Junco Sato Pollack is a nationally and internationally known artist. She served as a cultural ambassador for a while, at the same time, her interest was always to find ways to do 3-D surfaces and forms by combining fabric and layered techniques. She has used a variety of techniques in fiber. These include weaving, surface design, sculptural work, heat transfer printing, and paper making. She is Professor Emerita of Georgia State University where she taught in the Textiles Program.
In one very early series of her art were silk hangings woven in damask with printed warps. After the cloth was off the loom, she added silver leaf which was adhered to the woven surface by screen printing adhesive and pressing silver leaf onto the surface. The silver leaf in this hanging has tarnished to dark grey.
This detail shows more of the damask patterning in the cloth itself. The silk damask has screen-printed warp images of ivy. Then she adhered silver leaf leaves on the woven surface. The weave is a 16-shaft damask.
Reed and Sett
Junco tells that “Japanese silk hand weaving is mostly plain weave based on tsumugi fabric which is hand-spun weft on plied reeled silk warp. The weft is coarse, but both warp colors and weft colors are interactively visible. (What we call tabby.)
“So, denting is usually double dent, and this is why we have so many fine reed numbers per inch, ie. 45 coarse, 55 medium, 65 fine. Double dented, they become 90 epi, 110, 130 and so on. Thus, achieving well distributed warps and no dent lines, called “shirome” (white looks) of lines.” (What we call reed marks.) The photo is of a bamboo reed of mine I have “ for show,”
Peggy O.
Besides being an artist, ambassador, and teacher, she has grown silkworms and reeled out the filaments. The reason for raising silkworms was that she wanted to create 3 dimensional raised patterns on silk fabric. That required the use of sericin-rich silk threads to create the thermo-plastic silk for a 3-D surface. She wove in “shibori binding stitches” while on the loom, and heat set the pleats after the stitched-in threads were gathered up. This process is now called “woven shibori.” By weaving on a jibata loom, it was easy to create an extra harness to weave in shibori stitching threads. Images of her work can be found at JuncoSatoPollack.com.
This is a diagram of how the Japanese traditional jibata loom works. A loop of string attached to the loom’s heddle stick and the weaver’s toe is how warp threads are moved to make the sheds. The backstrap of course lets the weaver lessen and tighten the warp as needed. This helps to make clean sheds with dense warps of fine threads.
Jim Ahrens (a part of AVL as you all know by now) taught us Ashenhurst’s way to calculate sett that industry uses. It’s especially handy when winding such very fine threads on a ruler would be difficult! I use this method and teach it to my students. This worksheet is in my book, Weaving for Beginners, and the information also is in Winding a Warp & Using a Paddle (in the big chapter on sett).
The Ashenhurst formula calls for the square root of the yards per pound. I don’t even have a cheap enough calculator anymore and certainly don’t remember how to find square root. What to do?? I Googled “what is the square root of 30,000.” That was a yardage Molly McLaughlin gave in the previous post. The answer: 173. Then I multiplied 173 by 0.9 (on iPhone calculator) to get 155 for the diameters in an inch. That’s a calculation for the wraps per inch concept. According to Ashenhurt’s Rule you should then divide the diameters by .5 for plain weave or .67 for twill. However, it looks like Molly skipped that step and took 80% of the diameters to come to 124.5 for 120 epi for her 30,000 ypp silk. Previous tips on my website explain the calculation more thoroughly. See them HERE. Here are two Tips: “A Weaving Tool: Ashenhurst’s Rule” and “Good Reasons to Use Ashenhurst’s 80% Figure”.