Stumbling blocks to stepping stones

Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don't quit. - Conrad Hilton

Another idea I got from one of the students' projects in my class was to use both interlinking and interlacing in the same piece.  In addition, I want to also use both of these with loom-weaving.  I warped up a narrow width on my loom to test my idea.  The two samples in the photo below have a woven length made with the loom, then interlaced sprang, then interlinked sprang (and of course then the mirror image of the sprang - interlinked then interlaced), and finally another length of regular weaving.

The top sample has some of the warps omitted from the sprang section (and later cut off), so the sprang section is narrower.  I had omitted the green warps because my brain took a vacation and I was thinking that all the warps from my weaving would turn 45 degrees so they would be too close together.  What actually happens, though, is that yes, half the warps make a turn, but the other half turns the other way and acts like weft to the first half (and vice versa).  I must admit this is one of my many V-8 moments.

So for the sample in the bottom of the photo, I didn't omit those warps.  That of course messed up my carefully-planned color sequence but the size is more what I wanted.  There are some interesting accidental patterns happening, too; the red and gold area has sort of a houndstooth going on.

So then I thought, what if I use a loom weave denser than the plain weave in the above samples, like a twill.  I could make the sett even closer, and my interlaced portion won't be so open.  I want it closer to a piece of plain weave fabric set on the bias.  So I put a 3/1 twill on the loom, and...

...well, that was certainly not what I was after.  The interlaced sprang is now all lumpy and "gathered".  It wants to be much wider than the woven portion, even in a relaxed state.  What I learned is that spacing the woven portion closer does not encourage the interlaced area to have a spacing anything like a loom-woven weave.  But it does have some potential dimensional appeal:

Fodder for a future project, perhaps.  For the project at hand, it's back to the plain weave.  And for my experimentation, rather than a failure, I now have a new bit of knowledge and another aspect to explore.