Passementerie is the art of making braids, fringes, tassels and edgings for cloth or furnishings: think of those heavily fringed lampshades and swanky tasselled tie-backs around curtains in stately homes. On Heritage Craft’s Red List it’s an endangered craft, which means there are serious concerns about its ongoing viability.
It’s not really my style interiors-wise, but I’ve been following Elizabeth Ashdown on Instagram for a while, dazzled by her textures and contemporary use of colour. So when she announced that she was offering a workshop at West Dean’s London site I was intrigued and booked a place.
Week 1
On entering the classroom we were greeted with a wonderful range of samples and materials – a luscious riot of colour – along with copies of her beautiful book.
All these samples were woven on a loom – some are warp faced (images 2 and 3), others were weft faced (image 4). We only wove weft-faced pieces in the workshop due to the type of looms we were using.
When I say looms, they were essentially like wooden picture frames. This was a relief, as I’m a bit fazed by the complexity of setting up a loom. This was much simpler – winding the wool around the frame and weaving a couple of foundation rows. As you can see from the image below, we set up two warps on the same frame.
Elizabeth (or Libby as she likes to be known) provided an excellent handout with diagrams of five different passementerie designs.
The first one featured scallops on one side and picots on the other. These are loops that protrude from each edge, formed by using a decorative weft. In my sample below, the smaller picots are on the left, larger scallops on the right.
The main challenge was trying to keep the edges of the braid straight and parallel – you can see that mine is getting a bit narrower as the weaving proceeds!
In the afternoon we used the second warp to weave a mirrored crête design, using two decorative wefts, so slightly more complicated. For one of my decorative wefts I used some cordage I’d made from day lily. You can see the bits of fibre shedding off beneath in the photo below.
Homework
Of course, my first thought was whether it would be possible to create this type of structure in 3D – for example, joined into a tube. But the warp has to be woven flat, and it loses tension as soon as it is taken off the loom, so this would be tricky.
We had a week’s break until the second part of the course. There was no homework set, but I thought I would try creating a similar structure using twining, with paper string that has enough body to support a more structural piece. It takes longer to make, because twining uses two active weavers, each of which has to be wrapped around each warp thread. But it can be joined, and results in a sturdy piece that can hold its own weight.
Here’s a more freeform fun little piece inspired by picots and scallops.
I also had a go at weaving one of Libby’s patterns that we would not be doing in class. This is a crête design with two decorative wefts. I used cotton yarn and PET plastic, made from recycled plastic bottles.
Week 2
The second week we started with an interconnected crête, using two warps and four decorative wefts. Here are a couple of samples made by Libby.
As before, we created two warps, but this time wove them both at the same time so that we could interlink the decorative wefts as we went along. Here’s my finished piece.
In the afternoon we moved on to fringes, again using two warps. Here are Libby’s samples.
And here’s my finished piece.
All in all it was an excellent course. Libby was an enthusiastic tutor and provided very clear handouts and plenty of different materials to play with. There were even some cord winding machines where we could create our own cords by combining different fibres. It was a lot quicker than making cordage by hand! 😉
Further experiments
I’m intrigued by the possibilities of this technique. Since the workshop ended I have tried (of course!) making a “double decker” twined circular piece inspired by the interconnected crête. Simply interlinking the decorative wefts did not provide enough support, so I knotted the wefts where they crossed over.
Going back to weaving on the frame loom, I’ve also experimented with creating weft loops at the front instead of at the sides. There’s no reason I can see why they couldn’t be at the back as well.
Lots of potential for experimenting here!
