Sunday, April 25, 2010

Double Weave Sample


I am in a small study group that is working with the book Doubleweave on Four to Eight Shafts by Ursina Arn-Grischott.  This wonderful book has lots of  intriguing photos of wonderful double weave cloth but you are left to figure out the drafts for individual pieces yourself.  The book does go into extensive detail about tie ups, threading and treadling, so I'm not selling it short there.  It is just rather frustrating to see a piece and wonder how it was done and not yet have the skills to put it into a draft.

One of our members (Dottie Smith)  has done more double weave than I have and set a challenge for herself to figure out the draft for a three color sample on page 68.  The different part of this sample is the log cabin design in the center.  Dottie put together a detailed set of instructions that showed us each block of  face and back cloth, which shafts it was using and the color sequence for the warp.  Since it was all so nicely laid out for me, I volunteered to weave samples for everyone in our study group.  The draft performed perfectly.  I've photographed three of the samples below.  What a dummy I was not to have photographed the back, which isn't so attractive color-wise.  But who cares about the back -- it's the face cloth that is so neat.


Two shafts for each block of face cloth and two shafts for each block of back cloth means eight shafts needed to weave this.  Kinda fun, don't you think?  And Dottie is a genius for figuring it out.  I have torn her draft instructions apart and have everything written out  for future drafting on my own.  The block thing seems fairly straight forward and I can follow a draft without any problems.  The problem I seem to have is playing with colors and getting the solid color blocks where I want them. 

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