Year Of Projects: week 6

Craftingwise, this week has been both very eventful and very uneventful – uneventful in the sense that I can only measure progress in terms of fixing previous mistakes, but eventful as it was a lot of work, and I learned an awful lot, all to do with weaving, which is my current and not that transient crafting obsession!

I mentioned in last week’s update that I had found a serious mistake in my warp, basically tension was off, and by a good measure, I found out later.

When you look up info on how to fix this, the overwhelming consensus seems to be: don’t try. After having gone through it, I can see why! It did take me a good 5-6 evenings to undo and re-do my warping, but spurred on by the thought of the money I would have otherwise sunk into this project (there’s over 5km yarn in that warp!) and by the excellent advice and encouragement received on Ravelry (see this thread), eventually I managed to unroll and re-beam my warp (I’ve described the process here for future reference, though I do hope I will never ever have to refer to it!)

Now this did have some rewards, as I did manage to weave a bit, and here are the first two repeats of the pattern!

It is a reversible fabric, once I’ve woven some more the other side should be visible on the cloth beam (the one at the front of the loom), which will become a reversible casual men summer jacket, though the recipient has now been told that in spite having started on this back at the beginning of July, of course I meant summer 2021! 😜

It is woven using a technique called “overshot patterned doubleweave”, and amazingly for double weave, it can be woven on a four shaft loom, or at least in principle on a rigid heddle loom with three heddles. Why “amazingly”? With doubleweave you weave two layers of the cloth at the same time: you can make a double wide piece, extending the capacity of your loom; you can make a tube, for a pillow say; you can exchange layers, and you can do loads of other things (check out Jennifer Moore’s “Doubleweave: Reviesed and Expanded” to see all the amazing weaves doubleweave enables you to do). However each layer needs two shafts, which means you can’t weave anything more complex than plain weave. But with this “overshot pattenred doubleweave” technique, you get mileage from picking up threads from the bottom layer, which adds to the patterning abilities.

If you aren’t a weaver all the above will probably come across as gibberish – but I still hope you’ll agree that woven cloth is looking great (for which I claim no merit, see the November 2018 issue of Heddlecraft, which is where I took it from). Happy week!

This is a year of projects (YOP) update. YOP is a Ravelry Group, and an idea – make a plan for the year ahead for all your fibre activities, then update your blog every week if you manage. The objective is to keep track of progress on any fiber crafts with maximum flexibility: post, don’t post, follow your list, change it – so really it is just an opportunity to get to know of more blogs and activities of those who share a passion for anything fibre crafts. My YOP graphics “nicked” with thanks from Backstageknits!