duh!

I never thought of this.  My only consolation is that Leigh didn’t think of it either!  Three cheers for the marvellous Madelyn van der Hoogt and her marvellous book on drafting.

Having woven just shy of 2′ of samples using a skeleton tie-up, I thought I was getting the hang of the treadling, but when I had washed and pressed my samples there were some fairly big and obvious errors — that particularly annoying kind of obvious that only manifests itself when it is Too Late.

If you enlarge the following picture you can see more clearly the mistakes that the arrows are pointing out:

I was managing to get the pattern picks right, but I was slipping up on the tabby and getting the wrong one in the middle of a sequence.

What I had proposed to treadle, based on my tie-up was

This would give me four pattern picks in one set of blocks followed by four pattern picks in the other set of blocks.  The ‘actual pattern’ is determined by the outermost treadles.  These are joined by the treadles which raise only shaft 1 or only shaft 2 to make a complete pattern lift.  The tabby lifts are the middle two treadles.

This was too clumsy.  The fact that pick 4, for instance, involves 2 adjacent treadles meant that I had planned to depress them both with my right foot.  However in practice it was much more straightforward to use one foot for the ‘actual pattern’ treadle and the other foot for the four central treadles.  In effect, this:

So that is how I proceeded.  However, the danger here was the skipping about of one foot while my brain was thinking about the shuttles!  My errors arose like this:

The L in the red square on the third pick shows where I tended to go wrong – hitting the wrong tabby between two pattern picks.  This gives a long warp float on the shaft(s) that make the pattern.  The tie-down threads on shafts 1 and 2 are not as badly affected since they are alternated in the pattern picks.  I reckon that what I am seeing is this:

(I have squished up the tabby picks since I used a very fine thread…)

Anyway, I reckon that a much more intuitive skeleton tie-up would be this, which swaps treadles 6 and 7

and would allow me to progress from left to red with the non-pattern foot.  Of course, there’s a but.  Quite a big BUT.  I have only been using one out of the many possibilities for treadling Summer & Winter.  This sequence uses the tie-down shafts alternately, but in other cases I might want to do something quite different.  Something to think about later!

In the meantime, Clio has gone back to the hospital for more monitoring and tests (poor girl) so I had to tie the warp back on by myself.  However, she is due to restart a softly-softly approach to chemo on Weds and come home on Thursday, free from staples.

“duh!” was posted by Cally on 27 Oct 2008 at http://callybooker.wordpress.com