Textile Society of America

 

Date of this Version

1988

Document Type

Article

Citation

From Textiles as Primary Sources: Proceedings of the First Symposium of the Textile Society of America, Minneapolis Institute of Art, September 16-18, 1988

Comments

Copyright © 1988 by the author(s).

Abstract

This report is on Crepe, which I have been weaving for eighteen years. I've chosen to achieve crepe effects not by weave structure or finishing techniques, but by the amount, direction, and combination of spin in the yarn. In my work I have used available commercial yarns almost exclusively, although I am interested in handspun yarn effects as well. I've chosen to use plain weave or tabby, so as to eliminate other elements, and focus on the effects of the spin of the yarn.

The area on which I concentrated was intentionally limited; using plain wave I first combined different fibers to see the resulting surfaces. Then I combined yarns which I had different amount of spin in warp, weft, or in both directions. Generally, one of the yarns had an unusually right twist in either the spin or the ply. These many experiments were done using both natural and synthetic yarns, varying the sett. The crepe effect only appears after washing, when each of the tightly spun yarns tries to every to its own spin direction.

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