Experiments with Shadow Weave

 Reno Fiber Guild and friends has been involved in a study group about shadow weave.  I decided to keep my experiment for the group to an 8 shaft draft that is available on the 1000+ Pattern book by Marian Powell.  All of the towels were woven using the 8 shaft profiles from  8-28 on page 235 of the book.  The profile shown is 8-28-1 and is tromp as writ.  In the book there are 12 different treadlings for this design and I used quite a few and incorporated another treadling from another pattern as well.

Since I have enough shafts, I added a basketweave selvedge for simplicity in weaving with two shuttles. After converting the profile to a draft, a portion of the threading is as follows.  The basketweave selvedge threading isn't shown in this draft.

The warp was alternating dark green and pale gray.  Each towel had two color wefts that were different from the warp. 

It was difficult for me to get good photos of the towels that follow, but I hope you can see that many possibilities were available with one threading.  I didn't even come near to exhausting the different patterns.    Also note that since these are actual pieces of cloth, there are some distortions in the photos of the pattern because the cloth was not absolutely flat.    Click on each photo to get an enlarged view.

It would have been fun to see what these patterns would look like in black and white, but it was also fun to play with all sorts of colors to see what I could get by with.  The more value contrast, the better but I didn't find any weft colors that I couldn't make work as long as the value was much different.  Bright yellows and chartreuse were both favorites, along with some very bright orange.  Quite a fun project.