More Taquete Experimenting

Today I cut off the taquete warp from the David loom. I've secured ends and the results are now in the washing machine, but before I tossed them in there, I took a few pictures.

First, here are the sheep - nice and fat after resleying the warp.



Then I began experimenting, beginning with Lillian Whipple's butterfly design from her workshop.



Remember my last post, where Sara was surprised at my using a knitted pillow top and sewing it to a commercial pillow? Well, I decided I wanted to focus on weaving taquete design strips on this warp, rather than whole towels, to make the most of the warp that remained. So... I started just weaving strips of designs. The plan is to hem them, and then sew them to - you guessed it - some commercial towels.

I wanted to create some of my own designs. I've got lots of shells and images of shells around my house. For taquete on 8 shafts, you can only have a 6 block design, so it was a bit challenging to do a design that looked like a shell, but I'm happy with the result.



Since a gold key is a special symbol for me, I tried those, using golden yellow linen for the pattern weft. As you can see, I started using off white for the background, but it's hard to see the keys (although the linen makes them pop out texturally, if not visually) so I tried again with dark blue for the background. I liked that better.



Moving along, I made a little house design, and then had the most fun creating a design for teapots and teacups. (That's my symbol for my sister, who I dearly wish lived closer so we could get together for tea.)



These look a little funky - I suspect they might look a little better after finishing. We'll see. Still, I had a wonderful time playing with making these designs. Makes me want to do more, too, although I may try this on the Megado next time so I can avoid the pickup process that slowed things down so much. In fact, I tried doing a celtic braid design, but that required SO much pickup that I finally gave up on it. I have patience, but I also do have my limits.