Hills & valleys
Another EZ Dye project. I wove 4 scarves and a sample. I cut the sample up into strips to do some dye tests, to help me decide what colors to dye the scarves. I'm still dyeing samples--I cut the warp off today and will finish by the end of the week. The hard part is deciding what colors to dye them.
The dyed sample shown has the white rayon as the weft and was first dipped in Procion fuchsia, which only dyed the EZ Dye cotton. The I dipped haf of it in Cushing's direct Blue, which overdyed the fuchsia to give purple and tinted the white to give light blue. So with 2 colors in the warp and 2 dyes, there are 5 colos shown: white, black, fuchsia, blue, and purple.
Oh, the weave structure... I like the 1/3 vs. 3/1 twill for these ridged "hill & valley"scarves, but wanted something different than the usual. So I found this broken twill #2 in Davison and put it into blocks. Well, the threading is only 8 threads, so I mapped it to a straight draw for my 16 shaft loom.
Double weave bag
I have done double and triple layer cloth with pick-up before, but this is the first time I have used loom controlled effects with blocks
illustration of blocks on 15 shafts
I've created a draft that I hope will illustrate some of the things you can do. The first five treadles show what happens if you use the same pattern in blocks 1-5, 6-10, and 11-15: you get an allover pattern. So if you want to weave plain satin, or a 2/3 twill, or anything at all that's weavable on a 5-shaft straight draw pattern, you can do it.
The second five treadles show what happens if you use three different patterns for shafts 1-5, 6-10, and 11-15. Shafts 1-5 are tied up for satin, 6-10 are tied up for twill, 11-15 are tied up in a pattern I made up. If you repeat this treadling, you get satin on shafts 1-5, twill on 6-10, and my made-up pattern on 11-15.
The last ten treadles show how you can alternate blocks to create a checkerboard pattern rather than stripes. Treadles 11-15 and 16-20 are reverses of each other (what was up is down, what was down is up). By alternating them you can get a checkerboard pattern.
You don't have to use inverses for creating alternating blocks. You can alternate any treadling you like, e.g. you could alternate treadles 1-5, then 16-20, then 6-10, etc. You'd get a mishmash pattern but it would work.
PM me if this is confusing!
Log cabin
The draft was provided by Su Butler because I was struggling to understand the color-and-weave effect formed when using a log cabin draft. This draft uses a one block, 7 thread pattern that repeats across the entire project.
