huck lace draft

The creative redhead who blogs at Handcrafted with Altitude asks whether I will share the draft I used for the crinkly merino/silk scarf in huck lace. The answer is yes, certainly. I planned a threading on eight shafts — and threaded what I planned — but after sampling I ended up using a very simple treadling that could just as well have been done on four shafts.

Here’s a glimpse — I can’t fit the whole thing into one screen snapshot so this is one half of the draft. The block at the left-hand side below (threaded 1-8-1) is the centre block and the rest of the threading is a mirror image of what you see to the right of that block.

I had a little bit of plain weave at the edge of each silk stripe and then 11 blocks of 3-end huck with the float thread on shafts 7 and 8 alternately. If you are not familiar with huck, then know that it is very, very simple. Each block is an odd number of ends (in this case, three) and consists either of shaft 1 alternating with an even-numbered shaft or shaft 2 alternating with an odd-numbered shaft. This means that the whole threading is alternately odd-even and makes it super-easy to weave tabby. Anyway, the merino stripes consist of four blocks of 3-end huck, using shafts 5 and 6 for the float threads. I had three of the broad silk stripes separated by the merino stripes and then a little strip of silk at each edge. I also included a bit of huck when I threaded the border strips, using shafts 3 and 4.

This setup gave me the potential to vary the placing of the huck floats and the plain weave in all sorts of ways, but in the end I treadled what is shown above: huck lace in the merino areas and the main silk stripes, plain weave in the borders. If I had only had four shafts at my disposal, I could have threaded the borders on shafts 1 and 2 only and just used two 3-end blocks (1-4-1 and 2-3-2) for all the huck areas.

Another matter from the crinkly scarf post on which I need to update you is the state of the letter tray. If you thought it had problems before, well, those problems have increased… by about two kilogrammes.

I may be wrong, but I suspect this structure (and its twin, which is out of sight behind the books to the right) was not designed for a household such as ours. The really serious matter is that the piece of paper sticking out from underneath Phoebus is my to-do list. It’s no wonder I am footling about on the internet because my proper tasks are concealed beneath a furry ginger bottom.

“huck lace draft” was posted by Cally on 23 Jan 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk