Italian viscose dress fabric modelled by Laia
3 textiles that inspired me recently – and their analysis
by handwoven textile designer Anna Champeney (nw Spain)
A Viscose dress fabric
This industrial dress fabric looks a bit like a print but it is in fact woven.
It´s a lovely, high quality Italian viscose fabric and my sister-in-law was wearing it when I visited her recently in Barcelona!
You could tell the quality of the fabric by its sheer weight and its drape.
The fabric is in fact a double weave fabric – I would say woven on a Jacquard loom – and in just two colours. This goes some way to explaining its superior drape, its weight, and the fact that each side is the exact reverse of the other and the circles can be pulled apart slightly to reveal two separate layers. As I specialise in designing hand-woven double weave fabric cushions and scarves in my own studio doubleweave cloth always attracts my attention.
I – and most other hand-weavers – don´t weave anything as complex structurally on my loom because our looms are different. The fact that the design includes circles is a dead giveaway – incidentally you need a lot more than 8 shafts to weave circles in doubleweave although I haven´t worked out just how many you´d need!
You can see there has been some movement of the threads within the fabric by looking at the circles. As the yarns are so fine you don´t notice this in the final garment and it doesn´t affect its performance. Double weave fabric means that each separate face can have a slightly more open sett than normal (a slighly lower number of warp ends and weft picks per cm) because the fabric is reinforced by the intersections with the second layer. This slightly more open sett in double weave makes it les stiff and hence it drapes better.
Although I can´t match the complexity of the doubleweave zigzag and circular design in my handwovens I can really appreciate the graphic quality of the design and use that to inspire me. It would be easy enough to design a double weave warp with two colours with bold squares, rectangles and colour affects to add complexity. And I could combine plainweave on one side of the fabric and twill on the other on my 8 or 12 shaft loom with no problem. Handweaving gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of more spontaneous or assymmetrica design compared to industrial fabrics.
Woven textile analysis and designing – book some holiday tuition with Anna Champeney Estudio Textil in north Spain, enjoy time out in a weaving retreat or spend a week at the studio and hire a loom. Contact us with your ideas.
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