Waffle Weave (2)

This is a sample of waffle weave (warp running vertically). It turned out easier than I thought. The threading is just a point twill on 8 shafts. 300 ends in all - mostly white but with a central section of red and some isolated red threads. in carefully selected positions All 2/6 unmercerised cotton.  The centre line of the cloth runs down the middle of the visible red sections. I have woven several sections with just white and some others with just red. Given the long warp floats at the edge of the cloth, there seems no point in adding a threaded selvedge. I have used a floating selvedge instead. The draft for this is shown on the left.

On the table loom, a Voyager, this has an easy liftplan. If you look at the cloth, in both the draft and the sample above, there is not a lot of tabby in the centre of each rectangle and the cloth is quite three dimensional.

Each rectangle in the cloth on the loom is 18 mm by 20 mm. The warp is 20 epi so that the 15 thread repeat should be 19 mm if there was no draw-in. If I was weaving tabby with a 2/6 cotton, I would be using 16 epi but 20 epi allows for the lack of thread crossings in this weave.

The cloth above the extra pale green thread in the left is a second draft (see below for the draft). This has far more tabby in the centre and is much flatter as a result. Each rectangle is now 18 by 27 mm which reflects the increased amount of tabby.  And the liftplan is very complicated - easy to make mistakes.  It would have to be re-sleyed.

1. So all in all, I prefer the first one. because it is more three-dimensional. I will weave a bit more of the second draft, then cut it off and wash it.
   

I am not sure whether I shall re-sley it to get the pattern square. Going by the current dimensions, I would have to use 19epi!! Do I care? Let's see what the dimensions are like after washing.

One change to my usual practice is that any breaks in the weft thread will have to done by doubling both ends in the centre of the cloth. I usually end at the end of a weft throw and tuck one end back in for one or two inches. With all the warp and weft floats around, this is a bad idea.

These drafts have been worked out from Kathryn Wertenberger's book, 'An Introduction to Multishaft Weaving', 1988, ISBN 0-934026-34-3.

All-in-all, this has been an interesting exercise and not nearly as difficult as I thought it would be.  I have not woven with such thick yarn for a long time and was horrified by the large amount of yarn required. Yes, I did do the sums before I started  and I will use about 0.5 kg of yarn. You can weave a lot of 90/2 silk with 0.5 kg. I have just weighed 3.5 yards of 90/2 silk 22 inches wide and it was all of 6 ounces (170 gms).

 The builder is starting next Monday on re-decorating and we have jointly come up with a plan to improve access to the bathroom by rehanging the door on the left rather than the right. Of course we have to move the light-pull and one of the wall lights but it is all do-able and will improve access enormously. All I have to do is to organise where the contents of the loom-room are to go so I started by clearing out the garage today. It was very cold so I did not finish but will do some more tomorrow.