What you see is not always what you get

Interleaved drafts have fascinated me for quite awhile. The problem I have, when I play with them in Fiberworks, is that I always end up with several threads on the same shaft side by side.  If I move one “warp” to separate those threads, I still end up with side by side threads somewhere in the draft. That meant I had to do some tweaking, moving threads to different shafts. I started moving the 2nd duplicate thread 2 shafts up, but then I ran into the same problem, threads side by side. I finally just moved them as I could. If the second one couldn’t move up, then the first one did, or the second one moved down. I’m sure it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s mine and that’s the best that I can do.

My second problem is color.  I can change the colors in Fiberworks and get something that looks like something I think I might like. Using colors that I have in my stash, not so easy.  Before I show you the draft, I should also explain something else. In Fiberworks, you can shift-click drag across an area to make a Selection, as long as you have your Selection tool turned on. I had my interleaved draft on my screen, and tried to select a part of the color bar. The problem was, I had my draft minimized a bit too much, I didn’t have the Selection tool turned on, and ended up drawing a line in my threading. I liked the effect it created, so I drew a couple more lines at random.  The draft is no longer a completely interleaved draft, and I wanted to see if it wove up the same as I saw on the screen.

Draft:

And this is what it looks like on the loom, upside down of course:

Okay, not at all what the color looks like on screen. Granted, the colors in this picture aren’t true but still.. yuck.  Since I won’t remember it later, I started with a sett of 28, using 10/2 cotton. I didn’t like it, changed it to 32 epi. I like the epi better, just need to find a different color to use for weft. I’ve come to terms that this isn’t going to be a usable item, though I’m sure it will be useful for learning.

The other thing I’m working on is a deflected double weave piece. There’s a story to go with that one. Last year, I drove 4 hours to buy a Baby Macomber. When I saw it in person, I was almost heartbroken. It was in much worse shape than the photo showed. Determined that I wasn’t going to drive 4 hours and come home empty handed, I bought the Baby anyway.  I’ve removed rust, sanded wood, and done a lot of cleaning.  The loom didn’t come with any hooks for the treadles. Doing some searching on Ravelry, I found many posts where others have changed to Texsolv heddles. The problems with Texsolv is 1) it doesn’t fit through the holes in the lamms very easily, and 2) the solution is to loop the Texsolv over the entire lamm, which leads to 3) the Texsolv can slide over and no longer be lined up with the treadle and can damage the loom. And then I came across a brilliant solution – put a zip tie through the hole, and use that as the hole to put your Texsolv through. This works great! Unless your loom is old and wasn’t properly taken care of, and the plastic/bakelite type stuff breaks off.

I was expecting the break to be where the zip tie was, but nope, it was at the rivet, which was still pretty close to the zip tie.  Instead of waiting for the next one to break, and the next one, and so on, I sent all 8 back to Macomber and had them all upgraded to all metal.

So back to the DDW. The draft

Woven.  Where are the little square dots??

They’re there, but they’re hiding.

In the bottom half of the picture, they are where the blue line is. In the top half, they are the red lines, which turn into the blue line when I weave the next few picks.  Got that? 🙂 I’ve been playing with the draft and I’m going to change the tie up, but not change the threading. What I have planned will look very different. Or will it?? What you see is not always what you get.