Weaverly

Once upon a time I wove this black & white shawl in cotton and rayon, blocks of alternated basket weave and plain weave. Although the basic plan requires only 8 shafts, I wove it on a 16 shaft loom, so that I had the luxury of extra shafts for plain weave bands at the selvedges.

The shawl drapes well and is a pleasure to wear (as long as I am careful to keep the long floats of 16×16 basket from snagging on sharp objects). In this closeup you can see the plain weave edges ( in the left side of the photo) in beige.

I’ve always wanted to weave this structure again, and last week I put a sample warp on my 8-shaft loom. For this sample I used 8×8 basket weave alternating with plain weave. Warp is 8/2 cotton from LoftyFiber and weft is 10/2 cotton from my stash. The sample has been washed. I couldn’t get a balanced plain weave at the original sett of 24 epi. I also decided to rethread the 8/8 basket sections to 4×4. So-o-o, I cut off and rethreaded, and also resleyed the reed to 20 epi.

Still with me? On the original warp, now 20 epi, with weft in two colors of 8/2 cotton, I am alternating blocks of 4×4 basket with plain weave blocks. Without a plain weave border, it is necessary to use a floating selvedge. So far I am liking this. We’ll see how it washes up.

Meanwhile, I am thinking that the next time I try this I will reduce the color rotation in the warp to 4 and 4, to conform to the threading units.

And then I was thinking of blocks of 3×3 basket, which led me down a whole ‘nother rabbit hole:

Which led me to the following: same threading & treadling, but with a twill tieup. And a max float length of only 4. The interesting thing about this version is that by wrapping the tieup, you get 8 different versions. Fascinating.