To Boldly Go...

Lately, I have been fascinated with an article from WeaveZine - Florida Fantasy, by Jannie Taylor, in the Fall 2008 issue. I've got this incredible loom with a multitude of harnesses, and we all know that one of the unspoken weaving rules is that you MUST use all of your harnesses whenever possible.

The article describes a fabric the author wove with images of palm trees and flamingos in double two-tie unit weave. Did I mention that a few years back I was totally consumed with double two-tie unit weave?! At the time, however, I didn't have all of these shafts - it was after I had to sell my AVL, so I only had an 8 shaft floor loom. This weave structure can really consume lots and lots of treadles, so I shelved the idea.

The good thing about ideas is that they never really go away. They eventually resurface - teased out of retirement by some sort of reminder.

So.... I got out my weaving software - Fiberworks PCW - and started to play. At first, I thought I could create a profile draft, do a block substitution for double 2 tie unit weave, and everything would be hunky dory, but it didn't really turn out that way, so I shifted strategy. I created a threading similar to the article, but using ALL of my shafts (the article is for 24 shafts). To create the design motif in the liftplan, I needed to learn how to use the sketchpad feature of PCW. Very cool, and lots of fun to play with, and neat all the different transforms available. I decided I wanted to weave an image of shuttles and spindles.

In the article, therre is a short paragraph that says "After that, there are several steps before you actually have a weaving draft: space the palms throughout the fabric, add the tabby shots, add the ties to the pattern shots, add the color, etc." This is similar to mathematical proofs that summarize pages of steps with "whence." But... the truth is, those were EXACTLY the steps I needed to take.

I discovered I could invert the pixels on the sketchpad, copy it, and paste it into shafts 3-29 on the liftplan. I edited the liftplan to alternate 1 and 2 and to lift 31 and 32 for the border. When I liked the results, I used the Weft Menu to add tabbies. Then I played with colors until I liked what I saw.

So this will be the next warp on my big loom. I have, by the way, decided to name her. I'm not a big one for naming tools, but it occurred to me that Meghan would be a good name - Meg for Megado and Han for handweaving. A stretch, I know. The bonus is that when I was pregnant many years ago, the name I had picked out if I had a daughter was Meghan. I have two sons, so the name isn't taken in our family.