Counting Carefully

I was warned that the last exercise in our weaving homework would be time consuming and fiddly. That warning was so right!

Unfortunately the program that powers this blog has decided to orient my picture sideways--I've tried twice to fix it and I've had no luck, so please turn your head at right angles to the screen and have a look at the fiddly, time consuming cute little pictures I did for my homework: The technical word is brocade. Each little bit of colour is a different combination of shafts raised on the loom and in between each bit of colour there's a thread of plain weaving to stabilise it. Sometimes there are two colours on one line. You can also see where I mis-counted in doing the heart shapes and missed one of those tiny little red lines, but I'd already unpicked it once to fix another mistake, so that one is going to stay there. It reminds me of counted cross stitch, which I used to do once upon a time, but somehow grew out of the patience required.

So, I guess this is an example of the detail available on an 8-shaft loom. Not my favourite so far, but there you go, I'm not really in the mood for counting carefully today.

Eight Shaft Weaving

Weaving Certificate, Year 2, Lesson 1: Introduction to Multi-Shaft Weaving:
Eight shafts, count them: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!

I'm starting to get to know my new loom. It's just like the one I used last year, except of course, being made individually by hand, it's not just like the one I used last year. I was delighted to discover that the levers that lift the shafts have turned out with different shades and textures of wood.

The theory topic for yesterday morning was "Introduction to Multi-shaft Weaving". Apparently multi-shaft, by definition, and contrary to numerical logic, means more than 4. This year we will be working with 8 shafts. The take home message, as far as I could gather, was, "expect more complexity". We will also be working with finer yarns than we did last year. So there are a few challenges to look forward to.