Sunday, May 6, 2012

I step off to explore spranging within weaving

After the sprang and doubleweave bag, I wanted to explore further combining weaving with sprang. Especially multishaft structures in the same piece as sprang. I wanted to try inserting sprang into "windows" left in the weaving by leaving some warps unwoven in the middle of the width of the piece. I also wanted to see if this would work over a warp several yards long. So I set up a relatively complex twill pattern with some stripes of straight lines separating the twill sections. My thought was to sprang the twill sections between the lines.

I wanted to be able to sprang any section whenever I chose while weaving, so each would have to basically have its own warp beam. The solution here was to weight the warp sections instead of beaming them. The stripes of non-twill could be beamed since I didn't intend to sprang them, but the twill sections needed to be weighted. However, somehow as I was measurring the warp, I forgot about the section weighting requirement and measured a number of ends per section that had nothing to do with my design. I realized this at some time during the setup. but because the warp was so long, I couldn't think of a safe way to regroup the sections.  So I just proceeded on with the weaving experiment.  Here it is in progress.  You can see I have two shuttles going at this point, leaving some warps unwoven in a "window" (upper part of photo), and another "window" that I have already worked in sprang.  Can you see the stripe running right into the window?  That wasn't the original concept.

The piece isn't successful for several reasons. The spranged sections didn't relate to my weaving structure. The yarns I chose were just some undesireable ones I wanted to use up. The colors are ugly, they have rayon in them so they are a little slinky, and the one I chose for warp is a sort of cable, so it doesn't show the sprang well.  This also made the sprang difficult to work, because it was hard to tell what was a whole yarn rather than one cable ply.

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