After two days of plugging along on these towels, I think I’m finally starting to get a rhythm in the treadling and the color changes. The structure is still just not sinking in and it’ll probably require going back to straight-up Summer and Winter before I really get my head around it. But, I like how they’re looking so far.
The first towel made strict use of the draft as published, but with the second, I started experimenting with color order. Given the length of warp I have available, there’s plenty of opportunity to keep experimenting and I’ll start that with the next one.
The other thing that’s bothering me a bit is that the pattern floats aren’t really organizing themselves well. I need to beat quite firmly in order to get the ppi I’m after and that occasionally ends up pushing a float up and over the tabby pick just below it. Like this:
The draft implies that the blocks with the long, horizontal float should be a bit more open. I’ve experimented quite a bit with weft tension and altering my beat (open shed, closed shed, closed with a hard beat, open with a hard beat, closed double-beat, and on and on) but any variation that includes carefully placing the weft, rather than beating, results in too few picks per inch. So, onward with the simplest plan I have – keep weaving and then see what happens in the finishing. I know they’ll change a lot, cotton always does! That’s part of the fun – they just need to go faster.
Best of all, this warp is giving me a number of ideas for future exploration. I’d like to do this again as standard 4-block Summer and Winter, and also as Crackle. The latter keeps me on four shafts, but since the Gilmore has eight, it’s not an issue to thread the four-block version. That’ll have to be another warp, and perhaps my first for the Complex Weavers study group.
In the mean time, it’s back to spinning cotton. I’ve at least another eight ounces to go.