Remember this project? From July? Well, seeing the Wood and Woven merchant at Gulf Wars reminded me that I was OH-SO-CLOSE to having my own 5 yards of 20" wide diamond twill, without paying $30/yard for it. It is cotton, but still…
Magical, watching the pattern appear. If one didn't know about all the painstaking threading, it would seem easy. Though, see those loose threads? They're loose because I'd made a threading error, and at first the pattern showed up like this:
Can you see the error? Hint, it's dead center. Look for where the diamonds don't line up. Here's a help:
A bit left of center in this picture is an incomplete diamond, and, if you look closely, you can see two pairs of doubled threads. If I'd continued weaving this, this error would have repeated all the way down the whole 5 yard length, creating a jog in the pattern. Ick. What to do?
Well, it's nice to be learning on slick cotton, and find the mistake soon. You untie the warp threads, pull them out of the woven piece, re-thread them through the correct heddles, and weave them back, that's what you do.
Kind of scary, but I told myself "it's like frogging knitting", and pressed on. The worst thing would have been that I'd somehow gotten off the entire repeat sequence, which meant that not only these six threads were wrong, but there was no way to put them in right and have the diamonds meet up again, but fortunately that didn't happen. As I thought about it more, I realized it didn't happen because I took the extra step of dividing up my threads and heddles into repeats of twelve, per my pattern, so there was a consistent measure to return to.
I wove another foot after supper last night, and realized how to dance the treadles to keep up with where I am in the pattern, so I'm getting up some speed. I'm not sure what to do with this fabric. I could make a Viking apron with it, and actually match the Viking occasionally, but purple's not my favorite. I could make a very nice present out of it. I could perhaps sell it. I have a lot of colored cotton, and want to play around with trim next – I figure I can crank out 4 pieces of 4" trim at the same time, in the same structure, but in different colorways.
Anybody have any orders?
Their Highnesses are making a heavy push to up the quality of our gift baskets to other kingdoms. Seriously, if you saw what other kingdoms were giving us vs what we give in exchange you’d be mortified. Some hand-woven yardage would make an excellent contribution.
$30/yard? Seriously?? I might have to think of my encore career post-retirement . . . . (anyone want to be my agent?)
Trim is much fun to weave. The problem with what you describe (doing several pieces at once) is that the edges won’t be selvages. But for really great trim, go to the Davidson book, pick out a nicely complicated twill (3/1 twill have more variations) and thread up one repeat, plus maybe a stripe on each side (you might be able to match some documented trim). You only have to warp about 30 ends. I just used a belt shuttle to both weave and press in the weft rather than using the beater, so it goes pretty fast. I don’t know if you ever saw the trim on Julie’s black-and-red garb at San Luis–but that’s how I made the trim.