I got most of my weaving done on Sunday morning and then did a bit more yesterday. I'm hoping you can see on the pic that it's quite a thick textured weave. the red stripes are really like ridges in the fabric. That's because of the stuffing threads--that's the thick brown yarn you can see on the right hand side of the pic. I've raised the shafts holding those threads so you can see them more clearly. OK, so we have a woven structure on the front of the fabric, these stuffing threads in the middle and a floats on the back that trap the stuffing threads. That's how the ridges are formed. There's no stuffing in the black striped areas of the warp.
Two more interesting features
- It's woven with two shuttles: red and black in this case. Two picks of red, two picks of black, with the relevant striped areas weaving up as a plain weave in each case and the opposite colour thread disappearing as a float on the underside.
- The spots are formed by raising the stuffing threads in the middle of an area of red coloured weave. So the stuffing threads become a surface decoration.
As for weaving it, you need the heaviest beat ever. You really need to bash it to get everything to sit right. After the stresses and frustrations of the past few weeks, having something legitimate to bash into was just what I needed! Maybe that's why I got my homework done right away this time, whereas the previous homework sample sat neglected for a whole week.
Now I've finished all the samples in the Round Robin exercise other than one of the Colour and Weaves. That one's probably turned out to be the second most troublesome in the set and since I had a good go at a similar exercise done in a different yarn, I'm planning to treat it as optional.
Now I need to catch up on my Summer and Winter sampler--remember the Summer and Winter Sampler . . . hmmmm . . . and then get ready for the end of year project. Right!
No comments:
Post a Comment