organising my feet

One of my reasons for trying Summer & Winter on this warp is that I wanted to try using a skeleton tie-up.  This is a way of tying up the treadles on a floor loom which gives you a fair bit of flexibility for the price of some fancy footwork.  I don’t need to describe the principle here since Leigh has already done that for me in this excellent post!  By the way, I love this remote collaboration, whereby I sit at the loom and play while Leigh writes up all the hard stuff

Now my loom has eight shafts and fourteen treadles which gives me a fair amount of pattern potential.  Incidentally, I have reasonably long legs, so I can use all fourteen without sliding off the bench.  The way I have been working for the last little while has involved playing around with twill blocks, which means I have usually tied up my treadles in groups of four.  The middle two treadles I use for plain weave, leaving six either side for my pattern.  I generally try to alternate feet so that each group of four would be arranged with two on either side of the plain weave treadles.  When I was weaving shaded twill — as in this scarf here — I needed all twelve twill treadles: four to weave 1/3 and 3/1, four to weave 2/2 in both blocks, four to weave 3/1 and 1/3.  I organised these so that I used both feet, but in the context of an overall move from left to right and back again – my legs are reasonably long, as I said, but that is no reason to make myself use treadle 1 with the left foot followed by treadle 14 with the right!

Anyway, it would be much more informative if I provided a diagram, so here is one.  L indicates where I use my left foot, R indicates… well, see if you can guess.

I seem to have wandered a long way from S & W.  This is the first time in the life of my loom that I have untied those middle treadles and set them up for a different kind of tabby!  In S & W plain weave is produced by alternating shafts 1 and 2 together with all the other shafts (3 to 8 in this case) together.  That combination now sits on my two middle treadles.

But what about the rest?  To practice the skeleton tie-up I have been weaving as if I only had two blocks rather than the six I threaded.  So the blocks on shafts 3, 5 and 7 act together, and the blocks on shafts 4, 6 and 8 act together.  The way S & W works means that sometimes I need to lift shafts 3, 5 and 7 with shaft 1 and sometimes I need to lift them with shaft 2.  The same goes for the 4-6-8 combination.  I have gone for the following arrangement on the middle six treadles:

What this means is that in order to get a brick treadling (described here by the indomitable Leigh!) I am using my feet like this:

At least I think that is what I’m doing — I am far from fluent in this new language!  Clearly as I break the pattern apart into blocks and have more pattern treadles, I won’t be able to use the same foot for non-adjacent treadles.  My thinking is that, by keeping the skeleton lifts for shafts 1 and 2 in the middle with the tabby, I will be able to use either foot as necessary.  This is what I did for the alternating twill-tabby treadling here, for example.

The next thing to worry about is the fact that my loom is a countermarche.  This means that each treadle is supposed to lift certain shafts but also lower the other shafts.  Clearly that won’t work with a skeleton tie-up — I can’t use one treadle to raise shaft 1 while another treadle is trying to lower shaft 1.  I was a bit anxious about how this would work, but in fact it’s a doddle.  I’ve taken a bunch of photos but I have already spent far too long on this post.  I need to get back to the loom!

“organising my feet” was posted by Cally on 19 Oct 2008 at http://callybooker.wordpress.com