Spranging over fabric now holding together

Doubleweave & Sprang Yardage on the Loom

After the last experiment I decided I needed to add a shaft, so I can then get the warps to weave on the back of the fabric and not just float there, so that there's sprang on the front, plain weave in the middle, and a looser plain weave with half the warp ends on the back. This piece took 4 shafts for each of 2 regular doubleweave blocks, plus 5 shafts for the sprang block: 13 total shafts.

This piece is about navigation, hence the sort of nautical color scheme.  The warp block stripes are all in light and dark blue for contrast. For the weft stripe pattern, I looked at a map of the world, and wrote down the names of countries or regions in each of 24 15-degree-longitude slices of the earth.  Then, thinking of each region, I picked a stripe sequence and colors to fill a 4-1/2" length of fabric in 1/2" increments.

Reverse of Finished Fabric Showing Looser Plain Weave

This method of weaving based on time intervals is in reference to the title of the piece, "Dead Reckoning", which is a navigational method of multiplying your speed in the water along a bearing by time elapsed, which traditionally is the only way to figure your change in longitude when out in the ocean.  Further, the sprang motifs remind me of an hourglass, a measure of time and a symbol of time passing and our eventual mortality, a play on the word "dead". And finally, sprang is a method of constructing hammocks, a reference to the custom of burying dead sailors at sea in their hammocks.