pattern. Partly because the resolution on the image is so bad, and partly because I want to personalize my towels.
The structure of a Perugia towel
The technical details that I have observed in numerous extant textiles is that the towels start with a straight treadling to create a herringbone pattern in 3/3 twill before the first row of pattern weft. This is mirrored on the other end of the towel.
The first pattern sections are often two solid stripes between 1-2 cm wide, simply done by creating extended tabby by utilising two twill tie-up treadles that lift three opposite shafts. So that one weft is packed together with the second to create a solid covering of the weft over the warp. You can see that the columns created by this technique are sometimes three and sometimes five warp ends wide – which is the structure you get with point threading the twill.
Earlier examples sometimes has rows of “dots” which are created by alternating pattern weft and background weft on the same extended tabby structure as the solid lines.
The pattern rows are often quite complex the later we get, earlier textiles are more geometric. The patterns are picked out in indigo or woad blue cotton on a white tabby background.
Most often one unit is 2 warp ends, and floats are rarely longer than 6 units. Bigger areas of solid colour are often broken up with regularly spaced dots to create a diapered texture – mostly blue with white dots on one side and mostly white with blue dots on the reverse.
Where I have been able to count the threaded in pattern and had information on the width of a textile I have observed the sett to be 12, 16 or 22 ends per cm in the warp.
Almost all examples of complete towels are made with a border composed of two or more elements near one end, which is mirrored at the other.
The middle section of most towels is 3/3 lozenge twill, rarely with less than three nested lozenges, which implies this is produced on a six shaft loom with six pattern treadles and two extra treadles for tabby.
Pattern bands are separated, if they are close together, with either extended tabby or twill treadling, rarely tabby, in the background weft.
Pattern picks are often done with doubled thread. Background weft is also sometimes doubled.
How to set up a loom for Perugia textiles
I have no proof of exactly how they set up their looms to weave these textiles (if anyone has any hints, send them my way!), but this article on Umbrian or Friulian Ancient Textiles (18 July 2020) shows how it was done in the 19th century from the same region and it seems to me to be a very plausible set up. They have the half-heddle sticks suspended below the warp, and use two very wide paddles to save the working shed and the next one in sequence. It is worked just like this weaver’s video which I found on Instagram this past week.
I have my half-heddle sticks set up above the warp, and keep them off the warp by elasticated bands when I’m not actively working with them, and my shed sticks are a little narrower. I also have a shorter distance to my back stretcher bar, which will limit how many pattern rows I can pick up.
I took a bunch of photos showing how I pick up patterns.
Below are a few images of weaving my towel. First there’s the verification that the picked up pattern would work. Also realizing that the pattern weft I used was not sufficient so I went looking in my stash to find a cottolin. Second image shows how the pattern turned out on my towel, with a solid stripe of blue to top and tail it and make the pattern stand out more on both sides.
I realized while weaving that I did not have enough of the pattern weft yarn to make the full pattern from my inspiration from the V&A, so I had to truncate my pattern stripe to be able to mirror it. It ended up working out, just. If I had realized in time I would have designed it slightly differently, but I worked with incomplete information to start. Never a good idea for weaving. However, I love the results so far on the loom and am steaming on ahead with a second towel.
I found another suitable pattern weft yarn – an 8/4 cotton which I was able to split in half for an 8/2 yarn which fills the pattern rows even a little more than the first one. I can also purchase new yarn to enable me to weave the full repeat. Last image below is with the new pattern weft. It’s a bit more of a muted blue, slightly darker, but I think it will also be good.
Lia de Thornegge
Lia's Continued Crafts 
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