February's Towel of the Month - the Pattern and Draft

Here's the draft for February's Towel of the Month.  Like January's towel, it is again sett at 30 epi if you are using the 40/2 linen.

The linen warps are threaded on shafts 1 and 2 and make the plain weave ground, so this structure is heavy on those two shafts.  Shafts 3 and 4 are only used for the cottolin pattern warp.

Turned Summer & Winter is "turned" because instead of a supplementary weft forming the pattern, it's a supplementary warp.  To weave, you only need to use one shuttle with the ground weft.  The supplementary warp is threaded in the borders, and sleyed in with the ground warp as indicated in the draft, so that the warp is double the density in the border sections.  The marks in the draft are if you are using a 15-dent reed.

With 4 shafts, there is only one pattern block; that is, the pattern area works together as a unit when controlled only with the loom.  There are only two things you can make it do using only the loom: weave the pattern floats on the front/top of the fabric, or weave the floats on the back/bottom side.  This is how the weaving will start out: weave the floats on the back for a while, then on the front making a red rectangle in the corners of the towel, then float on the back again.  Then we'll start the patterning, which is done with pick-up.  By picking up the pattern, we will cause select pattern warps to float on the front while the rest float on the back.

That's the basic flow of the draft; we'll go over it in more detail when we get to each step.

Weave along and get a chance to win the Towel of the Month!  If you are weaving along, please leave a comment to let us all know.  Put a link or url in the comment to a photo (on your Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, your blog etc.) of your work in progress. Deadline is midnight GMT Feb 28, 2014.