08/10/2012

On adding borders

There was a question over at Weavolution about
adding plain weave borders to a waffle weave.

As the asker had 4 empty shafts on her loom, I started doodling about other possible borders.

To take it form the beginning – here is one possible 4-shaft waffle draft:


It uses five treadles, according to most(?) books/practices – which, had the loom been a "standard Swedish", would leave three treadles unused.

Adding 8 ends at each edge, we can easily get plain weave:


This only works because waffle with five treadles is treadled to a point - with straight treadling we would get two picks in the same shed every time we go from treadle 5 to treadle 1:


But... the reason I added the ends to all four empty shafts is that plain weave is not the best companion to waffle weave , because of the difference in draw-in/shrinkage.
So what about adding a twill border instead?


As usual, when treadling to a point, the outermost ends will not get caught when treadling in one direction, but the edge floats will not be very long , so in my opinion this will work in most instances.

So... could I find a nice "hem" (or, rather, "border" – at least in Swedish, a border (bård) goes crosswise, while something that goes along the warp is a "stripe" ("rand"))

This requires four more treadles, which would be a problem for the "standard Swdish" loom. As I understand it, US looms always (?) have two extra treadles.


Note that I changed threading direction at the left edge, to make the twill line match (actually "oppose") the line at the right corner.

As usual, all pictures get bigger when clicked.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Have you tried Laura's basket weave solution for borders on twills?

Reedguy