Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Serendipitous Laziness - A Project in Plain Weave with Sprang

I'm weaving a piece in plain weave, with a large section left unwoven to work in sprang once it is off the loom.  This weekend I was hemstitching the border of this section, and while my hands were stitching my brain was processing the project's progress and plan forward.

The original plan was to use every 4th warp yarn to sprang, and the other 3/4 would just be snipped off and left as a little fringe.  But I decided that the sprang would be too open that way; I really should use the half-warp like I've done before on the doubleweave pieces.  But if I do that, the fringe will be too sparse, and I never was really happy with that solution in the first place.  If I could only fold the unused warps to the back side of the fabric... then the aha! happened: I realized I could indeed fold them back if I could weave them into a fabric layer of their own behind the sprang warps.  And here's where serendipity helped out:  I had threaded using 8 shafts, even though I could do plain weave using only 2, because I didn't have enough heddles on any one shaft, and if there's one thing (and I think the only one thing) that I dislike about the weaving process, that one thing is moving heddles between harness frames.

So, simple enough to just tie up a couple more treadles to always lift my sprang warps, and weave plain weave with the ones that won't be used.  This bit of fabric is weft-dominant and kind of loosey-goosey, but I think it will do the trick to allow the flap to be pressed back and tacked to the fabric like a little facing.

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