It’s several years now that I know the work of Sirko Galz from the Handweberei Galz in Germany. My first wrap from him was a very heavy cottolin wrap with a change of the weft colour in the middle. I owned another semi-custom, started two customs and still own one of those, in heart weave, with matching loop.
It was out of question for me that I’d be super interested in his newest project: creating a handwoven baby wrap on a jacquard loom! Jacquard is a special weaving technique with the evolvement of the pattern mechanised. The pattern is punched into cardboards by hand and the punchboards will than operate the complicated mechanic.
The loom is still operated by hand why it’s still called handwoven and the weaver still has to be aware of failures. Jacquard is a well-known technique with machine wovens but you won’t find it very often with a handweaver.
It was sheer luck that Sirko Galz could buy one of the last wooden jacquard looms in october 2015. The loom measures 3 meters in width, 2 meters in depth and another 3(!) meters in height!
Snow covered landscape
Sirko Galz decided to expand his weaving work of baby wraps and will be doing some more tests to find out about the ideal warp density. Midwinter’s Silence is his first baby wrap project on the jacquard loom. He says about it:
I’ve chosen the colours by imagining a snow covered landscape during winter season where sunbeams shine through the trees and frost patterns are visible on the windows.
The texture is an 8-linked atlas (please correct me if I am using the wrong terms here) which leaves a pretty homogeneous surface. While the „right“ side is dominated by the warp, the „wrong“ dominated by the weft. The pattern evolves similar to a damask through the change of the warp- and weft-atlas. As weaving material Sirko Galz used a high quality mercerised cotton.
Shimmering & soft but rather heavy
The result is a density of approx 280 gsm. The wrap is mid-thick, pretty heavy, shimmering and soft. I got a short piece of it with a light pink weft and it turned out really beautiful. I also love the white weft that Sirko Galz used because it’s perfect for the image he created for „Midwinter’s Silence“. I’ve been sewing a Ring-Sling out of my piece and am really happy with this beauty. Look at my pictures – it’s amazing!
Due to it’s rather high density, the baby wrap that’s travelling as a tester, isn’t easy to wrap with and tighten, at least not in a Ruck as a colleague of mine stated. I just did a short FWCC for which it was totally okay but I can imagine that the wrap is more perfect with toddlers and experienced wrappers than newborns and beginners.
