Hi there,

I've been working on planning a twill sampler gamp.  It's coming along well, but before I start my loom set up, I've run into a few questions.  My sampler is small, only 192 ends total, and I'll be weaving it on my 4-harness table loom.  I'll be using 8/2 cotton with a 2-2 sley in a 12 dent reed (from my samples, it seems as though this will give me about 26 epi).  My threading includes a mixure of straight twill, 8-end point twill, Bell Celtic, 6-end point twill, advancing twill, and herringbone.  My question lies in dividing up the heddles on the harnesses.  At first I was thinking I'd do 48 on each (48x4=192), but then I realized that due to my threading, things don't come out evenly (almost, but not quite).  Does anyone have an easy way to calculate how many I should put on each?  I only have about 197 heddles total (I should order more) so I have enough for my project but don't have a lot of wiggle room.

My second question is about floating selveges.  I've heard that this is a way to get nice edges on twills.  Any pointers?

I'm also curious if anyone has any tips on creating a warp with stripes.  My first warp had equal sized stripes of two colors, but I'm hoping to get a bit more complicated for this project-- stripes of varying widths in 3 colors, using various color to separate the different twill threading patterns.

I can attach my draft if it would be helpful to see where I'm at.

Thank you!

Comments

Wed, 03/30/2016 - 01:40

sandra.eberhar…

I use weaving software to tell me how many heddles I need on each shaft.  You can take the heddle count from your draft and multiply it times the pattern reps you have, that will be your heddle count.  I like to use floating selvedges; I warp them with the rest of the warp and when they start to become slack (take in is less than the rest of the warp) I weight them with S-hooks and weights from the back of the loom.

Wed, 03/30/2016 - 11:44

woolybat

That's exactly what I ended up doing!  I've very new to using Fiberworks, so I didn't know it had those capabilities.  So glad that it does!

As for the selvedges, I decided to try a basket weave on the edges, just to make things easy.  This will only be the 4th warp I've made, and I'm going to attempt to make it multicolored, so I think I may have enough new things going on at once already!  Maybe next time I'll patch in a new skill, like the floating selvedges.  

My only wonder now is how to wind the warp and warp the loom-- I've been doing it front to back, but it seems like a lot of people do it back to front when working with lots of colors.  Does anyone have any thoughts on this?  I may just go for it front to back, and see how it goes...