Light and Airy Summer Weaving

Memorial Day being the unofficial start of summer here, I have started my summer project which is to learn about gauze (crossed-warp) weaving, also called leno weave (there's a whole digression on the terms but many people use them interchangeably).  The movement that the warp ends make is similar to sprang, except that a weft is thrown to hold the twists in place.

I got a copy of the 1980 Shuttle Craft Guild Monograph #32 Doup Leno by Hella Skowronski and Sylvia Tacker, and I plan to go through it like a textbook.

This sample is the first "exercise", a simple threading the same all across the width of the warp, 1/1 twists in pairs, all in the same direction.  It is 10/2 cotton.  I set it at 16 epi based on an old article on leno by Mary Meigs Atwater in her Shuttle Craft Bulletin, where she suggests that a warp setting of 2/3 the "normal" is appropriate for leno.  The next sample will be at 20 epi as a comparison.

Weaving this sample, I learned there is quite a variety of treadling variations possible, basically varying the number of plain weave picks before the twisted pairs return to their original position.  That number can be anything from zero to several.