Years ago I heard about a kind of cloth that was woven twice. I had to try it—just from hear say. This was my first experiment. I realized that it wouldn’t work but I thought it looked interesting, so I had it framed. However, it shows what the first weaving would look like.
The first weave (of the twice woven) is a mat. Individual small warps are woven as wefts. The weaving squeezes threads in a pattern. Dye could not penetrate where the threads were squeezed, in other words those areas would resist the dye and you would end up with stripes. There are 4 warps in the woven mat here.
The colorful threads are the strings tying the crosses in the warps. They keep the threads in order.
Instead of individual mats, I wove plain weave between two mats here. You can see where the cross ties are woven in.
Here you can see areas where the threads were squeezed by the weaving and then where I began to unweave the mat to show the white areas which were resisted by the squeezing of the threads in the warps.
Another area where I began taking out the original threads of the first weaving showing what was resisted when I dyed the mat.
Here is a warp after the mat was unwoven that shows the stripes of the dyed and the resisted areas.
In this diagram the warps are being resisted in the mat.
Here the weft threads are being woven for the resist. Often both are in one textile.
Here is a photo of a piece I bought when we visited the weavers in Japan.
Seeing this process in the real was a dream of a lifetime! Each mat was one thread in the repeat.