Mad Fun with Different Wefts



I should probably have spent the evening cleaning house, but the call of the loom downstairs won me over.   Spent a good while weaving on the AVL on the inaugural warp I've been working on.

 

Since there is enough on this warp not only for the lute strap I'm making, but also to play with warp and weave up samples, I indulged in what is probably the most fun part of weaving - sampling!!

 

In addition to the violet (logwood) weft I wove with the night before last, I tried: madder red (same as the warp yarn, basically), indigo blue, and the Osage orange/indigo overdye green.

 

 

Better rhythm, which produces a more consistent fabric, and I adjusted the tension on the loom by tightening it slightly - the sheds were still perfect. 

 

Also, at one point, watching the harnesses (for this pattern there must always be four up, four down going on, regardless of which four) I noticed that one shed was consistently raising three harnesses instead of four.  I looked at the mechanical dobby and noticed that one of the bars had only three pegs in it; it was missing the peg for harness #1.  I added it, and it was corrected immediately.  The mistake is very tiny, but noticeable, and if you look carefully at the horizontal double diamond shapes, on the red, blue, and violet versions (all of which were woven before I added the missing dobby peg), the little points don't look so pointy.   Then on the green version, they are properly pointy again.  So that's what it was.  I had thought that perhaps I had put one into the hole and it fell out, or was stripped, but when I put in the missing peg the threadhole was not stripped, and the new peg screwed in perfectly. 

 

 

These shots all show the green in slightly different colors (the light was slightly different each time) but the closest to the actual color of the green is the image directly below:

 

 

The green one is my favorite.  There's a nice color value balance between the madder red and the green...very medieval in flavor, I think. 

 

 

Someone on Weavolution mentioned that the double-diamonds looked like an infinity symbol, and she declared that it was in honor of the infinitely amazing adventures in textiles I can have with the AVL loom. 

 

And I declare that that's exactly what I'd like.