of floats

My P2P2 sample warp looks a bit like a riot on the banks of the Ganges, but there is method in’t I promise.

I’m trying a whole assortment of stripes so that I can see what happens when floats of one colour surround a cell of another colour.  However, I started with a pre-sample (yes, I’m afraid so, neki desu!) because I wanted to find out how the two surfaces of Brighton honeycomb differ in practice.

Well, now I know. On the face of the cloth they alternate large and small — you can see it in the area I’ve circled below, though the small cells are so tiny they have practically disappeared.

The large cells occur where the floats surround an area of plain weave. The little cells have no plain weave inside, but occur where two warp floats and two weft floats meet. Now that I’ve seen it in the cloth, the drawdown begins to make sense!

On the reverse side, the cells are not square but rectangular, and they alternate between horizontal and vertical.

In the cloth they hardly look like cells at all, but if you peer closely you can make out little pairs of parallel floats: a horizontal pair followed by a vertical pair and so on. Well, that’s them.

I’ve also been on a nostalgia trip through my earliest weaving records, though I’ll have to come back to that later. I’m off to a research workshop for a few days, but I’m leaving the loom in capable hands.

“of floats” was posted by Cally on 19 June 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk