gauze peek

I've been making good progress on China Leaves, and hope to have it off and washed this week. Meanwhile, much non-loom time is being spent scanning slides for a weaving presentation I am giving next week. These things always seem to come up so fast! Since I'm spending all this time fussing with images anyway, I decided to give you a few pictures of one of my textile passions: gauze weaves.

In most weaving, warp yarns are parallel to each other, and never change lateral positions in the cloth. Gauze weaves, by contrast, are based on the warp threads crossing each other. They can cross in various arrangements-- one over one, two over two, almost any combination you can imagine. The cross is held in place with a weft pick. On the next pick, the warps return to their original position, so they never fully twist around each other (quite distinct from tablet weaving, though brief descriptions may seem misleadingly similar). The picture above shows a gauze with 2x2 crossings.

Because of the crossings, wefts cannot be beaten in as closely as in plain weave or other structures. This forces the weft to undulate when gauze is combined with non-gauze structures. Even simple arrangements, such as the blocks of plain weave and 1x1 gauze crossings shown above, can make unusual fabrics; curves are not so easy to achieve on the loom.

Crossing warps force the fabric to collapse in the weft direction. Different gauze structures have different densities when they take their final shape after relaxing. These densities can be used to create elaborate patterning. This green structure is comparatively simple, but you can see that some areas of the fabric are very open and others more compact.

Gauzes become especially fascinating when combined with energized yarns in warp or weft or both. They can create holes, circles, or a base for hexagonal designs. (Hexagonal designs are also very hard to achieve on loom with two sets of perpendicular elements.) The more I learn about gauzes the more potential they reveal. This extremely short description is only to give a taste of what they are like. (All photos are from my reproductions and experiments).