January's towel of the month - weaving!

Yay!  all sleyed, ready to weave...

I raised shaft one, and checked that I had every other warp raised.  This was easy to see since I used a 15-dent reed: one yarn should be through each dent in the reed.  I raised all the other shafts (two through four) and all the other warps came up, looking similiar - one per dent.

Then I raised just shaft two, and checked that it was the pattern threaded for that shaft, in little groups of two: first six groups, then three spaced out, then five, then three...looked good.  Similarly with shafts three and four.  I tied up the treadles for weaving, and feeling smug that I didn't have any threading errors, raised the first shed to put in a header...and snapped a warp yarn. Presumably it was a threading error, but we'll never know since it came right out of the heddle it was in.  So I repaired it and started weaving.

I wove a couple inches of plain weave for my hem, then inserted a piece of rug warp that I'll remove after it comes off the loom, to make a line for my

hemstitching.

Then I started watching the pattern appear.  It's an attractive pattern with a square field formed by the five groups of 2s and 3s, and a sort of an oval leaf shape in a star pattern.  I was happily weaving along thinking how nice it was to weave something that went so fast, when I noticed the right selvedge warp starting to wear.  I was getting too much draw-in.  So I sistered in another edge warp, and "bubbled" my weft more to get the draw-in to lessen.

Plain weave in this threading is formed by raising shaft one (foundation threads), versus all the other shafts (pattern threads) alternately.  You can see by studying the tie-up in the draft that the "spot" in spot Bronson is formed by leaving one pattern shaft lowered while the other shafts continue to raise to make plain weave, causing the weft to float over the 2 or 3 threads that are on the lowered shaft.  On the reverse side, those warp threads float correspondingly as warp floats.  And between them are another couple of layers of threads of warp and weft left just passing across each other, not woven.  These layers of non-interlaced yarns tend to smoosh together and form the spot or bump that makes the pattern.

In her book Handwoven Laces, Donna Muller devotes an entire chapter to spot Bronson.  She discusses the difference in structure and threading from huck spots, and how to use this structure to design your own patterns.

Are you enjoying weaving along in spot Bronson?