Week 18 - Jacquard Work

As well as working on my second Dash and Miller warp this week, i also had the opportunity to use the Jacquard loom in university. As exciting as this sounds, i was completely over whelmed by the sheer scale of the loom and found myself anxious when i first took to the machine.

Prior to the actual weaving process, it is required to put some time in to developing an image suitable to be woven. Differently to my usual Texel loom, the Jacquard loom is able to weave images onto cloth, leaving patterns behind on the surface of the cloth to create the picture / image.

I wanted to stick with the theme i have been looking at for the Dash & Miller brief, so opted to use an image created using Photoshop from one of my initial research images. The points / zig-zag pattern is one that has made an appearance rather regularly over the past 6 weeks, so here is the chosen image.

Above shows the development stages of the Jacquard design, from initial image, to scotweave input and finally to creating a loom harness, ready to take to the loom to be woven. This process was somewhat tricky to begin with, having to alter the size and dimensions to create a image big enough to fill the width of loom took some getting used to. I wanted the white chevron shapes to stand out strongly against the background,  to achieve this i chose to use satin and sateen structures only. This means one pattern is mainly warp faced, whilst the other is mainly weft faced, perfect for what i want to achieve.

Belows shows the final Jacquard samples, two in different colour ways.