Saturday, December 17, 2016

A Visit with Jochen Ditterich at Sage Weavers

 


 Sage Weavers was a week later than usual this month so that we could spend  time with Jochen Ditterich who was in town visiting his son.  Jochen has been teaching weaving for many years and was recognized this year by Handwoven as one of their two handweaving teachers of the year.




 Jochen showed us a rug he wove for his son when he received his PhD.  The technique he used is called shaft switching and it allowed him to get the involved pictorial image of his son bicycling.  Unfortunately, the dog made his mark on the rug - but otherwise it has stood the test of time well.

Jochen tells us he has many hundreds of pounds of wool in his studio and from the video show we watched, he wasn't exaggerating.  In order to weave the basketweave rug shown above, he combined several ends of slightly different colored yarn.  This gives the rug a much more interesting color effect than using just one color.


Here is an airy scarf woven in silk using bead leno as the weaving technique.  Note the nice little picot edging along the scarf.


 
Another sumptuous piece - this time a shawl woven in cashmere.

 
And, then on to Jochen's standby scarves - rayon chenille warp and weft.  No two are the same and there are usually many different warp colors in each scarf


A friend made this jacket using 8 of Jochen's chenille scarves.  A real luxury piece.

We enjoyed the afternoon talking and sharing with Jochen and hope that he will let us know when he is in Reno again so that we can get together again.  We had hoped he would be moving to Reno, but he tells us not now.  He has too many looms and too much yarn to move.   I guess most of us can identify with his dilemma.
 
Read more about Jochen here at his website and take a look at this video made by a friend of him in his home studio in Grand Rapids, MI.  https://youtu.be/lsVmPkKN1vQ

1 comment:

  1. It was a very good meeting and I especially enjoyed seeing Jochen's weavings

    ReplyDelete