B-Side Magic

It can be easy to think that other weavers know exactly what they are doing and that it's just you that sometimes fumbles. Rest assured that even an experienced weaver such as Jennifer Moore has had her share of surprises when she has removed doubleweave pieces from the loom. -Susan

I became intrigued with the concept of doubleweave when I was still a beginning weaver in the early 1980s. It wasn’t so much the idea of having two different sides of a textile that captured my imagination as it was the idea that through layer exchange and pick-up, I could play the colors of one layer against a different set of colors on the other layer.

I started with a sampler and learned the basic techniques of weaving two layers: folded cloth and tubular weaving. Then, through quite a bit of trial and error, I practiced some basic pick-up until I felt that I understood how to do it correctly. I wove my sampler with a solid light layer and a solid dark layer, so the opposite side of the weaving looked the same as the face side but with the colors reversed. No big surprises there.

Once I had the sampler under my belt, I immediately wanted to jump in and weave a “real” doubleweave piece with lots of colors. Remembering how we created rainbow-colored pictures on black backgrounds with crayons and India ink in grade school, I planned a piece with one solid black layer and one layer with a spectrum of 12 colors in pearl cotton moving from one to the next across the width of the warp and then used the same colors in the same sequence for the colored layer’s weft. I drew a fairly simple geometric design on graph paper—something that wouldn’t be overly challenging for my first foray into a larger-scale pick-up piece.

Square Dance by Jennifer Moore, 13.5" × 15.5"; side A, left and side B, right. PHOTOS BY CAROLYN WRIGHT

The weaving proceeded slowly but smoothly enough, and bit by bit, the design emerged as I had planned it. Finally, the big moment came when I reached the end, unrolled the weaving, and cut it from my loom. When I laid it out and looked at the side that had been the upper surface on the loom, I was happy enough. I might have liked some smoother transitions from one color to the next, but I felt pretty good about my first piece from a limited stash of yarn.

Then I turned the weaving over and was utterly stunned to find a far more interesting and complex composition on the other side. It was as if a team of elves had been weaving away on the other side of the cloth unbeknownst to me, maybe while I was sleeping at night as in a fairy tale. This, of course, became the front side of the weaving.

This experience has been at the core of my work in doubleweave during the 36 years that have passed since I wove that first piece. While I feel I have gained a more refined sense of design and color, and I have a somewhat better idea of what might happen on the underside of a piece (not to mention a larger stash of colors to work with), I never really know what the underside is going to look like until I take the weaving off the loom and turn it over. I keep an open mind as to which side will be the front and even consider turning it sideways or upside down. I love the surprise that I get every time, and this is one of the joys that keeps me inspired to keep working in doubleweave.

Magic Carpet IV by Jennifer Moore, 9.5" × 12.5"; side A, left and side B, right. PHOTOS BY DANIEL QUAT

Sometimes, there is clearly one side of a weaving that I want to be seen, and I will stretch the weaving like a canvas and frame it. Other times, I want both sides to show, and this presents challenges. I have experimented with various hanging devices that enable a piece to be turned over with no hardware showing from either side. I have had pieces suspended from the center of a gallery so that people can walk around them and see them from any angle. Another solution is to suspend a textile between two pieces of glass. One of my favorite solutions was for a series of miniature pieces that I wove based on a fractal design. For a couple of them, I had a woodworker friend build stands that the pieces could hang from. Two others in the series hang by a small brass rod and are set into a frame with a pair of pins. They can then be lifted out and turned over so they can be shown from either side.

While doubleweave is a natural technique for creating textiles with different appearances on the two sides, most types of weaving have some difference in structure or coloration from one side to the other, and it is worth considering which one or both (!) you want to see.

It’s always good to keep an open mind and be able to see both sides of a story. That is just as true in weaving as it is in life.