Schafenfreude

I really do want to embrace sampling. And what better way than with a fabric structure that I truly know nothing about – but has incredible possibilities.

Overshot.

After finding a number of coverlet books in Jeane’s “Dead Weaver Stash”, I was overcome by Sarah’s “white hot enthusiasm” and really, really started itching to give it a try. I’d no idea whether I’d be able to find a suitable use for the fabric (other than coverlets) so that meant sampling would be a good idea! Looking around for actual samplers didn’t turn up much – there were even complaints that overshot didn’t lend itself to sampling other than pattern wefts since the threading/treadling was so complicated. More fuel for the fire.

Fortunately, I have a copy of Fiberworks (best money I’ve spent in a long time) and that would let me play around with things a bit just to see if I could put something together. The “Namedraft” function lets the user enter a phrase (8 – 40 characters) and generates a threading/treadling based on one of seven (!) alphabets. There are also four tie-ups from which to choose – Rose, Star, Transposed Rose, Transposed Star – so there are just a ton of patterns that can be generated. That got me to thinking about taking a more traditional overshot pattern and playing with both treadling and tie-ups to see if I could make a sampler. That was yesterday.

Anne Dixon’s Handweaver’s Pattern Directory has a few overshot patterns that include a few treadling suggestions – and I settled on “Star and Rose”, page 108. A little further research on Ravelry helped me choose yarn (10/2 cotton for warp and tabby weft, 8/2 wool for pattern weft) from stash and then I did a quick threading plan. 204 ends, 4-ish yard warp, sett at 20 epi. Boom.

Today I beamed and threaded, tied on and started weaving to check threading and to see if this sett/weft would give me square squares. I’m not getting hung up at all on colors. I’m just weaving. I’ll do a set with this tie-up, then I’ll do some of the two other treadlings in the book, change the tie-up, later, rinse, repeat.

I’ll likely also use some 5/2 cotton as weft – just to see the difference in fabric. Strictly traditional overshot is cotton and wool, but depending on the end use, maybe this will be better. And, understanding this might help me figure out a garment use for the resulting fabric. But the real goal is just to sample. So, Lynn – are you proud of me? I sure am. :-)

This past weekend, Jeane and I were talking about sampling. Both why it’s important and why I, personally, have such trouble doing it. When working on the shirt last year, the benefit of sampling was absolutely clear. I’d never have come up with the final fabric had I skipped that step, and I ended up with a garment that pleases me to no end. Keeping that in mind, why do I still struggle with sampling? After thinking hard about it, I settled on the fact that it’s really, really time consuming. And it means a lot of time and effort to get, well, a scrap of cloth. That’s a tiny bit less appealing than going straight to a project – or minimizing the amount of sampling that I do. That realization hatched another Crazy Idea for this coming year. Lynn, you are also a bit responsible for this. Your thought of working toward, and building, a sample book got me to wonder if we can’t all work together on this sampling thing. As each of us works on a garment, or project, I’d like to toss out the idea that we *all* sample for it and then exchange what we’ve got. For example, if I want to do something in wool, but don’t know about sett, I could hand off two sample setts while I do the third. I’d even be willing to wind/send a warp if that’d make the process go more quickly. Then we’d each weave off our portion, cut and finish and send to the other two. That way, we’d get a wide variety of samples, at different setts, and help to build out our respective sample books. Jeane even said that she’d be up for joining in. So there’s my next crazy idea. And, I’m totally in for helping you two with sampling as well. Thoughts?