Conference 2009 Scholarship Report

Advancing Twills with Virginia West

Fifteen years ago, I was sitting at the Minneapolis Convergence fashion show, and a very elegant lady asked if the seat next to me was vacant. We chatted a bit, and after the show, my friends asked me what Virginia West had to say. I asked, “Who was Virginia West?” So, after all these years, I finally saw that she would be teaching at MAFA and I wasn’t about to miss a chance to take a class with her. And was it worth waiting all that time!!!!

I contacted her before the workshop, because I had some Tencel® that I wanted to use (a space dyed skein with the Grand Rapids colors). Fortunately, she recommended using my solid color as the warp, because once I started weaving, you couldn’t see the beautiful patterning because of the business of the weft. She graciously let me use one of her cones of yarn as my weft—and those glorious patterns started to show up.

But this workshop wasn’t just about weaving; it was also about theory as it applies to twills. We learned how to read a draft and a tie-up notation and then create one of our own. I had never thought of the line separating those harnesses that are up and those harnesses that are down as the weft. Brilliant! What a way to keep from having floats that are too long. She graciously answered all of our questions and assisted wherever she was needed.

It was such a joy to weave a scarf that was actually a sampler of a variety of different tie-ups and treadlings. And several of us had the opportunity to start a second scarf before our time in the workshop came to an end.

What was truly fun was sitting down and applying what she had taught us about possible twill threadings and tie-ups to create a design of our own. I played with some thoughts on graph paper and when I thought I had something that might work, I asked another class member who had a laptop with fiber software on it, if we might be able to enter my data to see if in fact it did work. What a fantastic thing to see!!! In fact it did work and I was so pleased. The file was sent to me after I got back to Buffalo.

I am looking forward to putting it up on my loom and making a scarf of my own creation. Of course, I have to get that second scarf from the workshop off the loom first. I thank you Virginia West for sharing this wonderful knowledge with us, and hopefully I can help to explain this theory to other weavers. And perhaps at the next MAFA fashion show, I’ll be modeling my design.

Suanne M. Pasquarella