Here's the draft for this project. If you click on the image you should be able to open it larger. I was able to open January's draft on my tablet and use it right at the loom for threading.
I included the drawdown in this draft so you can see the pattern. It looks sort of like a four-leaf clover when depicted in green like this. If you do yours in another color it might make a nice floral motif.
Planning for three towels, and backing off on my conservative estimate for loom waste, I will measure my warp ends to be 1.1 x (3 x 38") + 20" = about 145", or just over 4 yards. Since it seemed to work well before, I will again measure it in 5 groups of 4 inches (120 ends each) or less.
Repeat the first 38 ends of the threading, fifteen times, then thread the other 25 ends to balance out the pattern for a total of 595 ends.
Make sure to "use tabby" when weaving, as usual for overshot. Repeating the entire treadling sequence shown will make the wider pattern band. The narrower band in the photo looks to be pattern picks 6 through 15 or possibly 5 through 16.
Weave along and get a chance to win the Towel of the Month! You do not have to weave every month, just the towels that interest you. If you are weaving along, please leave a comment to let us all know. Put a link or url in the comment to a photo (on your Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, your blog etc.) of your work in progress. Deadline to post you r comment is midnight GMT Mar 31, 2014.
It's the end of March, the Towel of the Month is finished, and one of them is on its way to my next test kitchen!
I did some rearranging in my house, and now my 16 shaft Macomber loom lives in a place with more light.
Again I am not getting a balanced weave, so the design is turning out much taller in the warp direction than was suggested by the draft I posted, but I like this shape better.
This piece entitled "Predator" was juried into the Complex Weavers show
Complexity, so it is leaving to go traveling for a few months. First
it's off to Nebraska, at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln for a
month-long show. Then to Washington state for the weekend of the
Complex Weavers seminars in June. Finally it goes to Providence, Rhode
Island, coincident with Convergence, the biennial national conference
for handweavers, spinners and dyers by the Handweavers Guild of
America. My piece and the other Complex Weavers fiber art will be on
exhibit on the following dates:
by Marguerite Porter Davison, chapters 13, 15, 17 and maybe others are examples of these smaller designs. In her book Weaving Overshot: Redesigning the Tradition
, Donna Sullivan shows examples of miniatures by both Estes and Hayes. In her section on altering scale, she refers to many patterns already reproduced in miniature, and then describes the process of reducing the size of a pattern by removing pairs of threads. Carol Strickler, in A Weaver's Book of 8-Shaft Patterns: From the Friends of Handwoven
, gives a rule of thumb for miniaturizing overshot. Whether reduced from a larger design or made "from scratch" by using shorter blocks, the miniature draft ends up as Barrett describes as point and progressing twill threading. A final clue comes from Estes, where she says a design has been miniaturized when it has been reduced to the point where it cannot re reduced further without losing the character of its pattern form.
, in which the concept of miniaturization is taken to the extreme for the purpose of making textiles appropriate in scale for dollhouse furnishings.
The drafts shown here are one example by Bertha G. Hayes of a miniaturization she named "Gallinger Gem". The first image is the draft of a larger pattern, the second one the miniature version of it. There is a more recent publication of Hayes' overshot patterns by Norma Smayda, Weaving Designs By Bertha Gray Hayes: Miniature Overshot Patterns
