Monday, September 1, 2014

September's Towel - Turned Monk's Belt

The weave for the Towel of the Month for September is another "turned" structure: that is, it's woven with the patterning in the warp, whereas the "normal" way to weave it is with the pattern formed in the weft.  This design also has some color in it ("yay - finally!" say the color-lovers, after looking at all those natural-colored linen lace weaves).  The ground warp and the weft are unbleached linen, and I am using 22/2 cottolin as the colored pattern warp.

The draft looks a little complicated, but I've tried to add a few labels to fill in the blanks.  Start by looking at the center of the diagram, where there is a sketch of the width of the towel.  From right to left, there will be 74 ends of linen threaded on shafts 1 and 2 to weave plain weave, then a stripe of the pattern, then a central area of linen plain weave, another stripe, and finally 76 ends of plain weave.

The profile draft for the stripes is at the top of the diagram.  Each square represents a sequence of 4 threads, two linen and two pattern.  From right to left, thread two units of block A, then one of B and so on.  The threading for the two blocks A and B are at the left in the diagram.  When you are sleying the reed, the pattern stripes will be sleyed double the density of the plain weave portions: if you are using a 15-dent reed, all 4 threads go in one dent.

The colors of the cottolin are indicated at the bottom.  I wasn't sure what color "bittersweet" was, so I looked it up and it seems to be a salmony orange.  Notice that although the threading of the stripe is symmetrical, the color order is not, so reverse the order for the second stripe.   Since this is a supplementary warp, you may want to beam the cottolin separately from the linen if you have a second warp beam.


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