Another knot

I’ve tried several different structures from Searles’ book of freeform techniques, but then decided I needed one which wasn’t there. So, putting her wisdom together with that of Barbara Walker, I have devised ‘freeform turned summer & winter’. With its two layers, the warp is very dense, so the first thing I discovered was that I couldn’t see my cartoon.

I had been just drawing an outline and then scribbling in it roughly, just enough to distinguish ‘outside’ from ‘inside’, since it is very easy to lose track of that when focusing on the individual pick.

But the density of the double warp meant that I kept reading my scribbles as boundaries and getting immensely confused. So I had to get the marker out and colour the whole thing in solid.

Well, I coloured in a photocopy. I’ve been using non-woven facing fabric for larger cartoons, as it rolls and unrolls nicely, but paper is fine for small sections. As this is a repeating pattern, the cartoon can be moved up to continue the next section, or I can just finish it off with a horizontal end bar in the same way that it begins.

The revised cartoon was still quite hard to see…

….but at least I could dig into the warp and know for sure whether I was looking at pattern or ground. And the next phase of weaving turned out much better.

I picked these yarns because they were lying around, about the right size, and not needed for anything, but the colours have turned out to be quite fitting. It is slow weaving, too.

“Another knot” was posted by Cally on 24 July 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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